
Sex at Dawn -- evolutionary biology misused - jseliger
http://jseliger.com/2010/07/21/sex-at-dawn-christopher-ryan-and-cacilda-jetha/
======
datapimp
I found myself very irritated by quotes like this:

"The book argues that humans are not “naturally” monogamous. That might be
true. But Sex at Dawn doesn’t prove it."

"males evolved a strong appetite for sexual novelty and a robust aversion to
the overly familiar.” But they don’t have any evidence for that"

If they don't, I think it is safe to assume it is because the authors assume
their readers have a bit of life experience. And not because there aren't
volumes of biological and historical evidence to support these claims if they
wanted to include it.

I just don't see these two points as even being controversial enough to be up
for debate. You don't need that much romantic history to know that men have a
strong appetite for sexual novelty, and that highly desirable men are not
monogamous, that women know this ahead of time and are willingly complicit in
their non-monogamy.

Ok, I guess for the type of guy who would write these critiques, some things
need to be spelled out on paper. You can just step outside in the world though
and not need it to be.

~~~
Groxx
Even the "obvious" isn't necessarily true. How much is cultural, and how much
is _biology_? If you can't show something's _not_ cultural, have you shown
anything aside from supporting/fighting prejudice with prejudice?

~~~
jseliger
The grandparent is really similar to a post someone just left on my review. In
response, I wrote:

It's not obvious at all that this is more true than men than of women, or if
so, how. That's why people making these kinds of claims need
evidence—otherwise you're merely telling stories and repeating stereotypes.
For another example of this general principle, see Mark Liberman's
[http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/24/s...](http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/24/sex_on_the_brain/)
Women use 20,000 words a day, men only 7,000 - or so says a new bestseller.
Fact-checking ``The Female Brain."</a>.

~~~
Groxx
Oh, ouch. The author for that number-pair also wrote "Why Men Don't Have a
Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes", "Why Men Lie and Women Cry", and "Why
Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking." (from your
link)

Scientific-credibility nose-dive right there.

------
robryan
_To really catalog everything that’s wrong with Sex at Dawn, I’d have to go
back through at least five or six books (and probably more) and at least a
dozen papers. It would take me all day._

I feel the same way about _The God Delusion_ , quiet enjoy the book and the
arguments it puts forward but to actually take an unbiased look at all the
arguments from many sources that are being put forward and notable refutations
of these would take a seriously long time.

~~~
berntb
Dawkins isn't a "real" expert on e.g. theology.

My favorite anti-religious author is Ingemar Hedenius, but that is afaik only
in Swedish.

------
TheSOB88
This refutation of a book I've never heard of is not particularly interesting
to me.

~~~
_delirium
I could go down the front page making comments like that, I suppose? "This
collaborative filtering plugin for a framework I don't use is not particularly
interesting to me", or perhaps "This GUI elements library for an Adobe tool I
don't use is not particularly interesting to me". People have heard of
different things!

~~~
robryan
I find it worse when something random about a technology you would never read
apart from it being an article on HN is interesting to me. I've spent a whole
heap of time reading stuff about Haskell(for one example) that is posted here
but I haven't used it and don't know if I'll ever get around to learning it.

