Group

Here is another important article (which will be linked via my "Articles
posted to CED page - http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/cedartic.html)
about evolutionary psychologists Wilson & Daly's theory that there
is a strongly marked and universal tendency for stepfathers to kill their
stepchildren which is a prediction of Darwinian `selfish gene' theory:

"But a controversial new theory would have us believe that the
stereotypes of cruel or heartless step-parents that run through
folklore have a biological basis. A pair of Canadian psychologists,
Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, claim that children are up to 100
times more likely to be abused or killed by a step-parent than by a
genetic parent. The[y] ... believe the heightened level of violence
suffered by stepchildren is a product of evolutionary programming.
... all human behavior has been shaped by a ruthless Darwinian
calculus of reproductive self-interest. ...: we love our children, first
and foremost, because they are vehicles for our genes. Parental
care, or `investment", as evolutionary psychologists like to call it,
is nature's way of ensuring that we give our offspring the best
chance of surviving and thriving, so that they, in turn, will breed
and pass on our genes to successive generations. ... There is simply
no good Darwinian reason for an adult to `invest' in a child who
doesn't share their genes. So, in any blended family, there will be
an inherent conflict about who gets access to precious parental
resources: the stepchild or the natural child. Sometimes that
conflict will lead to physical and psychological violence, and even
murder. Daly and Wilson have put together an impressive array of
statistics from a number of countries, all of which point, in their
view, to one conclusion: that step-parents are, in fact, `hugely
overrepresented' as perpetrators of child abuse, and `even more
hugely as child murderers". ... children were between 70 and 100
times more likely to be killed by a step-parent than by a natural
parent."

As mentioned in my previous post, this has been hailed by Darwinists like
Helena Cronin (notice how she just shrugs off "infanticide" as "evolved
inclinations that we would expect in the allocation of scarce parental
resources", even though "to kill one's own child is surely to commit
Darwinian suicide" :

"And yet, infanticide within families does happen, although to kill
one's own child is surely to commit Darwinian suicide. But, once
again, Daly's and Wilson's detailed analysis finds that, on the
contrary, infanticide fits well with the evolved inclinations that we
would expect in the allocation of scarce parental resources (Daly
and Wilson 1988, pp. 37-93). Perhaps most tellingly, stepchildren
turn out to be enormously more at risk than natural children (Daly
and Wilson 1988, pp. 83-93). So, for example, in 1967 an
American child living with one or more substitute parents was 100
times as likely to be fatally abused as a child living with natural
parents; Canadian figures are similar; and, in North America as a
whole, stepparents are more over-represented among homicides
than among nonfatal abuse cases." (Cronin H., "The Ant and the
Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection From Darwin To Today,"
[1991], Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, reprint,
p.344)

And, to add another, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, under the heading
"Stepfathers Worse Than No Father":

"Westerners appalled by such barbaric treatment of the fatherless
should take a look at their local newspapers. Child homicide in
civilized societies is nowhere tolerated, very much against the law,
and uncommon. Nevertheless, in North America when the father of
offspring under two years of age no longer lives in the home and an
unrelated man or stepfather lives there instead, this rare event is
seventy times more likely to occur. [Daly M. & Wilson M.I.,
"Homicide," Aldine de Gruyter: Hawthorne NY, 1988] The murder
of infants by stepfathers or mothers' boyfriends resembles the
circumstances under which sexually selected infanticide evolved in
other primates: males from outside the breeding system increase
their own chances to breed by eliminating offspring sired by rivals.
The superficial similarities have sometimes led to the erroneous
conclusion that child abuse as we know it today is or once was
adaptive. Some clarification is in order. Canadian psychologists
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson were the first to demonstrate
increased risk to infants from having unrelated men in the house.
They were careful to stress that in postindustrial human societies,
neither child abuse nor infanticide is adaptive. More likely than
not, the boyfriend goes to jail and the mother is prosecuted for
neglect. More important, the attacker is not some invader entering
the breeding system from out side it: he already has keys to the
apartment and access to the mother's bed. Imagine: the mother goes
off on an errand, leaving her baby in the boy friend's care. She may
or may not have an inkling of the risk. Perhaps she senses that her
boyfriend resents diversion of household resources, including her
attention, to some other man's child. ... Perhaps boyfriend and baby
are already off to a bad start all the more reason why the baby may
reject such tentative comfort as this man offers. The baby cries,
makes demands not willingly met by a man in no way sensitized
for this task. Mother Nature has set high his threshold against
altruism toward this insatiable stranger. Because of the low degree
of relatedness between the man and the child, the benefits don't
come close to out weighing the costs of care. But beyond his lack
of solicitude for an unrelated, very vulnerable but demanding
dependent, the abusive boyfriend may have little more in common
with an infanticidal monkey than a certain nonspecific impatience,
a general predisposition to respond violently to repeated
annoyance." (Hrdy S.B., "Mother Nature: Natural Selection and the
Female of the Species," Chatto & Windus: London, 1999, p.237)

But, as Proverbs 18:17 says "The first to present his case seems right, till
another comes forward and questions him":

"However, there is a paradox about these grisly statistics, one that
seems to upset the whole Darwinian applecart. In all these
countries, the total number of children killed by their natural
parents is still higher than that killed by step-parents. Evolutionary
psychologists have developed some ingenious theories to explain
why it is that anyone should commit what amounts to genetic
suicide by murdering their own offspring. ... Within the scientific
community are many who believe Daly and Wilson's Darwinian
view of parental love is flawed, and question their statistical
evidence and scientific reasoning. ... R.J. Gelles and J.W. Harrop ...
found that there was no significant difference between the rates of
severe violence perpetrated by natural parents and step-parents.
And Steven Rose ... argues that Daly and Wilson have tailored the
facts to fit their hypothesis. `There's a huge difference in murder
rates between, say, the UK and the US,' says Rose. `For their
hypothesis to have any scientific validity, you would expect the
rate to be reasonably constant across populations. And even more
importantly, the actual percentage of step-parents who kill or abuse
a child is tiny. The vast majority are no different from genetic
parents: if there really were some deep Darwinian antipathy
between step-parents and stepchildren, you would expect a lot
more step-parents to be killers, and that simply isn't the case.'
Leslie Margolin ... is less circumspect, calling Daly and Wilson's
theory `patent nonsense'. `Step-parents don't have the same social
supports and incentives to care for children as biological parents,'
argues Margolin. `They don't have a long shared history with the
kids.' ... His research uncovered a disturbing element: in a
significant number of instances, stepfathers were encouraged to
assault a child by the child's mother. Typically, the mother urges a
live-in boyfriend to discipline a child she can't control herself. He
starts out meaning to punish the child and ends up using fatal force.
This scenario, repeated consistently in the cases Margolin studied,
seems to strike at the roots of Daly and Wilson's work. So, why
then would a mother jeopardise her `precious Darwinian
investments' ... by encouraging a genetic interloper to do them
harm? Daly and Wilson shrug off these criticisms. ... Like many of
the comparisons evolutionary psychology makes between human
and animal behavior, this has a seductive surface appeal. Rose,
however, calls it a `crappy just-so story', no more deserving of
scientific credibility than Kipling's fables. `If it's natural, and lions
do it all the time, then why don't humans?' says Rose ... Rose
argues that Daly and Wilson ignore counter-examples from animal
and human behavior that might make their theory look shaky. `The
real clincher is adoption. Adoptive parents have no genetic
relationship to their children, but there's no evidence at all that they
are any more violent or abusive towards their children than
`natural' parents.'"

Steve

PS: See tagline for another important quote by David Stove, which applies
to evolutionary biology generally.

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The [Melbourne] Age

[...]

Child-killers: is it in the genes?

By TOM MORTON
Saturday 6 May 2000

IT'S A STORY everyone knows: how Cinderella lost her mother as
a little girl, was humiliated and mistreated by her stepmother, and
ultimately rescued from a dysfunctional stepfamily by a handsome
prince with an eye for a slipper.

The story dates back at least to the 16th century in European
folklore, and is thought to be much more ancient, possibly
originating in the Middle East or Asia. Many other folk tales feature
a cruel step-parent: think of Hansel and Gretel, whose stepmother
bullies their father into abandoning them in the forest.

For many contemporary social critics, the growing number of
stepfamilies in Western societies is a symptom of moral decline,
the legacy of easier divorce and loss of respect for family values.
Yet stepfamilies have always been around. The prefix "step"
comes from an old English root related to "bereavement". Before
the arrival of antibiotics, anaesthetics and the rest of the arsenal of
Western medicine, it wasn't uncommon to lose a spouse early in a
marriage and then remarry. What we call blended families have
been around a lot longer than the Brady Bunch.

But a controversial new theory would have us believe that the
stereotypes of cruel or heartless step-parents that run through
folklore have a biological basis. A pair of Canadian psychologists,
Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, claim that children are up to 100
times more likely to be abused or killed by a step-parent than by a
genetic parent. The husband-and-wife professors at McMaster
University believe the heightened level of violence suffered by
stepchildren is a product of evolutionary programming.

Daly and Wilson are in the vanguard of the self-proclaimed "new
science" of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists
believe that all human behavior has been shaped by a ruthless
Darwinian calculus of reproductive self-interest. As Robert Wright,
one of the strongest advocates of evolutionary psychology, puts it
in his book, The Moral Animal: "Do whatever you can to get your
genes into the next generation".

If Daly and Wilson are right, in extreme cases "doing whatever you
can" may involve cutting short the lives of children who are not
your own. In purely Darwinian terms, stepfamilies are perilous
places for a child to be.

The gist of their argument goes like this: we love our children, first
and foremost, because they are vehicles for our genes. Parental
care, or "investment", as evolutionary psychologists like to call it, is
nature's way of ensuring that we give our offspring the best chance
of surviving and thriving, so that they, in turn, will breed and pass
on our genes to successive generations.

This doesn't make the deep feeling of tenderness you experience
gazing at your sleeping progeny any less real: but the reason you
feel it for them, and not for the budgie or the children next door, is
because they're carrying your DNA. Daly and Wilson like to talk
about parenting as a form of "resource allocation". This goes for
the obvious things, like food, clothing and shelter, and the more
intangible, but no less essential, parental resources of affection,
attention, time and patience.

In evolutionary terms, then, stepchildren will always be behind the
eight ball. There is simply no good Darwinian reason for an adult
to "invest" in a child who doesn't share their genes. So, in any
blended family, there will be an inherent conflict about who gets
access to precious parental resources: the stepchild or the natural
child. Sometimes that conflict will lead to physical and
psychological violence, and even murder.

Daly and Wilson have put together an impressive array of statistics
from a number of countries, all of which point, in their view, to one
conclusion: that step-parents are, in fact, "hugely over-
represented" as perpetrators of child abuse, and "even more
hugely as child murderers".

Beginning with a study of data collected by the American Humane
Association in the '70s, they found that children living in
stepfamilies were seven times more likely to be abused than those
living with their genetic parents. When they turned their attention to
killings of children, the correlation was even starker. Police records
from Canada, and similar data from Britain, Finland and NSW, all
showed the same pattern: children were between 70 and 100
times more likely to be killed by a step-parent than by a natural
parent.

However, there is a paradox about these grisly statistics, one that
seems to upset the whole Darwinian applecart. In all these
countries, the total number of children killed by their natural
parents is still higher than that killed by step-parents. Evolutionary
psychologists have developed some ingenious theories to explain
why it is that anyone should commit what amounts to genetic
suicide by murdering their own offspring.

But Daly and Wilson's riposte is much simpler. As a proportion of
the total population, they argue, stepfamilies still make up less
than 10 per cent of all families in a country such as Australia.
However, step-parents are responsible for a disproportionate
amount of child abuse and child murder.

There is a touch of crusading fervor about the academics, whose
pursuit of the Cinderella complex goes back 25 years to their days
as young researchers at the University of California. Reading their
papers and recent book, The Truth About Cinderella: A Darwinian
View of Parental Love, one could be forgiven for concluding that
they have it in for step-parents. Yet both insist the opposite is the
case. They believe their theory can be a step towards greater
social acceptance of step-parents, one that will increase
understanding of their problems.

"Violence is the tip of the iceberg," says Daly. "It's simply the most
visible sign of a much broader phenomenon, which is that genetic
parents, on the whole, love the child, wish it well, and are
distressed by its distress, while step-parents, on the whole, feel
those things much less intensely, or wish the child could be
fostered out."

Within the scientific community are many who believe Daly and
Wilson's Darwinian view of parental love is flawed, and question
their statistical evidence and scientific reasoning. A major study
published in 1991 by R.J. Gelles and J.W. Harrop, veteran
American researchers on family violence, found that there was no
significant difference between the rates of severe violence
perpetrated by natural parents and step-parents. And Steven
Rose, a professor of biology at the Open University in Britain, and
a leading critic of evolutionary psychology, argues that Daly and
Wilson have tailored the facts to fit their hypothesis.

"There's a huge difference in murder rates between, say, the UK
and the US," says Rose. "For their hypothesis to have any
scientific validity, you would expect the rate to be reasonably
constant across populations. And even more importantly, the
actual percentage of step-parents who kill or abuse a child is tiny.
The vast majority are no different from genetic parents: if there
really were some deep Darwinian antipathy between step-parents
and stepchildren, you would expect a lot more step-parents to be
killers, and that simply isn't the case."

Leslie Margolin, a child-abuse researcher at the University of Iowa,
is less circumspect, calling Daly and Wilson's theory "patent
nonsense". "Step-parents don't have the same social supports and
incentives to care for children as biological parents," argues
Margolin. "They don't have a long shared history with the kids."

Margolin, who also trains social workers in counselling, has
studied cases of abuse and murder in detail, trying to understand
the emotional and social dynamics that lead step-parents to harm
a child. His research uncovered a disturbing element: in a
significant number of instances, stepfathers were encouraged to
assault a child by the child's mother. Typically, the mother urges a
live-in boyfriend to discipline a child she can't control herself. He
starts out meaning to punish the child and ends up using fatal
force.

This scenario, repeated consistently in the cases Margolin studied,
seems to strike at the roots of Daly and Wilson's work. So, why
then would a mother jeopardise her "precious Darwinian
investments" (to use Wright's phrase) by encouraging a genetic
interloper to do them harm? Daly and Wilson shrug off these
criticisms. Like many evolutionary psychologists, they see
themselves as intellectual rebels, taboo-breakers who have had to
battle a stifling burden of political correctness.

Their chief target is the "social role theory" of the '60s and '70s,
which they believe painted a warm and fuzzy picture of blended
families as simply one kind of family type among many, all of them
interchangeable and all equally nurturing for children.

ACCORDING to social role theory, conflict in stepfamilies grew
from the issue of there being no defined role for step-parents,
hence they often felt confused, uncertain and inadequate in their
relations with their stepchildren.

In Daly and Wilson's world view, the truth is much simpler: step-
parents feel a kind of visceral resentment at "pseudo-parental
obligation" that is, in Darwinian terms, against nature. They cite
some striking parallels from the animal kingdom. Male langur
monkeys and lions are notorious for wiping out the offspring of
other males. The adult male lion is a lonely hunter until he mates.
When he does, he forms an alliance with other males to take over
a pride of females. If successful, they immediately kill cubs
fathered by their predecessors. "It's a very systematic act," says
Wilson. "There's a special bite the male lions use to kill the cubs
that they don't use in any other context."

Like many of the comparisons evolutionary psychology makes
between human and animal behavior, this has a seductive surface
appeal. Rose, however, calls it a "crappy just-so story", no more
deserving of scientific credibility than Kipling's fables.

"If it's natural, and lions do it all the time, then why don't humans?"
says Rose, whose latest book, Alas Poor Darwin, will be published
in July.

Rose argues that Daly and Wilson ignore counter-examples from
animal and human behavior that might make their theory look
shaky. "The real clincher is adoption. Adoptive parents have no
genetic relationship to their children, but there's no evidence at all
that they are any more violent or abusive towards their children
than `natural' parents."

Despite these powerful critiques, Daly and Wilson's views on step-
parents have been seized upon eagerly in the British and
American media and championed by fellow neo-Darwinists such
as Steven Pinker. They're also beginning to influence debates on
child protection in Canada.

In Australia, says Gillian Calvert, the NSW Commissioner for
Children and Young People, the theories have had little impact.
"People resort to biological explanations for social problems when
their real agenda is to deny the community's responsibility for
fixing them."

CALVERT cites examples of Australian research that shows living
with a non-biological parent is a risk factor for child abuse, but only
one among many. "All our experience tells us that there's no single
cause for child abuse or killing. Nearly always, there is a complex
build-up of factors: domestic violence, psychiatric disorders,
substance abuse, and physical discipline of children."

In a sense, the answers from those who work in child protection
are depressingly familiar. People from low-income backgrounds
are known to have higher rates of divorce and relationship
breakdown, and to repartner more often. Poverty, job insecurity,
second- or third-generation unemployment and feelings of
rejection by the social mainstream all contribute to the stresses on
young parents and step-parents, many of whom also have little
family or social support. All these stresses can contribute to a
heightened risk of violence against young children.

It is precisely because these problems seem so intractable that
theories such as Daly and Wilson's appeal, promising to cut
through the complexities of individual motivation, and illuminate
what Yeats called "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart" with
the clear light of science. Many critics question whether their
theory amounts to science at all.

Interestingly, recent research from a different quarter suggests
another explanation for the Cinderella complex. Studies on mice
suggest that males undergo hormonal changes when their
offspring are born which trigger nurturing behavior. There may be
a biological basis to the paternal instinct.

Scientists have yet to investigate whether human males enjoy a
similar rush of paternal hormones. But there is evidence that men
who have the chance to be closely involved in caring for a baby
early in its life are less likely to harm it later on. It's easier, then, to
understand why stepfathers who miss out on early bonding, and
have little chance to learn parenting skills, might be more inclined
to lash out at a child in moments of rage. It's no more than a
hypothesis, but no less plausible than Daly and Wilson's view.

Tom Morton produced The Descent of Man, a series on the new
Darwinism on ABC Radio National's Science program earlier this
year.

[...]

Copyright (c) The Age Company Ltd 2000. [...]

(Morton T., "Child-killers: is it in the genes?," The Age, 6 May 2000
http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000506/A43786-2000May5.html)
==========================================================================

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"To a *certain* extent, of course, the temperature of Sydney, or of
anywhere else on earth, does depend on its latitude. Everyone knows this,
because everyone knows that temperature falls off systematically,
(however irregularly), with increase in latitude. Two places on the same
latitude always *would* have the same temperature at any given moment,
if all other things were equal between them, and barring accidents. But
then, other things *cannot* ever all be equal between them. .... The two
places always differ in some respect which affects local temperature:
elevation, or humidity, or prevailing wind, or surrounding topography, or
something. But even if, by some unheard-of fluke, the two places were the
same in all such respects, meteorological accidents would nearly always
make them differ in temperature at any given time. There would be a
windy morning here and a still one there, an electrical storm there but not
here, or something of that sort. The result is ... that knowledge of the
latitude of a certain place is just about useless for predicting what its
temperatures are like ... There is undoubtedly a causal dependence of
temperature on latitude, but it is extremely attenuated. ... But the
dependence of parental altruism on parents sharing half their genes with
offspring, if it is real at all, must be much more attenuated still. For there
is no latitude at which temperatures vary as widely as temperatures on
earth *can* vary; whereas ... species in which parents share half their
genes with offspring vary in parental altruism as widely as species *can*
vary in that respect. So the knowledge that in a certain species, parents
share half their genes with offspring, is even *less* use, for either
explaining or predicting the degree of parental altruism in that species,
than the knowledge of a certain place's latitude is, for explaining or
predicting its temperature. ... the statement, 'Two species, in both of which
parents share half their genes with offspring, would always exhibit the
same degree of parental altruism, if all other things were equal between
them, and if no accident made them differ in altruism.' ...says extremely
little ... the provisos it contains are too stringent ever to be satisfied. ...
But, little as the statement says, what reason have we, to think even that
little true? We certainly do *not* have in this case, corresponding to what
we do have in the case of temperature and latitude, a systematic (even if
irregular) decline in degree of parental altruism, with a declining
proportion of genes shared by parents with offspring. Not only do we not
have that: we *do* have reasons, several of them, to think that this
statement about shared genes and parental altruism is false." (Stove D.C.,
"Darwinian Fairytales," Avebury: Aldershot UK, 1995, pp.154-155.
Emphasis in original)
Stephen E. Jones http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Moderator: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CreationEvolutionDesign
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