Mormons can teach Darwin too!

So I taught my students about anxiety today.  I talked about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.  I talked about early exposure to nicotine and volatile parenting as risk factors.  I talked about systematic desensitization and exposure therapy.  And when one of my students asked about gender, I told them honestly that women are much more prone to anxiety (and depression) than men.  When they asked why, I opened it up to a discussion about societal pressures on women vs. pressures on men.

I knew before anyone opened their mouth that arguing about gender pressures in a college classroom is a pointless exercise.  I've played that game from both the student and teacher perspective before.  So I let people argue for a few minutes, get a little huffy, and figure out that it's not worth arguing about.

And then I started talking about evolutionary pressures.  I talked about typical mammalian gender roles and the cross-species tendency for males to force copulation on females and attack their male rivals and their rivals' offspring.  I talked about mammalian species with spined penises that anchor the males during forced copulation and scrape the females' birthing canal to induce ovulation.  I told my students that what humans call rape is the norm in the animal world.  I told them that many mammalian males kill their new mates' offspring in order to bring them into heat.  And I told them that evolution has rewarded aggression as a fear response in mammalian males and anxiety as a fear response in mammalian females.  Our monkey mothers needed anxiety to figure out how to please their rapists/mates and our monkey fathers needed aggression to conquer their foes and claim the most prime monkey ladies. That's how the possibility of gene transmission has been maximized since before humans came down from the trees and lost their tails.  Not one of my students had an argument to make after that explanation of gender differences in anxiety. 

Evolutionary psychology has a lot to offer in terms of explanatory value.  Simple ideas explaining complex realities are the core of parsimony and good theory.  Sure, literal readings of scripture refute Darwin.  But literal readings of scripture also say that Moses's adoptive mother saved him from the river via her arms miraculously stretching out Stretch Armstrong style so she could reach the basket he was floating in.  I don't put a lot of stock in completely literal readings of scripture. 

No prophet has ever refuted evolution.  A bunch of militant preachers have - quite a few Mormons disagree too.  But nobody with real "authority" has ever poo-pooed the idea in an official capacity.  In fact, prophetic silence on the issue is notable in light of how many other concepts prophets have taken a stand on. 

I don't have any cognitive dissonance when talking about evolution.  I believe in it 100%.  I'm open to intelligent design vs. random mutation, but that's hardly a refutation of evolution.  It's just an argument about evolutionary mechanisms.  If God is a purveyor of law, then natual law applies too.  So tonight is a hats off to Adam's mother, who likely looked much like Eve, but was imperceptibly inhuman in some minute way that we ourselves would not recognize as a species boundary.  And hats off to Adam's great-grandmother a million generations back, who probably looked more like Koko the gorilla than you or I.  Without their guiding influence, I wouldn't be able to teach my students about mammalian mating rituals in an abnormal psychology class.

Isn't academic freedom fun?