Lap Dancers and Evolutionary Biology

In a recent study, Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico published a study in Evolution and Human Behavior that correlates the amount of money strippers earn with their fertility. In other words, strippers earn more when they are most fertile.

"Because academics may be unfamiliar with the gentlemen's club sub-culture, some background may be helpful to understand why this is an ideal setting for understanding real-world attractiveness effects of human female oestrus."

And cue the joke: how did pervy Larry get a research grant? (SNL Weekend Update, last Saturday).

The Economist summarized the Miller's research this way:

"[strip] clubs are a field site as revealing of human biology as the Serengeti is of the biology of lions and antelopes. Dr. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist - and the author of the theory that the large brains of humans evolved to attract the opposite sex in much the same way that a peacock's tail does. His latest foray, into the flesh-pots of Albuquerque, is intended to investigate an orthodoxy of human mating theory."

He considered strippers' earnings, comparing those who were on the Pill and those who weren't.

"The results support the idea that if evolution has favoured concealed ovulation in women, it has also favoured ovulation-detection in men. The average earnings per shift of women who were ovulating was $335. During menstruation (when they were infertile) that dropped to $185 - about what women on the Pill made throughout the month. The lessons are clear. A woman is sexier when she is most fertile."

In other words, men were able to detect fertile women, who were more attractive, as measured by their greater earnings.

This brings me to wonder whether evolutionary psychology makes meaningful statements. This sort of research brings out the logical positivist in me, it seems.

How can hypothetical statements about human behavior have meaningful content if there is no way to prove these claims false, if the observed data comes from human behavior in the present and is retrofitted to suit human precursors on the African savanna?

Evolutionary psychology considers human behavior in the possible world of the distant human past, drawing conclusions based on behavior observed in this one. In these possible worlds, possible ancient humans behaved in ways that maximized survival.

My first instinct is an appeal to falsifiability because the correlation of fertility with lap dancers' earnings is likely, and plausible, but how can it be proven false? It's a good explanation, but is it the right one?

How are these explanations more than just so stories?

How can it be tested, without dismissing counter-evidence as anomalies? How many anomalies (i.e. fertile dancers who do not earn significantly more) can be tolerated, until Miller agrees that maybe his theory is not right?

Unlike the study of how species change over time, evolutionary psychology observes human behavior, and physiology, in the present. And uses this as evidence for statements about the way humans may have been in the distant past (and by extension, explain the ways our brains and .

I am unaware of a scientific controversy that makes a good case for evolutionary psychology.

Given that it is most suited to the study of mating behavior, the conclusions about gender that can be made, based on such evidence, are the most troubling concern. When evolutionary accounts for gendered behavior creep in to social and political theory, from the pay gap to the humor gap (in this article, Christopher Hitchens claims that women are not funny, and it all comes down to the uterus.)

Evolutionary behaviorism proposes explanations, fair enough. But where dubious scientific evidence creeps into the broader social consciousness it stands in as a naturalist account of the way things are, and ever more shall be, unequal pay without end, amen.