Remora
Lionel Tiger is one of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology. You know evolutionary psychology, don't you? (he said in his best Henny Youngman voice.) That's the science where you imagine a theory and then walk your fingers through any sort of evidence or analogy or just things you make up on the spot to prove it. It's much like, well, being a presidential speechwriter.

Anyway, today in Slate he used the WCT assault to support his imperial male theory, which he has kicked around for years without ever making it very convincing. Lionel's theory, in a nutshell, takes various old wives' tales about male aggression, peppers them with his own over-emphasis on sexual selection in evolutionary theory, and matches them to mix and match facts culled from cultures Tiger knows very little about.


Osama Bin Laden's Man Trouble - Why his young men in groups are so scary. by Lionel Tiger

Here's a paragraph indicative of Tiger's usual insanity:

Their comfort [ the their refers, rather murkily, to terrorist males] in an all-male world begins with the high sex segregation of many of the Muslim communities from which the terrorists draw. While there are great variations among Islamic communities, the sharp tendency is toward sexually segregated societies. Contact between the sexes is tightly restricted by draconian moral codes. Not only are women's faces veiled, so is their behavior. This means that men and women have relatively little to do with people of the opposite sex. Therefore, they develop a great deal of reliance on those of their own.

Most men in most societies marry, or try to. This is more difficult than usual in polygamous societies in which powerful men may have as many as four wives, leaving three potential husbands without a date for Saturday night�or any night.'

Thus Tiger insinuates the shabby, empirically discredited, but still ticking Chagnon thesis that male violence stems from sexual competition among males. Off to the races with his favorite obsession, he doesn't let some pokey thing like actual knowledge of Arabic culture get in his way. Later on, for instance, he writes:

"The United Arab Emirates, not normally considered forerunners of the progressive movement, have taken an inventive action that reflects how difficult it is for men and women to mate in a traditional manner. To marry a local woman, men in that nation must provide gifts, feasts, and ritual performances that may cost as much as $40,000�an impossible accumulation for all but a few. Many would choose a foreign wife instead, which is unattractive to the government. So now when a man marries a local woman, the government supplies a grant sufficient for his ceremonial obligations."

Seemingly Tiger has no idea of how the oil money raked in by the various states in the Arabic peninsula has been distributed. And notice how he gets his figure of $40,000 - the marriage feast and trimmings "may" cost that much, which then becomes our assumed standard cost -- "an impossible accumulation for all but a few." Using figures like that, I could prove that nobody in the US ever receives medical care -- I just quote the most expensive medical care figure, say medical care "may" cost that much, and the rest is coasting.

What can you say? The man's a tenured prof at Rutgers.