Integrity is the single most important factor in the search for truth. Most errors in the history of science are due to a failure of integrity; even cases that we normally attribute to ignorance were really due to the failure to admit ignorance. I can think of only a few cases in which the evidence clearly pointed in the wrong direction, and the information required to recognize the error was simply too obscure or abstruse to be recognizable.
The history of science stinks with violations of integrity. Heliocentrism (Copernicus) was rejected solely due to abstruse arguments arising from the theological concepts advanced by Thomas Aquinas centuries earlier. The actual facts were simply swept under the rug. When Galileo proved the heliocentric model beyond doubt by simple observations of the phases of Venus, it caused such an uproar among church conservatives that ultimately he ended up confined to house arrest for the rest of his life. Most people rejected Darwin because they subordinated intellectual integrity to religious faith. Many still do.
Religion is not the only motivation for rejection of integrity. In our more secular time, politics has taken the place of religion as a source of denial of truth. Witness the many, many climate science deniers who, for narrow political reasons, deny the data, deny the physics, and deny the obvious fact that our emissions of CO2 are causing catastrophic changes in our weather. They don’t have an iota of integrity. Science be damned; politics over everything else.
Opposition to abortion gives another example of the subordination of scientific fact to political doctrine.
But crimes against integrity are not the preserve of the right; the left has its own chimeras. Opposition to nuclear power, for example, has nothing to do with the technical facts surrounding nuclear power. Nuclear plants are much safer than coal burners; a tsunami that killed 20,000 Japanese resulted in failures at the nuclear plants at Fukushima that are estimated — ESTIMATED — to lead to perhaps a few hundred deaths in the future. And we solved the problem of disposal of radioactive waste decades ago. Look up Yucca Mountain repository.
But today I wish to delve into a specific case of scientific anti-integrity for a different political reason. In this case, the motivation might be called feminism, although this case is an example of misguided, ignorant, and malicious feminism — an ugly smear on the reputation of a noble ideal.
The case in point is this paper published in PLOS ONE: The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts. Here’s the abstract of the paper:
The sexual division of labor among human foraging populations has typically been recognized as involving males as hunters and females as gatherers. Recent archeological research has questioned this paradigm with evidence that females hunted (and went to war) throughout the Homo sapiens lineage, though many of these authors assert the pattern of women hunting may only have occurred in the past. The current project gleans data from across the ethnographic literature to investigate the prevalence of women hunting in foraging societies in more recent times. Evidence from the past one hundred years supports archaeological finds from the Holocene that women from a broad range of cultures intentionally hunt for subsistence. These results aim to shift the male-hunter female-gatherer paradigm to account for the significant role females have in hunting, thus dramatically shifting stereotypes of labor, as well as mobility.
The authors begin by citing a number of cases in which grave goods associated with hunting or warfare were found in burials of women. The authors argue that this calls into question the hypothesis that hunting in early societies was carried out by men. Logic dictates that the existence of such burials establishes only that not all hunting in these societies was carried out by men. Indeed, the evidence of grave goods is so sparse that we cannot draw any general conclusions other than a vague statement that some women in some societies participated in some hunting behavior. Such a conclusion is of little value in understanding human evolution.
The central content of the paper is an analysis of what is known of 63 modern foraging societies for which we have adequate anthropological data. The authors found that 79% of these societies showed some evidence of some women engaging in some hunting practices. They made no attempt to characterize the degree to which women engaged in hunting as opposed to gathering, nor did they attempt to determine what fraction of the society's food supply was supplied by female hunting.
The authors conclude that:
The collected data on women hunting directly opposes the traditional paradigm that women exclusively gather and men exclusively hunt…
Thus, the entire paper is an attack on the straw man hypothesis that men only hunted and women only gathered. Well, doh! I would expect that any even slightly educated person would instantly acknowledge that every society had its exceptions to the general rules.
I would have no objection had the authors frankly acknowledged that their results accomplished little more than demonstrating the existence of exceptions to the general rule that men did most of the hunting and women did most of the gathering. But the authors went way, way beyond their results in the title they gave to their paper: “The Myth of Man the Hunter”. The notion that men did most of the hunting is not a myth. Consider the following evidence:
Early hunting strategies
First, some background. For most of the last million years, hominim hunting took place on the savannah in East Africa and utilized only rocks as weapons. The first spears appeared about half a million years ago, but these earliest spears were too fragile to be used as the primary hunting weapons; their purpose was to make the kill once the prey had been downed. What little evidence we have suggests that spears were not hurled until about 100,000 years ago.
The basic hunting strategy relied on the high temperatures of the savannah. The hunters would sneak up on the prey and leap up, throwing rocks. The prey would flee much faster than the hunters could run, so the hunters would walk in pursuit. Upon nearing the prey, they would again throw rocks, again forcing the prey to flee. They repeated this process all through the afternoon. The prey would overheat with each flight, and its increasing body temperature would weaken it until eventually the hunters were able to close in and kill it.
Human males evolved the following attributes to succeed in this endeavor:
Male Sweat
Men sweat more profusely than women. This cooled their bodies, permitting them to continue the hunt all through the day. Women, unable to sweat as profusely, would not have been able to persist as long as men.
Upper body strength
It has been firmly established that males have considerably greater upper body strength than females. This difference is explained well by the hypothesis that males during the last million years engaged in hunting to a much greater degree than women. That upper body strength enabled males to throw rocks more powerfully and accurately. Rock strikes would injure the prey, quickening the successful end of the hunt.
Projectile obsession
Males have a better understanding of projectile motion. Males are also more inclined to engage in playful hurling of projectiles. I discussed this tendency in greater detail in my essay on the phylogeny of play. I am unable to find any scholarly research results on this subject, but I think it safe to say that the gender difference in this proclivity is so pronounced as to be characterizable as common knowledge. This obsession with throwing projectiles is readily explained by the importance of male hunting during human evolution, and the absence of such an obsession among females.
Conclusion
The paper clearly demonstrates that some women in some societies did sometimes engage in hunting. The authors betrayed their political motivations by exaggerating the significance of their findings. The hypothesis that males were primarily hunters, to a greater degree than females, during much of human evolution is solidly supported by firmly established anatomical, physiological, and psychological gender differences. Calling this hypothesis a myth is a political statement, not a scientific one. The authors demonstrate a disappointing lack of integrity in permitting their obvious political preferences to intrude into their scientific reasoning.