Paternity Uncertainty and Evolutionary Psychology: How a Seemingly Capricious Occurrence Fails to Follow Laws of Greater Generality
■ Michael Gilding
Swinburne University of Technology
ABSTRACT
Evolutionary psychologists aspire to show how – contrary to ‘soft’ social sciences such as sociology – ‘seemingly capricious’ occurrences in the realm of human behaviour follow biologistic ‘laws of greater generality’ (Pinker, 2005: xii).This article is a case study of the ‘seemingly capricious occurrence’ of paternity uncertainty. According to evolutionary psychologists, paternity uncertainty arises from the fact that men are ‘hard wired’ to seek as many sexual partners as they can, and women to seek men of superior genetic quality.This account is said to be demonstrable through independent biological evidence of widespread discrepancy between putative and actual biological paternity in human populations.Yet close scrutiny of biological evidence and new evidence from representative sex surveys indicate that evolutionary psychologists consistently inflate estimates of paternal discrepancy. Evolutionary psychologists’ account of paternity uncertainty highlights their overattachment to biologistic laws at the expense of understanding the social dimensions of human behaviour.
Steven Pinker, a luminary of evolutionary psychology, describes in his
Foreword to The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology how he wished as
a graduate student that psychology could meet the ‘standard of explanatory
Sociology elegance’ set by the laws of physics, and ‘show how a seemingly capricious
occurrence falls out of laws of greater generality’ (2005: xii). The emergence of evolutionary psychology in the 1980s answered his wishes. It provided an ‘organizing framework’ for the study of human behaviour. Pinker explains:
An explanatory hypothesis for some emotion or cognitive faculty must begin with a
theory of how that faculty would, on average, have enhanced the reproductive
chances of the bearer of that faculty in an ancestral environment. Crucially, the
advantage must be demonstrable by some independently motivated causal consequence of the putative adaptation. That is, laws of physics or chemistry or engineering or physiology, or some other set of laws, independent of the part of our
psychology being explained must suffice to establish that the trait is useful in attaining some population-related goal. (2005: xiv)
This article is a case study of the ‘capricious occurrence’ of ‘paternity uncertainty’, where doubt exists regarding biological fatherhood. Paternity uncertainty highlights the biologistic framework and methodology of evolutionary psychology, and the challenge it presents to sociological understandings of human behaviour. Evolutionary psychologists understand paternity uncertainty as the outcome of differential female and male ‘mating’ strategies, giving rise to differential patterns of ‘parental investment’. They believe they stand on especially firm ground in this field, on account of clear ‘nonhuman analogues’ –
unlike, say, in morality and art (Tooby and Cosmides, 2005: 12). There is little
room in this account for sociological considerations, notably the diverse effects
of social institutions, time and place. Evolutionary psychologists demonstrate
their account through biological evidence of widespread ‘paternal discrepancy’
– a difference between putative and actual biological fatherhood – among
human populations. In turn, they have been prominent in media representations
of paternity testing, unlike sociologists.
Specifically, this article considers the evidence for claims of evolutionary
psychologists about paternity uncertainty. First, it introduces the broad framework of evolutionary psychology, its understanding of paternity uncertainty
and its estimates of paternal discrepancy. It then examines the evidence for
paternal discrepancy in Britain; drawing first upon existing biological evidence,
and then upon new evidence arising from representative surveys of sexual
behaviour. On this basis, the article argues that evolutionary psychologists have
consistently inflated the extent and significance of paternal discrepancy, highlighting their overattachment to biologistic laws at the expense of understanding the social dimensions of human behaviour.
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