The registered sex offender who abducted Jaycee Lee Dugard and kept her captive for eighteen years had a prior record of rape. According to some experts, a rapist “gene” is something that may have helped evolution, that is, if men could procreate with both willing and unwilling women, it indicated fitness. And in doing so, they would also be passing on the gene that provided a penchant for forced sex.
This theory was expounded In a 2000 book co-authored by biologist Randy Thornhill, called “A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion.” But this year, in a Newsweek article, the debunking of the notion began. According to Newsweek’s Sharon Begley, Anthropologist, Kim Hill at Arizona State University, had a hunch that sloppy projections had been made about the fitness of rape. Although Anthropologists still study a fewhunter/gatherer societies today, few have ever seen a rape. That doesn’t mean the gene wasn’t selected for increased reproduction though.
Hill and some colleagues decided to do a calculation using an example of the Aché, a traditional hunter/gatherer tribe living in Paraguay. Using an example of a 25-year-old Aché, they mathematically projected how rape would affect the evolutionary journey of one male. They basically calculated a rapist’s costs and benefits and the likelihood that his genes would survive. They were also generous with their calculations — assuming that the subject would only rape women of child-bearing age, when in actuality, women of all ages are raped. The calculations included a demerit point system — the man would lose fitness points for things like getting killed by a rape victim’s relative, having the child abandoned by the rape victim, the likelihood that conception would happen at all based on a woman’s reproductive cycle, and even if being a rapist in a small town would affect the likelihood that others would share their food.
And…. drum roll please…. the final math, from Begley’s June, 2009, Newsweek article:
“Rape increases a man’s evolutionary fitness based on the chance that a rape victim is fertile (15 percent), that she will conceive (a 7 percent chance), that she will not miscarry (90 percent) and that she will not let the baby die even though it is the child of rape (90 percent). Hill then ran the numbers on the reproductive costs and benefits of rape. It wasn’t even close: the cost exceeds the benefit by a factor of 10. ‘That makes the likelihood that rape is an evolved adaptation extremely low,’ says Hill. ‘It just wouldn’t have made sense for men in the Pleistocene to use rape as a reproductive strategy, so the argument that it’s preprogrammed into us doesn’t hold up.’ ”
Yep, from the mouths of scientists — if you are a rapist, you can’t blame your genes fellas. It’s your own damn fault. Well, actually it’s probably the fault of some receptive biology mixed with a bad childhood. But it’s your own damn fault if you fail to seek help.