Sesgos ideológicos en las teorías sobre la evolución del sexo.

Abstract

The naturalization of human sexual behaviors and the conflicts between males and females on the basis of evolutionary accounts that explain these behaviors as the product of inborn differences in the biological nature of males and females has been criticized by cultural anthropologists. But the objections of these critics are ideological rather than scientific. Since this kind of criticism barely addresses the strictly darwinian aspect of sociobiological discourse, professional biologists tend to ignore it. The hypotheses on the evolution of sexual reproduction, the differences between sexes, the diversity of mating strategies and the sexual behaviors of males and females are loaded with ideological prejudices, and this ideological load is a cause of improper biases in their darwinian accounts. A major objective of this work is exposing and correcting the ideological biases in the evolutionary accounts of reproductive tactics of males and females without ruling out the adaptationist programme, only with a more rigorous use of the neodarwinian reasoning, showing that ideologically biased evolutionary explanations can be refuted by counter-arguments of the same adaptationist character. The ideological biases that permeated the 1980's sociobiology have been inherited by its intellectual daughters, the so-called ecology of behavior and the evolutionary psychology. Both ecologists of behavior and evolutionary psychologists go on emphasizing the conflict of reproductive interests between males and females (the opposition between the supposed male propensity to promiscuity and the supposed female propensity to monogamy) and overlooking the fact that the evolutionary stability of any reproductive estrategy requires that reproductive tactics of males and females reinforce one another. But this ideological burden shouldn't be seen as an intrinsic theoretical load of the adaptationist programme. Instead, they are the product of external influences that distort the view of evolutionary facts and lead to simplistic conclusions. Therefore, they result from an inaccurate or incorrect use of the adaptationist reasoning. Hence it's possible to "purge" the theory by a more rigorous use of adaptationist reasoning to prove that darwinism can't be a foundation for the naturalization of chauvinism or feminism, and to reinterpret the apparent conflicts between males and females in terms of mutual benefit and evolutionarily stable strategies.

Date of Award	20 Jan 2006
Original language	Undefined/Unknown
Supervisor	Jorge Wagensberg (Director) & Magi Cadevall Soler (Director)