Hi, nemesis.
From the looks of your reply, you seem to have no objection to my first and third point. I don't see how your response to my third point is relevant. Forgive me if I am misreading your post.
But I am going to ignore all that, because it appears that your main point is
quote:
If this is esteemed so highly, then what is wrong with rape from an evolutionary perspective? If sex and procreation are such a high virtues in the natural order of things, then why are controversial topics, like abortion, homosexuality, and rape an issue of either support or contention?
so I am going to just focus on this.
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First, a point that I consider minor. If the important thing is procreation, then rape can be counterproductive. Remember, the key to evolutionary success is not having sex or even producing children. The key to evolutionary success is producing children who will grow up and successfully reproduce themselves. It does no one any good (in an evolutionary sense) to have sex if no children are produced. It does no one any good to have children if the children die before adulthood, or fail to reproduce themselves. And, in the long range success strategy of evolution, the same holds if one does produce surviving, procreating children but the numbers of procreating children are fewer than someone who does not rape.
It is pretty easy to see that as a reproductive strategy, rape may not be all that successful. It takes work to capture someone and force sex on her. Especially when it becomes known among the circle of acquaintences that the person is a rapist; then people start avoiding the person, and the person has to put more effort into hunting new victims. It may very well be far more efficient to maintain a nice reputation and attract mates who voluntarily make themselves available on a regular basis.
Also, in our society women have the means to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and even to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Sex with an unwilling partner is not guaranteed to produce progeny.
In fact, in most traditional societies, there is often a stigma attached to the offspring of rapists. They experience more neglect, the experience more abuse, and so it is far more likely that they will not survive childhood, and it is often the case that if they do grow up, they occupy a lower caste limiting their reproductive success.
The rapist, if he is caught, may experience some sort of punishment, even death. So, he may have very limited opportunities to practice this particular reproductive strategy.
Finally, this makes people unhappy. Unhappy people make other people unhappy. The overall cohesion of society is undermined, making the society less stable and less able to provide the necessities of life to its people.
All in all, it isn't obvious that rape is a particularly successful reproductive strategy. The only way that this can be answered is to actually find out whether rapists have more children who have their own children.
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But the main point, as I have stated, is that the theory of evolution is a description of how the world works and why we see the things that we see around us. It is not a prescription about how we should live. Like the analogy that I used earlier, it is exacly like the theory of gravity. It simply explains a phenomenon that exists. But it in no way implies any morality of any actions whatsoever.
The theory of evolution does not say that people
should reproduce. It simply says that
if some people successfully reproduce and other people do not, and
if the difference in success is due to inherited characterisitics, then you will see a change in the human population over time - humans will evolve.
That is all there is to the theory of evolution.
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Where, then, does this sense of violation come from?
What difference does it make? This sense of violation and the sense of outrage exist.
Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus
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