evo-psych: unintentionally funny

(h/t mzmartipants)
Ah, now I see. Hitchens wasn't saying that women are incapable of being funny, he was saying there was no evolutionary pressure on women to be funny the way there is on men, and so men are funnier.

This might possibly make sense, if most pairings in history happened just the way the modern script goes: man meets woman in bar, man impresses her or makes her laugh, man scores. Therefore having the ability to make her laugh increases the likelihood that his seed will be passed on. There is no reciprocal need for women to make men laugh in order to score.

I started out prepared to write a post here about how he's probably wrong about why it is that making a woman laugh might in some or many circumstances increase the likelihood that a man will score (and I've been using that term very deliberately here, nudge nudge), but really I don't even have to, because the problem with his logic is even more fundamental than that.

This highlights the problem with claiming that evolutionary psychology is actually science: Hitchens sounds like he is assuming his own personal experience, or the experience of him and many of the men he's grown up with, or the cultural narrative of the "experience of the average guy in a bar" is the way it has always been, for every man ever in the history of the world. Having made this assumption -- and this is the flaw with so many evo-psych arguments I've seen -- he develops around it a theory of the evolutionary role of humor and publishes it, couching it all in scientific terms and claiming the argument is scientific.

Now, I've no doubt that evolution has shaped the functioning of the brain and therefore many factors of human behavior. Ever since I read The Naked Ape 20 years ago, I've been impressed by the notion that many of the mysteries of modern culture and behavior can be elucidated with appeals to human evolution. So as it happens, I am inclined to be sympathetic to this line of argument. (I also do not feel that bio-sociological arguments, if they happen to hold any weight, are contradictory to feminism or any other critical theory -- because any natural statistical differences that may or may not exist between men and women, or white people and nonwhite people, etc. etc., cannot justify unequal access to opportunity or protection of equal rights.)

The failing occurs when evo-psych proponents look around them and decide that the present status quo -- an artifact shaped by numerous complex agendas, overt and covert -- must have somehow come about because of evolution. In itself that thought is true: evolution brought us to this point by some means. But between the evo-psych researcher and the genuine status quo is a cultural narrative of what "everyday life" is like.

Here's the problem: ask the researcher what he thinks is an "everyday experience" and he will answer with an abbreviated script which is an amalgam of his life, what friends tell him about their lives, and what he sees on TV about the lives people live. "Oh, you get up in the morning, shower, run out the door, sit in a car in traffic for a while, work your eight hours, come home, and watch TV or maybe read a book before you go to bed. You know. Everyday life."

There is no room in this appraisal for those people whose lives are not like this at all. For what percentage of the population is that script an accurate portrayal of "everyday life"?

And so, going back to Hitchens and his argument about the evolutionary purpose of humor: for what percentage of the population does a man's ability to have sex with the woman of his choice actually depend on his ability to make her laugh? Don't know? Neither do I. Neither does Hitchens. But he thinks he knows.