Rape has a long history based in violence and aggression. There are several theories on why men rape, however the new field of Evolutionary Psychology has a new and interesting theory on the subject. According to “The Evolutionary Orientation”, evolutionary psychology, has its roots in “social evolutionism” which is “an evolutionary model [used] to explain all aspects of human social organization” (20). Eventually social evolutionism was disputed and rejected by many although the views are similar to what is held by evolutionary psychologists. The goal of evolutionary psychology is “to generate good theories of personality development” (37). What this means is that biology dictates personality and culture.
In “A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion”, Randy Thor
They conclude that there are only two ultimate causes of human rape. The first cause is adaptation. Thornhill and Palmer say that “adaptation….was directly favored by selection because it increased male reproductive success by way of increasing mate number” (59). This means that rape as an adaptation has specific psychological mechanisms that influence males to rape so that they have larger reproductive benefits then in the past. Their other cause for rape is that “it may be only a by-product of other psychological adaptations, especially those that function to produce the sexual desires of males for multiple partners without commitment” (60). The difference here would be that in this case there would be no psychological mechanism that would have been beneficial for reproduction in the past.
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