Dad's not lost: but his steadfast refusal to ask for directions—despite the jokes—need not be explained as an evolutionary trait of the human male

Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology by Richard C. Francis Princeton University Press, 2003, $29.95

   Here we are in our car
   We've been driving ever so far,
   We've been circling round and round,
   Shall I tell you what we've found?

   Dad's not lost,
   No he's not,
   This is Daddy's favorite spot....

--"Dad's Not Lost" by Tom Paxton

Everyone knows the stereotype: Even when lost, men grimly drive on without asking for directions. Evolutionary psychologists would like to explain this behavior by appealing to the romantic lives of ancient hunter-gatherers and, even further back, to the hippocampus of small rodents. The analogy between lost men and lost voles may be silly, but there seem to be intriguing links between human and animal behavior. In Why Men Won't Ask for Directions, Richard C. Francis suggests that physiological explanations of behavior--about how brains work--are often more informative than accounts of why the behavior evolved.

Evolutionary psychology, which focuses on the evolution of human cognition, emerged in the 1980s out of sociobiology, a perspective that encompasses all behavior. Both sociobiology, which the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University introduced in the 1970s, and evolutionary psychology adhere to the idea that every characteristic of every species is adaptive that is, each characteristic has enhanced reproductive success. Applied to explain the evolution of human behavior, the idea proceeds with appealing but misleading simplicity: Animals are depicted as doing something people also do. Next comes an account of the evolutionary advantage of the behavior for the animals. The conclusion is that it is natural, and therefore inevitable, for people to behave that way, too.

Ever since sociobiology was introduced, critics such as the the late Stephen Jay Gould and evolutionary biologist Richard C. Lewontin of Harvard University have pointed out that the basic reasoning of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology relies on mistaken evolutionary thinking. Not all characteristics of organisms, the critics note, come about as a result of natural selection. Before natural selection can operate, there must be some original variation among individuals in a trait, such as good versus poor spatial ability. Furthermore, the trait must be genetically inherited, and one or another version of it must enable some individuals to reproduce more than others. But there are plenty of traits around today that don't satisfy those criteria. Some traits have simply accompanied other traits that natural selection did favor, some are still hanging around as a result of a related trait in some distant ancestor, and some may persist purely by accident.

The most general objection to the idea that all traits are adaptive is that it results in stories about evolution that cannot be proved wrong, lf someone develops a good reason that natural selection led to a certain trait, the explanation may be accepted merely because it is plausible or comforting or clever, lf someone else gives a good counterargument to the explanation, a different adaptive reason can always be invented.

Critics of sociobiology have also pointed out another problem: the difficulty of establishing genetic inheritance of a trait. The action of genes depends both on the development and the environment of the organism. Behavior, furthermore, is social, developed in the context of" our interactions with others. Children imitate the behavior of the adults they live with, and everyone modifies behavior according to circumstances. A man might be willing to ask for directions at some times but not at others. Now, in Why Men Won't Ask for Directions, Richard C. Francis takes on evolutionary psychology and sociobiology from a new perspective--as a neurobiologist. He describes accounts of how sexual behavior works--particularly the neural and hormonal processes involved in the behavior--to rebut simple adaptive explanations for its evolution. He contrasts questions about what goes on inside an animal's body with questions about why natural selection favored a certain behavior. Francis shows that the answers to the "why" questions of evolutionary psychology ignore plausible, alternative "how" explanations.

Each chapter of the book describes one aspect of sexual behavior, outlines the adaptive explanation for it, and then offers a different account, on the basis of the physiology behind the behavior. Francis often argues that a particular behavior is a consequence of bodily processes rooted in evolutionary history, processes already in place when the behavior arose. Some sexual behavior, for instance, is a consequence of ancestral physiological pathways, rather than an innovation selected for its own sake.

Why, for example, do women have orgasms? According to the convoluted stories of evolutionary psychologists, because sperm enters the uterus more efficiently during orgasm, it is adaptive for women to be able to influence whose sperm can fertilize an egg, which they can do by choosing with whom they have an orgasm. Francis then describes an alternative explanation for female orgasm suggested by Elisabeth Lloyd, a philosopher of science at Indiana University in Bloomington, and others. Their idea is to look at the constraints imposed by development: the clitoris is derived from the same ancestral genitals as the penis. Natural selection for the ejaculation of sperm has favored the male orgasm, and having a clitoris leads, as does having a penis, to orgasms.