Mitt Romney's Wealth Will Not Sex Women Into Making Him President

A lot of blowhards out there who like to speak on evolutionary theory have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. It should come as no surprise that much of that pap comes from the right, whose leaders, even the “scientific” ones, love to beat up on science. The nuances of evolution are contentious as hell, but somehow this simple theory always ends up getting shouted down for only being a theory, or some other crap that shows the speaker fundamentally doesn’t understand how science works. (See this excellent primer on how creationists and others have yet to produce an argument against evolution.)

On the opposite, but equally egregious, end of the spectrum from the “Theory!” folks are the pop-evolutionary psychology clowns who say that, because something has been theorized or observed in nature, that it immediately applies to humans too. Sure, it’s a fun academic exercise to look at human behavior through proposed mechanisms of evolution, but here’s the rub: real human behavior is orders of magnitude more complicated than the observations of animal behavior that evolutionary theory is based on.

And then there’s something else entirely, a mutant troll from the Internet’s primordial soup: conservative columnists who triumph Mitt Romney’s excessive wealth as his trump card, using an evolutionary argument as back-up. That is what National Review writer Kevin Williamson does in a piece titled “Like a Boss,” which argues that Romney is richer and more fertile than Obama, and is thus a superior candidate for President.

An obvious, hearty trolling? Of course, and Williamson, who’s happily retweeting all the criticism he gets, knows it. But still, it’s the cover article of the National Review, and a whole lot of people are going to read his offensive campaign-trail bastardization of evolutionary psychology as truth. At the risk of wasting brain cells, let’s dive into some of this nonsense. In the name of science of course.
bq. What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women's pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse.

Williamson starts the piece with a real doozy, considering that the GOP has not once gotten the right answer to this question, and certainly not now.

I’ve written about the men-want-attractive-women-and-women-want-rich-men thing before, and the Evolution 101 theory goes something like this: Females have relatively fewer eggs than males do sperm, and carrying a baby to term is resource-intensive, which means that it’s a lot more costly (in natural terms, not monetary) for a female to have a kid than for a male. So women would want to hold out for mates that are good at aggregating resources to give them their best shot at having a healthy kid, while men have the luxury of shooting for a range of fertile women, and a lot of them at that.

While that sounds like the sort of harem-gasm that riles up the GOP establishment, what may help explain sexual dimorphism in lions and elephant seals doesn’t mean anything for humans. I mean, it’s fun to use the model to clown on the rich old creepsters of the world, but it’s most certainly not “conventional biological wisdom” that women only marry for money and men only marry for looks. Anyone with an ounce of wisdom would see that, thanks to the neurological zaniness that is love, people marry whomever they want.

But that’s just the start. Williamson continues bastardizing the cursory evolution Google search he did.

You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn't give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he's ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap.

What Trivers and Willard actually posited was based on environments in which the condition (health) of an individual affects the mating success of males and females differently. Imagine lions, for example. Being a male with a pride is a huge sexual benefit; you’ve got a whole harem of females to mate with. But to get there, the lion has to be big, strong, and healthy. If you’re an unhealthy male lion who can’t win a pride, you’ve pretty much hosed. Females, meanwhile, are more or less guaranteed to get pregnant from a pack-leading male either way.

Trivers and Willard didn’t hypothesize that more resources would buy more offspring. They argued something much more nuanced: that natural selection would select for parents to have control over the gender of their offspring based on their physical condition. So a pair of healthy parents would have incentive to produce a male, because then he’d have a better chance of hitting the sexual jackpot. If the parents aren’t doing so hot, female offspring would offer a better chance of not going totally bust on the evolutionary road trip.

The hypothesis has been supported in studies of polygynous species. (The graph above is from a study of elephant seals that showed Trivers-Willard effects.) However, for this mechanism to work in humans, one extremely important condition has to be met: We’d actually have to live in a polygynous society in which a privileged few men get all the women, all the other dudes don’t get shit, and women are more or less nothing more than pretty baby-makers.

While it’s not hard to appreciate why a right-wing columnist would worship that set-up, it’s also not hard to appreciate why he would bastardize science, that domain of climate change and, of course, evolution. Williamson’s half-reading of a nuanced (there it is again!) study by Cameron and Dalerum, which showed that wives of billionaires (but not female billionaires) have more sons than average, hardly, hardly, means that the Trivers-Willard hypothesis is anywhere near fact in humans.

It appears that Trivers-Willard shows up most prominently in subsets of the human population at either far extreme of status and resources. Aside from people too poor to afford food and basic necessities, it’s unclear how wealth is correlated to Trivers-Willard effects. For a good look at Trivers-Willard effects in humans, try this 2005 Discover article.

In any case, Williamson continues on his merry way, inevitably pissing off half of the Internet (and delighting the other half) by using an interpretation of Trivers-Willard to claim that Romney is exceedingly more manly and successful than Obama.

Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain. Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

The under-handed “Professor” title for Obama is par for the course. I understand that the GOP has a particular set of opinions about women’s rights, but as Harry Cheadle asked on Twitter, is Williamson really saying Romney is going to win because his dick is bigger than Obama’s? My vote’s yes.

Before Williamson wanders into comparing Romney to rappers, he concludes his evolutionary hackery thusly:

From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama's vote. You can insert your own Mormon polygamy joke here, but the ladies do tend to flock to successful executives and entrepreneurs. Saleh al-Rajhi, billionaire banker, left behind 61 children when he cashed out last year. We don't do harems here, of course, but Romney is exactly the kind of guy who in another time and place would have the option of maintaining one.

Williamson’s essay isn’t just bad science, it’s offensive. Why do female elephant seals get wrapped up into a male seal’s harem? Because he spends all his time bloodily fighting other suitors or bludgeoning females into having sex with him. That’s the type of president Williamson wants, and he’s far from alone.

Remember how I said that humans are more complicated than evolutionary models? In those models, there’s no accounting for love or joy. They’re just based off data. There’s no way yet for us to know if a female lion enjoys being inseminated by a male who may have just eaten her babies to get her back into heat, but those barbed penises wouldn’t be around if every female was willing.

But in Williamson and the GOP’s view, that doesn’t matter. There’s legitimate rape, and then there’s sticking it to your wife whether she likes it or not because she should revere you for being the big man on campus. For a particularly subservient hack to say women should just sit down and shut up when a big swinging dick is in the room, like nature tells them to, is ripped right out of the same tired Republican playbook of feeding people bullshit and forcing others to call them on it. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that evolution says nothing about Romney winning the election, nor does it change the fact that there will always be people willing to turn themselves into caricatures for measly pageviews. I wonder what evolution has to say about that.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.