This article discusses whether rape is an evolutionary adaptation, exploring whether it helps individuals survive and reproduce, and whether it is a trait that has been subject to natural selection.
Can rape be an adaptation?
The topic may be uncomfortable to hear or even frowned upon, but as someone who has always been interested in the purpose of human behavior, I find it fascinating. First of all, I’m going to leave the moral perspective out of my argument for and against this topic. While popular moral notions may inevitably come into play when discussing whether or not it’s an adaptation and how it affects us as a species as a whole, I’m not going to apply any personal moral notions to my argument.
Before I proceed, let’s clarify the definitions of two key words: rape and adaptation. For the purposes of this article, rape is defined as the attempted copulation of a female by a male by force, i.e., physical force, and the failure to take responsibility for the offspring after copulation. This definition is intended to distinguish rape from sexual behavior that would be common in primitive times or among animals without the institution of marriage or special ethical concepts. The basic definition of adaptation is “the product of natural selection. Natural selection is the competition for survival that occurs between individuals of the same species, and those that are adapted to their environment are the ones that survive and leave offspring. In other words, to determine if something is a product of natural selection, we would need to determine if it was a trait that favored the environment.
The bottom line is that rape can never be an adaptation. We can’t say for sure if there are genetic factors that make it easier to rape, but even if there are and they can be passed on to offspring, we can’t consider rape an adaptation. In this article, I will apply the arguments that scientists have made about adaptation in other topics in Darwin’s Table to rape in order to make the case that rape is not an adaptation. In order to explain adaptation, we must also explain natural selection and evolution, which I refer to in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene.
In order to be natural selection, it must be beneficial to survival, reproduction, within the environment. It has been argued that rape is an adaptation because it has been around since primitive societies and continues to happen today, but that’s looking at it from an extreme adaptationist perspective. Let’s say there is a gene that makes it easier to rape. Is rape an adaptation just because that gene has been around since the dawn of time, in primitive societies? We already know that the shape of our earlobes, our eyelids, and even our baldness are determined by genetics, but we would be laughed out of the room if we said that these traits are adaptations that have been driven by natural selection.
In order to debate whether rape is an adaptation, we have to ask whether it has benefited the survival and reproduction of the individual. The argument in favor is that rape is beneficial to reproduction for non-competitive individuals, but the very premise of “non-competitive individuals” implies that they have already been eliminated from competition and have not been selected. Females instinctively look for mates that can adapt to the environment and protect their offspring, and while we can’t be sure that the resulting mate will be able to adapt to the environment, males that are not selected by females will be less adaptable than other males. Even if they succeed in reproducing through rape, the chances of survival of that individual or their offspring will be less than other individuals.
So, is rape beneficial for individuals who can obtain a mate, as opposed to those who cannot compete? It has been argued that in primitive societies with no legal or social restrictions, rape is more beneficial in terms of time or effort than raising a single offspring. At first glance, this sounds plausible, because rape can spread more genes than mating through courtship. But when we look at the “selfish gene,” we see that this is not true. Richard Dawkinson describes reproductively advantageous behaviors in the sexual strategies of males and females. According to him, for a male to forcibly pass his genes to a female and abandon her, i.e. rape, to be reproductively beneficial, the female must be able to raise children alone. Given that it would have been difficult to raise children alone in primitive societies, rape is never beneficial to reproduction.
We can also assume that a female who is raped will raise her children with another male. From the female’s point of view, this might be a viable strategy, as she would be able to pass on her genes to her offspring, since she would be carrying half of her own genes. However, Richard Dawkinson also mentioned the male’s strategy in this case. To avoid the effort of raising children that contain other males’ genes, males may require a long courtship period from females, or they may spread chemicals during the courtship period to force females to abort. And it is obvious that if there is a competitor who wants to rape their mate, they will protect their mate through threats.
In the end, the act of rape cannot be beneficial to survival and reproduction, given the presence of competitors, and given that the survival rate of children drops dramatically when only females raise them in harsh environments. So this proves that rape cannot be a natural selection.
Rape is not selected for!
Let’s look at the definition of adaptation again. Adaptations are the product of natural selection. However, if we look at the current human species, we can see that rape was not selected for. Richard Dawkinson wrote about the group selection theory: ‘If there is a selfish minority in an altruistic group, then individuals with that selfish trait will have a better chance of survival, of producing offspring, and each of those offspring will tend to inherit the selfish trait. And after many generations of natural selection, this ‘altruistic group’ will be so infested with selfish individuals that it will be difficult to distinguish them from the selfish group’. Let’s think about the conclusion of this article. Are rapists prevalent? It may seem like a lot, given the number of sexual assaults in the news every day, but I think we can all agree that rapists don’t make up the majority of the human population, which in turn proves that rape is not a selfish act – an act that benefits the individual as a reproductive act, where the individual wants to pass on their genes to future generations. Rather, it is a characteristic of the majority of humans that makes rape a serious criminal offense and something that should not be done legally or ethically. Rather, we have adapted to protect ourselves or protect potential mates by preventing the act of rape.
It could be argued that the act of rape is only constrained by laws and ethics in modern society, but that everyone has the drive to commit rape. So let’s look at the case of animals, for whom no laws or ethical consciousness exist: is their usual method of reproduction rape? We already know that it is not. The animal’s usual method of reproduction is mating after an act of courtship, which shows that it was selected for because it is more environmentally advantageous to reproduce by obtaining a mate through an act of courtship than by reproducing through rape, where the object of the rape or the object’s potential mate is threatening their own survival.
The most important thing in determining whether a trait is an adaptation is whether it has been subjected to natural selection. But in the present, and by extrapolating from the past, we can see that rape has not been subjected to natural selection. Therefore, rape cannot be an adaptation. If rape is not an adaptation, how can we explain it? In Darwin’s Table, Pinker, another member of the adaptationist team, uses strawberry cheesecake as an example of an adaptation. ‘The reason strawberry cheesecake tastes good is probably not because we evolved a taste for strawberry cheesecake; it’s just that evolution has created circuits that allow us to find foods like ripe fruits, nuts, meat, and so on delicious… Strawberry cheesecake is just a byproduct of this evolutionary adaptation, a pleasure that we can feel.’ The same can be said about rape. Organisms evolved to feel sexual desire in order to reproduce, and rape is just a byproduct of excessive sexual desire. This argument can also explain why rapes that are not conducive to reproduction occur, such as same-sex and incestuous rapes, which have been heavily criticized by the pro-choice side but have not been accurately defended. If rape is viewed as a byproduct of sexual desire, then it doesn’t matter if it helps reproduction because it’s just one way to satisfy that desire. In fact, in Darwin’s Table, when Gould asks Pinker for an explanation for rape that doesn’t help reproduction, Pinker counters that it can be explained by Palmer’s byproduct theory, not adaptation. Not just in the particular case of rape, but because rape itself is not conducive to reproduction, rape is a byproduct, not an adaptation.
