Colonial Fantasies Live on Through Popular Science
Scientists working in modern fields such as evolutionary psychology often take a commonly observed pattern or stereotype and ascribe it to a “evolutionary purpose”, rather than examining cultural and historical factors. Pop science tends to treat “human nature” as something that exists in a vacuum, rather than a complex network of biological, environmental, historical, and cultural factors.
This creates what are known as “Just So Stories” — when irresponsible scientists take a trait they observe in modern society and make the jump to ascribing to a deep sense of evolutionary purpose or connection to genetics without appropriate evidence. This habit echoes the colonial legacy of Western science.
Pre-Enlightenment, European elites used religion as a tool of oppression, justifying the subjugation of others by claiming it was God’s will. When the Enlightenment lessened the influence of religious dogma on the populace, elites turned to scientific dogma to claim that oppression was the will of nature.
If scientists could prove that oppression was the “way of nature”, then the elites were no longer responsible for oppression; they were simply acting as nature intended. This desire to align oppression with an oversimplified conception of the “will of nature” is alive and well in popular science today.
For example, evolutionary psychology often treats the human mind as “a set of software modules that were written by natural selection [during the Stone Age] and now constitute a universal human nature.” If we understand the needs of hunter gatherer humans, we can understand the “purpose” of the human mind, evolutionary psychologists hope. While it’s tempting to embrace the simplicity of such an explanation and rest assured that all human behavior has a neat and clear evolutionary “purpose”, explanations like these are little more than imperial fantasy.
The reality of the processes of nature and evolution are a lot more chaotic and random, and much of it is obscured from human understanding — perhaps permanently due to our lack of detailed surviving records. For example, the idea of traits carrying an “evolutionary purpose” is more akin to a shorthand scientists use to theorize about why certain traits may have thrived. It doesn’t literally mean that each trait came about because of a concrete purpose that it was jockeying for in a self-aware manner. This mindset belies the relics of a Judeo-Christian, creationist mindset in which everything exists to serve a purpose known by God, and nature can fit neatly into binary, hierarchical processes.
For example, many birdlike creatures evolved to have feathers for thousands of years before they were able to fly. But scientists looking back on them often say “feathers evolved because they helped birds fly” to aid in the layman’s understanding. While this makes sense in hindsight, it isn’t technically accurate. A lot of the time scientists don’t fully know how the trait got selected, all they know is the end result and they attempt to work backwards from there. For example, we still don’t know what conditions prompted humans to shed the fur of our monkey ancestors, or which conditions made us walk upright. All we know for sure is the result, from there we try and work backwards. Western thought has a habit of squeezing the complexity of reality into teleological, linear narratives to make our brains feel comfortable, but this habit also distorts and dilutes our level of understanding.
This process often results in scientists (as well as laymen) projecting the biases of their time period onto the process of evolution or other theories of nature. Despite our hazy understanding of early human evolution, evolutionary psychologists love jumping to conclusions about the roots of modern behavior. One example is evolutionary psychologist David Buss’s studies on mate selection, which gave rise to many pop science tidbits about the disparity between mating behavior of the sexes. It’s commonly accepted in pop culture that men get more upset over a partner being sexually unfaithful, whereas women are more upset by emotional infidelity. This notion was further popularized by David Buss’s study “The Evolution of Desire”, which he believed showed conclusive evidence that these observed differences were the result of the differing evolutionary needs of males and females in the Pleistocene era.
Since female humans needed a long term partner to ensure the success of their pregnancy, Buss theorized, they were more threatened by their mate becoming emotionally involved with another female human. Men, on the other hand, were more threatened by having to expend energy on a child that is not theirs, so they feel more upset by sexual infidelity.
Buss conducted his study by distributing a series of “would you rather” questions to people of 37 different contemporary cultures. He found that according to the self-reported survey results, women reported higher rates of distress over emotional infidelity, whereas men reported higher rates over sexual jealousy. The results of the study are interesting, but they tell us very little about anything evolution-related. Health researchers note that self-reporting is a notoriously flawed method of collecting accurate data, especially when it comes to taboo topics such as sex. The survey results can tell us a lot about modern cultural attitudes towards gender and sexual activity, but very little about their connection to evolution.
To make the jump from the way people self-report on an “Either/Or” pen and paper test to a statement on the way our entire species evolved during the Paleolithic era is disingenuous and lacking in scientific rigor, yet Buss’s study is widely lauded in the scientific community. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if Buss’s biases led him to some universal truth, but bias rarely does. Biases are a result of the purposeful obscuration of truth for political gain, and must be unpacked.
When we look at the anthropological evidence we do have of Stone Age humans, Buss’s theory doesn’t hold water for many reasons. The first being that the direct link between insemination and paternity may not have been inherently clear to early humans. Most anthropologists agree that early humans had a vague idea of the connection between sex and birth, but early human art and relics provide evidence that the specifics of men’s direct role in procreation may not have been universally understood until later in human history. Surviving Neolithic relics and cave paintings display veneration of female fertility and the mother/child relationship, while male figures are depicted less often, emerging later as civilization developed. It also may not have been possible to know whether paternity was even a salient concern since the gestation period amongst humans is very long, and monogamy was not likely a widespread practice at the time.
There is a wide array of parenting and familial structures to be found in hunter/gatherer tribes, both modern and neolithic, which demonstrates that early humans’ view of “ownership” over children and allegiance solely to one’s own direct blood descendants was not universal, either, and may have been a later phenomenon that arose during the advent of private property.
It’s equally likely that the attitude of only wanting to invest resources in one’s direct descendants may have put the Stone Age man at an evolutionary disadvantage, since conditions were so harsh. Anthropological studies of Stone Age humans support this notion, revealing that early humans were tribal, often tending towards egalitarian and collectivist structures. Rather than two parents working alone to secure the safety of their child, early humans had better luck working together as a tribe to secure resources and ensure safety for children as a whole.
Buss’s assumption that a man would not want to devote any resources to children who were not his own is more evidence of his own modern attitudes towards parenting than that of early homo sapiens’, who did not necessarily have the luxury to care about which children were their own. Buss took his contemporary Western biases about parenting and men’s desires and projected them on to the Pleistocene humans. Many people accept his “Just-So” theory as fact due to confirmation bias, rather than thinking critically about the anthropological evidence that exists, or questioning whether it’s truly logical that the earliest types of humans would have the exact same attitudes towards parenting and sex as modern industrialized humans.
The truth is we do not have enough evidence of Pleistocene conditions and psychology to make the concrete claims that Buss wants to. Even if we did, there is no control group of humans that have only experienced Pleistocene life without any modern social conditioning. We would need a time machine for that, so as of now there is no way to parse out which aspects of human behavior are part of our “evolutionary blueprint” and which are the effects of social and economic conditions, which could have easily turned out differently. All we have are a few artifacts and fossils to try and piece together conclusions from.
Buss’s study also ignored a lot of irregularities or wrote them off as being due to cultural attitudes. For example, his theory did not fully hold in Germany, where only 25% of men reported that they found the thought of sexual infidelity more distressing than emotional infidelity. It has also been observed by social scientists that in areas where women have more economic freedom, the differences in attitudes between sexes decreases significantly. If irregularities between cultures exist, this demonstrates that these attitudes are at the very least just as much culturally influenced as they are evolutionarily.
David Buss’s study also ignored the fact that homosexual males were much less likely to feel threatened by sexual infidelity, demonstrating that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are not monolithic categories to which this single preference can be attributed. The study also ignored the existence of intersex people entirely. Buss ignored the nuances required of the scientific method in favor of simplified justifications of modern stereotypes, which support a satisfyingly simple worldview in which human behavior is universal, predictable, and hasn’t changed much in millions of years.
Buss’s study also ignored the multiplicity of tribes across human history in which the nuclear family did not exist and children were raised more collectively, such as the Naskapi tribe of Canada, or the Iroquois of North America. When European colonists began meeting Indigenous people around the globe, they were dismayed to find that paternity and monogamy were not universally valued, and used this to justify forcing Christianity on Indigenous people in order to erase the cultural values they deemed inappropriate. The highly individualistic culture of Western imperial nations is not a universal aspect of human nature, but scientists often, whether consciously or unconsciously, look for ways to confirm that it is. We must be wary and critical of this anti-scientific tendency.
Many evolutionary psychologists want to ignore the rapid changes brought on by watersheds such as the agricultural and industrial revolutions, which completely shifted and re-aligned human priorities, making deep changes to areas such as mating and alliance-building strategies. Human environments have changed so much since the Stone Age that there is no good reason to think our brains would still be “hard-wired” in the same way. (To even conceive of the human-brain as something that is “hard-wired” is an extreme oversimplification and demonstrates the Western bias that the human brain functions as a predictable machine.) The way that human traits are exhibited is also highly attuned to the ecology of the area, so it’s very hard to make the case for universal patterns of behavior when early human tribes were not monolithic either.
Evolutionary psychologists often want to posit that our mating strategies developed in a unipolar manner in response to singular survival challenges, and have remained essentially unchanged since then. However, it is more likely that a plethora of strategies and drives emerged due to a multiplicity of environmental demands, and continue to develop and evolve at least every several hundred years. Looking at both anthropological and biological evidence, the process of human evolution is messy and convoluted. For example, humans have a drive for lust which makes us want to seek multiple partners, and yet pair bonding also seems to have proved evolutionarily useful to us, especially after the advent of agriculture. These two strategies constantly come into conflict, becoming the subject of many a romantic comedy- and yet they have both helped our species survive. A unipolar description of humans’s mating needs is a gross oversimplification. It ignores the nuances and beautiful contradictions of evolution, and the diversity of human history; it abandons logic and the scientific method in favor of colonial European biases.
For modern science to be a legitimate method of inquiry, we need to do a much better job of noticing when individual scientists project their own biases onto how they hypothesize, design experiments, and interpret data, and wary of our own collective tendency to accept these pleasingly simple hypotheses as scientific fact. This tendency has always been a part of the creation and maintenance of systems such as the patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity. It erases the existence of many cultures and practices that do not match Western colonial expectations and norms. Interrogating and divesting from the ways in which we legitimize oppression and fail to imagine alternatives is a necessary part of the work that we are currently undertaking as a society.
