NY Press, July 17, 2001
Steve Sailer

New Neo-Darwinism
<A HREF="http://www.nypress.com/14/29/taki/feature2.cfm">
http://www.nypress.com/14/29/taki/feature2.cfm</A>

There’s a quiet war going on as Western scientists and academics try to
fertilize postcommunist Russia’s fallow intellectual fields with their
favorite theories. Last month I attended a scientific conference in Moscow
where American and European Neo-Darwinists introduced Russian students to the
controversial but fast-growing field of using evolution to explain human
behavior.

Having assumed that Moscow girls all looked like Soviet lady shot-putters in
danger of failing their chromosome tests, I was pleasantly surprised to find
that most of the students were young women who looked more like Anna
Kournikova. The appeal of neo-Darwinism to coeds is only natural considering
the subjects of the lectures: beauty, dancing, gossip, anorexia, childbirth,
caring for babies, twins, the differences between men and women (pervasive
and innate, according to evolutionary psychologists) and whether those
newfangled perfumes with pheromones actually work as aphrodisiacs (they
don’t).

German anthropologist and MD Wulf Schiefenhoevel entranced the young ladies
with a slide show of how Eipo tribeswomen deliver their babies in the New
Guinea highlands. Most of what the Eipo do–give birth at home, walk around a
lot during contractions, deliver in whatever position they feel like
(generally upright) and use a female midwife instead of a male
doctor–violates standard Western obstetrical procedures.

Yet it works better for them than Western medicine did until not too many
decades ago. Primitive tribes’ maternal death rates appear to be about 1
percent and infant death rates about 4-5 percent. In contrast, in European
hospitals in the mid-19th century, doctors infected vast numbers of women
with puerperal fever by failing to wash their hands between deliveries.
Maternal death rates often reached 8 percent, sometimes even 12 percent. For
a Darwinist, the relative effectiveness of Stone Age obstetrics is
predictable. In the harsh survival-of-the-fittest environment of New Guinea,
any tribe that birthed babies as badly as 19th-century European doctors would
have eventually died out.

Schiefenhoevel’s findings have, he claims, helped drive the trend toward
"natural childbirth." He’s dubious, though, of the current fad of insisting
that Dad be in the birthing room. Traditional cultures never let the father
anywhere near. The only males who drop by are shamans. (That’s how
Schiefenhoevel got in to take his pictures. As an MD, the Eipo granted him
honorary witch-doctor status.)

My wife had our second child at home, with me in the room. This semi-Stone
Age system worked superbly for mother and baby, but I felt like a complete
schmuck, as any New Guinean could have told me I would. All I can remember is
shouting crazed commands to our pair of lesbian midwives, commands such as,
"No, not those towels! Those are the GOOD towels!"

National differences among evolutionary thinkers were clear at the
conference. Primatologist Bernard Thierry was the only Frenchman. He said
that French intellectuals all accept Darwinism (creationism is almost
exclusively an American faith), but they just aren’t interested in it. The
French don’t even like animals much, except for pets.

In contrast, the Germanic peoples love the beasts of the field and forest.
Most of the German-speaking scientists in attendance, lead by the
distinguished Dr. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, are human ethologists. The field
grew out of the animal behavior studies of Dr. Dr. Dr. Konrad Lorenz. (He
held doctorates in medicine, zoology and psychology). This 1973 Nobel
laureate is most widely remembered for the charming footage of the ducklings
who, because they had "imprinted" on him immediately after hatching, followed
him everywhere as if he were their mother.

I expected that the Germanic scientists, the heirs to such system-builders as
Hegel, Marx, Freud and Spengler, would be the most avid theoreticians among
evolutionists, while the British and Americans would be the empirical
pragmatists. Surprisingly, however, the opposite is true. The most Promethean
system-builder is Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson, author of such ambitiously
titled tomes as Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and Consilience: The Unity of
Knowledge.

In contrast, the Germanic ethologists value intense observation. For example,
Frank Salter, a Darwinian-oriented political scientist from Australia who has
lived in Germany for 10 years, videotaped 60 hours of nightclubbers trying to
talk their way past the doormen of Munich’s exclusive Nacht-Cafe hotspot.
Salter methodically measured from his videotapes how much skin each female
supplicant was showing and found a correlation with how much they flirted
with the bouncers.

The ethologists half-jokingly claim that British and American evolutionary
psychologists get what little data they use from having their students fill
out sex questionnaires. The Germanics also find the Anglo-Americans
alarmingly infected with the speculative itch. Perhaps because in contrast to
the many disastrous theories invented by Germans, the two great theories
proposed by British empiricists–Adam Smith’s free-market economics and
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection–actually work, Anglo-American
Darwinists are today more willing than Germans to toss out half-baked
hypotheses. (Not that there's anything wrong with dreaming up new theories -
science needs them to progress.)

For instance, an American evolutionary psychologist who spoke at the
conference raised the baffling question of why natural selection doesn’t make
male homosexuality extinct. She noted a very recent theory that male gayness
might be a side effect of an unknown gene that protects against smallpox,
just as sickle cell anemia is a byproduct of genetic resistance to malaria.
With smallpox not existing outside the laboratory anymore, however, this
ingenious, if not particularly persuasive, conjecture seems destined to
remain more of a monument to evolutionary psychology’s fertile creativity
than a testable idea.