Did humans evolve to 'protect' women?

Ethnography complicates a convenient narrative

Alfred Russel Wallace is most widely known as the co-discoverer, along with Charles Darwin, of natural selection. Less well known are the contributions Wallace made to ethnology through his fieldwork in Amazonia and Southeast Asia.

Wallace described some particularly important beliefs and practices found in the Amazon among Tucanoan natives living along the Uaupés River. Of particular interest to me are the practices associated with music and gender roles. Wallace writes,

One of their most singular superstitions is about the musical instruments they use at their festivals, which they call the Jurupari music. These consist of eight or sometimes twelve pipes, or trumpets, made of bamboos or palm-stems hollowed out, some with trumpet-shaped mouths of bark and with mouth-holes of clay and leaf. Each pair of instruments gives a distinct note, and they produce a rather agreeable concert, something resembling clarionets and bassoons. These instruments, however, are with them such a mystery that no woman must ever see them, on pain of death. They are always kept in some igarapé, at a distance from the maloca [house], whence they are brought on particular occasions: when the sound of them is heard approaching, every woman retires into the woods, or into some adjoining shed, which they generally have near, and remains invisible till after the ceremony is over, when the instruments are taken away to their hiding-place, and the women come out of their concealment. Should any female be supposed to have seen them, either by accident or design, she is invariably executed, generally by poison, and a father will not hesitate to sacrifice his daughter, or a husband his wife, on such an occasion [emphasis added].

The key elements here are 1) the men have special musical instruments which are kept secret from the women, 2) the instruments are used by the men to control access to space and ritual celebrations (women must flee when they hear them being played), and 3) should any female be suspected of having seen the instruments, they are to be killed, even by their own father or husband.

Wallace also described some other important gender dynamics:

They have many other prejudices with regard to women. They believe that if a woman, during her pregnancy, eats of any meat, any other animal partaking of it will suffer: if a domestic animal or tame bird, it will die; if a dog, it will be for the future incapable of hunting; and even a man will ever after be unable to shoot that particular kind of game. An Indian, who was one of my hunters, caught a fine cock of the rock, and gave it to his wife to feed, but the poor woman was obliged to live herself on cassava-bread and fruits, and abstain entirely from all animal food, peppers, and salt, which it was believed would cause the bird to die; notwithstanding all precautions, however, the bird did die, and the woman got a beating from her husband, because he thought she had not been sufficiently rigid in her abstinence from the prohibited articles [emphasis added].

Essential elements here are 1) women are forbidden from eating certain particularly nutritious and perhaps desirable foods, especially during pregnancy, and 2) if they are thought to have violated this prohibition they may be punished with beatings.

In the descriptions above we have two themes commonly found across societies which have been central to much of my research: men using cult practices and food taboos to exercise control over women, monopolizing physical space and desirable foods, and punishing women who violate these restrictions with beatings and even death. As I discussed in my paper on disguises in hunter-gatherer societies:

Four of the 10 societies (Arunta, Bororo, Mbuti, and Ona) have cult practices in which adult males impersonate mythical beings for purposes of deceiving uninitiated women and children, and for three of these societies (Arunta, Bororo, Mbuti) musical instruments are used in secret to mimic the voices of these spirits and add to the credibility of the illusion. In each of these societies the men have secret feasts forbidden to uninitiated women and children (Colbacchini, 1942:286; Gusinde, 1931:1512; Murdock, 1934:35; Spencer & Gillen, 1927:298; Turnbull, 1962:184), often with the claim that the food is consumed by the spirits [emphasis added].

Other cross-culturally common practices in relation to the poor treatment of women are domestic abuse, rape, and wife capture. Across many societies in New Guinea, Amazonia, and Australia, gang-rape was a common punishment for women who, inadvertently or not, intruded on the men’s secrets. Gang rape was even reportedly a kind of ritualized rite of passage for young men in youth-abbeys in early modern southeast France.

Violence towards captured women has also been common. E. Lucas Bridges wrote of the Ona hunter-gatherers that after women were captured,

if they were caught by their new husbands before they could get back to their own people, they ran the risk of being soundly beaten or arrowed through the legs with arrows from which the barbs had been removed—generally. A wife of long standing, if she obstinately refused to do her husband’s will, was just as likely to be thrashed or arrowed.

According to the Lieutenant Governor of the colony of New South Wales in the late 18th century, the practice of wife capture among locals was reportedly quite violent:

the poor wretch is stolen upon in the absence of her protectors; being first stupified with blows, inflicted with clubs or wooden swords, on the head, back, and shoulders, every one of which is followed by a stream of blood, she is dragged through the woods by one arm, with a perseverance and violence that one might suppose would displace it from its socket; the lover, or rather the ravisher, is regardless of the stones or broken pieces of trees which may lie in his route, being anxious only to convey his prize in safety to his own party, where a scene ensues too shocking to relate. This outrage is not resented by the relations of the female, who only retaliate by a similar outrage when they find it in their power. This is so constantly the practice among them, that even the children make it a game or exercise; and I have often, on hearing the cries of the girls with whom they were playing, ran out of my house, thinking some murder was committed, but have found the whole party laughing at my mistake [emphasis added].

Kenneth Good described fairly normalized rape among the Yanomami; “If a woman left her village and showed up somewhere else unattached, chances were she’d be raped. She knew it, they knew it. It was expected behavior.” He even gives one graphic description of a group of boys fighting with a group of elderly women over a younger woman, and tugging her away to rape her.

Rape of the Sabine Women by Pietro da Cortona, 1627–1629

Among the Tsimané forager-horticulturalists of Bolivia an estimated 85% of women have been subject to intimate partner violence, which men appear to use strategically to increase their own fertility.

Anthropologist Bruce Knauft discussed the violent and coercive dimensions of polygynous marriage in parts of South Coast New Guinea, writing that,

Polygyny and control of female labor in sago production were a significant dimension of male status differentiation, and in cases of polygynous marriage, second wives “may be little more than drudges” unless they were sisters to the first wife (Eyde 1967:194; cf. Trenkenschuh 1982a:46). Wife-beating was assessed by Eyde (1967:192) to have been quite common among central Asmat, and he says, “only where a wife-beating becomes near-murder, or actually results in murder, will her brothers intervene.” He documents four cases that came to his attention in which men in fact murdered their wives. Unmarried women could be beaten by their fathers or brothers for promiscuity (ibid. :220).

Sex-biased infanticide is another obvious one, with female-biased infanticide being much more common cross-culturally than male-biased.

Another practice I discussed in a recent commentary is sex-biased sacrifice among the Ache of Paraguay. As Pierre Clastres noted, when a man in the prime of his life dies,

One of his children is killed, almost always a girl. This is the hunter’s jepy, the vengeance with which the Atchei honor him. He carries his daughter off crouching on his shoulder, just as he carried her so many times when he was alive. Through eternity, she will be her father’s faithful companion [emphasis added]. (Clastres, 1998, p. 250)

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I bring all this up because, in a recent preprint titled ‘Why Incels Capture Attention’¹, Costello & Acerbi reference what they refer to as the ‘harm hypothesis’ and the ‘greater protectiveness of females theory’, which, they write,

suggest[s] that humans evolved heightened sensitivity to harm directed at women, given their higher reproductive value and centrality to offspring survival (Stewart-Williams et al., 2024). This protective bias is robust across domains (see Graso & Reynolds, 2024 for a review). For example, people are less willing to harm women than men (e.g., FeldmanHall et al., 2016), are more punitive toward people who victimize women than men (e.g., Curry et al., 2004), and are less willing to accept harm befalling women compared to men (e.g., Graso et al., 2023)

This idea that humans have evolved to be especially protective and sensitive to harm directed towards women appears to be becoming an increasingly popular belief within evolutionary psychology.

In my view the ethnographic evidence discussed above, as well as innumerable other accounts that could be brought to bear here, conflict with this perspective. The ‘harm hypothesis’ strikes me as being deeply rooted in contemporary WEIRD values rather than being the result of a specific ‘evolved’ or ‘innate’ instinct or psychological mechanism. And indeed the literature cited to support it seems to suggest this.

Costello & Acerbi cite 5 papers in the paragraph above to support the model:

Stewart-Williams et al., 2024: the sample here consists of Prolific users mostly in the UK.

FeldmanHall et al., 2016: the samples were MTurk users in the US and volunteers in the UK.

Curry et al., 2004: the sample is convicted offenders in Texas in 1991.

Graso et al., 2023: US MTurk users again.

Graso & Reynolds, 2024: this is a review paper which does make some cross-cultural claims, but when you check the references you can see some important limitations. For example, they write that “Across cultures, women were perceived as less powerful than men but were seen more positively,” and when you check the reference it goes to Glick et al., 2004, which samples from 16 nations. However, when you read that paper they note in the methods that, “Most samples consisted primarily of college students participating for extra credit.”

Internet users, college students, and English speakers, even if they come from different countries, are going to share various cultural norms and practices in important ways. Such samples are not nearly as ‘cross-cultural’ as taking ethnographic evidence from small-scale societies in different parts of the world which haven’t had any contact with each other.

I think we can be certain from ethnographic evidence that the claim that ‘women are seen more positively than men across cultures’ is not remotely universal, and the opposite belief has historically been found in many parts of the world. Anthropologist Donald Tuzin, describing the ideology of the Ilahita Arapesh men’s cult in New Guinea, wrote that,

By their very nature, it is said, women are the source of nearly all discord and litigation within the community. Through their ceaseless enticements to adultery, their notorious insensitivity to the sensible commands of father, husband, and brother, and their mindless passion for gossip and intrigue—in these and countless other ways women are the bane of a peaceful society.

Additionally, the argument that women’s “higher reproductive value” is expected to lead to greater sensitivity to harm towards them can actually go in the opposite direction: domestic abuse, rape, and violent capture can be motivated in part by men’s reproductive interests, and such practices often don’t evince much concern for women’s well-being.

Now, let me extend an olive branch or two to the evolutionary psychologists: I do think these patterns, found particularly among college students and English speaking internet users, are quite notable, but I think it’s better viewed from a cultural evolutionary perspective than being assumed to be reflective of an evolved bias towards women. This doesn’t make it any less interesting or important to investigate, but I think attributing it to an evolved cognitive bias is simplistic in light of the ethnographic evidence.

I think to a large degree these reflect post-feminist WEIRD norms characteristic of reduced sex-segregation. In many deeply patriarchal societies you have a rigid separation between men and women, with men viewing women as intruders into their spaces and reacting with hostility. The men’s cult contexts described above clearly reflect this phenomenon. College students in contrast are living in much more sexually integrated contexts. Of course not all sex-segregated contexts involve violence and disdain towards women and not all sexually integrated contexts are egalitarian or view women more favorably than men, but I suspect WEIRD norms of integration are an important factor here.

Samples from contemporary industrial contexts are certainly useful, particularly when it comes to generating hypotheses or for initial explorations of them, but ultimately ideas such as the ‘harm hypothesis’ and the ‘greater protectiveness of females theory’ must be consistent with the ethnographic evidence, or else they require substantial refinement or should be scrapped entirely. Evolutionary psychologists need ethnography, and the field is stronger when there is greater engagement with it.

Rather than starting from the premise that humans evolved to be more protective of and sensitive to harm towards women, the evidence suggests there is massive variation in this regard, and we have to look towards the particular cultural and ecological contexts that can help explain this diversity.

Ultimately nearly all of my disagreements with evolutionary psychology stem from this concern about theories that are often built off of patterns found in contemporary industrial societies and aren’t sufficiently checked against the ethnohistorical record. I think the ‘harm hypothesis’ and ‘greater protectiveness of women theory’ are examples of this. I’d really love to see it become a norm for evolutionary psychologists to bring more of the ethnographic evidence to bear when proposing or endorsing particular models.

Related Posts: Dynamics of Polygyny in Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Part 1, Extractive polygyny and ‘evolved psychological’ mate preferences, Gebusi Homicide and the Cultural Influence of Violence, Ongoing series on male cults, Women’s secrets.

1. This post isn’t a critique of that paper per se, as I do have certain points of agreement with the broader cultural attractor perspective they take, it is just the ‘harm hypothesis’ and the ‘greater protectiveness of females theory’ which they endorse that I am questioning here. They are just the latest to reference these ideas, which I have been meaning to discuss for awhile.