International Law

Are Men Programmed for Illicit Sex?

Here is a very bad argument, over at Psychology Today, An evolutionary psychological view about power and illicit sex.

"Powerful men of high status throughout human history attained very high reproductive success, leaving a large number of offspring (legitimate or otherwise), while countless poor men in the countryside died mateless and childless. Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, whom we encountered in Chapter 2, stands out quantitatively, having left more offspring than anyone else on record, but he was by no means qualitatively different from other powerful men, like Bill Clinton."

And now, Eliiot Spitzer.

While this type of gossip is no doubt fundamental to our species, the science behind this inference is completely muddled.

We need enough data to fill out a 2 x 2 covariation table.

1. How many men, powerful or not, have extra marital affairs?

2. How many power men do not?

Without any of this data, this is a hopeless evolutionary story.

In order to make correlations, which are at minimum what we need for causation, we need to show that A) in the world of powerful men the % who had illicit sex, X, is greater than B) in the world of non-powerful men the % who had illicit sex.

Nothing like this can be shown by picking one individual who is a powerful man who had problems controlling his nether regions.

This is only one cell of the four we need to fill out.

Why are we so stupid? Because some people who write about evolutionary psychology like easy stories.

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on March 11, 2008 (boomark / email).