It seems like everywhere one turns evolutionary psychology arguments are running rampant (at least in the land of pseudo-intelligentsia literati). People eat this stuff up – they are great conversation starters at parties (“did you hear that monkeys like watching other monkeys bang on drums while…”) – and an extremely effective means to bring up otherwise taboo topics with would-be friend-with-benefits (“say, you know, it feels real good if someone tugs on your hair like this. That’s a conditioned response from thousands of years of…”)

Rather than shed light on human behavior, popular press reports on these topics seem to draw a lot of their appeal from the fact that mainstream evo psych arguments allow perfectly respectable publications/people, like the NYT Magazine, to publish articles about vanilla rape fantasies, which they might not otherwise be so inclined to do. The fact that there needs to be intellectual cover to discuss otherwise taboo practices is itself a more interesting comment on human behavior.

That’s not to say that some of these arguments aren’t valid: I don’t know, I’m neither an evolutionary biologist nor an anthropologist. Neither are 90% of the other peddlers of this material, however. These arguments are instead used to provide cover for, say, vain metrosexual dieting fads that allow modern interpretations of vestigial lifestyles to take on very modern conceptions of machismo. Sure our distant ancestors might have hunted mastadons and ate lots of berries. They also had very short life expectancies.

Many of the objections seem blindingly simple: why are some gay men be enamored with rape fantasies, if the appeal stems from female survivability in an era of common violence? It seems more likely that people find agency-free boning very appealing. Or, if us v. them tribal mentalities really are to blame for an inherent fear of foreigners, why does the modern definition of national and ethnic identification often expand to millions (or, a billion over here) of people. Deeply ingrained tribal loyalty would extend to, at maximum, 100-200 people, suggesting that modern political systems could only function among competing groups of angry-Michigander militia. Obviously the interaction of cultural and biological factors are at work in any type of social organization, though the popular sci evo psych arguments are much more absolute, and their authors rarely attempt to navigate any tension between the two.

So, dear readers, here’s the challenge: use absolute evo psych arguments to answer as many questions asked of you as possible. For example, respond to “what are you having for dinner” with “given thousands of years of my ancestors living in a tribal context my ancestors needed to rely on the women of the group to provide daily sustenance in the form of fruits and figs. So get in the kitchen, woman, and forage me some fruits and figs.”

Your logic will be irrefutable. The NYT might even come and quote you.