Does evolutionary psychology really cause mass shootings?

Evolutionary psychologists against evolutionary psychology's influence

A manosphere podcast bro about to tell you that, from an evolutionary perspective, women can’t be trusted

My evolutionary psychology colleague Daniel Conroy-Beam¹ (henceforth DCB) penned an op ed for the Boston Globe taking aim at influential evolutionary psychologists who, according to him, not only shape an unscientific public perception of the field but also, apparently, cause murder.

Evolutionary Psychology’s tenuous ties to violence

In the article, DCB laments the fact that evolutionary psychology is commonly cited by manosphere and incel groups whose unpalatable attitudes include desire for a traditional foreign born wife, the belief that women are feckless sluts for highly dominant men, and that feminism and wokeness have had a dire influence on heterosexual relationships.

DCB concludes the article by saying:

I am embarrassed to have ignored the appropriation of my work for so long. My complacency and that of my peers has allowed the manosphere version of our science to fester, grow, and borrow against our field’s credibility to suit its own interests. Because of our negligence, our science has a body count.

For an article that bemoans “provocateurs” and assertions that aren’t evidence-based, DCB plays fast and loose with the facts of his most incendiary objection:

Incels have been behind horrific attacks like the Isla Vista killings, when six students were murdered and over a dozen more injured near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, 10 years ago. The perpetrator explained in a book-length manifesto that his motivation for the massacre was frustration with women who didn’t find him attractive and envy of the men they did. This year, a man in Sydney stabbed six women to death in a shopping mall. The attacker’s father suggested his motivations were similar to the Isla Vista killer’s: frustration over his failure with women.

DCB cites the Elliot Rodger murders and the more recent stabbings in Sydney as evidence that evolutionary psychology has a bodycount. Unfortunately for DCB’s case, there is no evidence that either of these guys was influenced by evolutionary psychology. Searching for the word “evolution” in Rodger’s 137 page manifesto led me to read about the “revolutionary” World of Warcraft game and trying to find any books that influenced his thinking led me to his brief obsession with “The Secret”. Fortunately for these two very popular titles, they have not been tainted by appearing in the Rodger manifesto.

An interview with the father of the Sydney stabber said he (the stabber) was unhappy he couldn’t find a girlfriend. But, the attacker was also a schizophrenic who went off his meds. The implied argument from DCB is that both of these men were incels, incels like evolutionary psychology and therefore the negligence of evolutionary psychologists who engage with the manosphere causes murder.

If anything, I would argue, a wider appreciation of evolutionary psychology would have, perhaps, caused people to be more concerned with these two men (although a recent article demonstrates that hardly more could have been done for Rodger). Evolutionary psychologists have continually emphasized the point that unwanted mateless men are dangerous (italics mine):

How do the pressures of mating competition that men face account better for the patterns of male violence? Consider the case of a man who holds few resources and little social status, so he is utterly unappealing to women. Because he lacks what women want, he’s headed down the road to a reproductive dead end.…Violence gives him a chance to change paths. If over the course of evolutionary time resorting to violence afforded men a measure of resources or respect and assisted them in attracting mates, even if only temporarily, evolution would have favored adaptations to carry out violent strategies.

Buss, David M.. The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

Furthermore, William Costello wrote a great X thread (alt link) about how evolutionary psychology is integral to creating interventions to help incels.

There are two degrees of separation between Rodger and evolutionary psychology (Rodger—> was an incel —> incels like ev psych) which DCB uses as evidence that evolutionary psychology is a uniquely dangerous idea that should be communicated carefully by experts in the trenches of science.

Even if both of these men had murdered their victims while shouting “evolutionary psychology akbar!”, with a bookshelf at home full of Thornhill, Buss, Daly and Wilson, that wouldn’t mean that evolutionary psychologists should have to carefully consider what they say in public or how they represent the field so as to not be culpable for violence. In my view, no public intellectual and no science is responsible for how a small minority of mentally ill people interpret their ideas.

There are some exceptions to this general principle. For example, one should be held responsible if one is calling for violence or accusing people of heinous crimes as in cases like Pizzagate or Sandy Hook crisis actor conspiracies which, as far a I know, have never been endorsed by any public intellectuals. This also excludes information hazards, like telling people how to create a lethal pathogen. Below, when I say “ideas”, exclude accusing people or groups of heinous acts, calls to violence and communicating information hazards.

Do evolutionary psychologists need to communicate more carefully?

Professor Rebecca Sear- Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel also thinks that ideas about differences between men and women cause murder.

There are serious problems with the idea that some ideas and scientific findings need to be communicated extremely carefully, or even censored.

First, media and scientific establishments, which are dominated by progressives, label ideas as “dangerous” unevenly and unfairly. So, right coded ideas are deemed more dangerous than left coded ideas. For example, in the 2022 Buffalo shooter’s manifesto, he rationalized racist and antisemitic attitudes with citations to population genetics studies. The Buffalo shooter also cited Great Replacement Theory, the right-wing idea that White people in the United States make up a smaller proportion of the population than they did in the past. This claim, depending on who you ask is either a plain statement of fact or a dangerous conspiracy theory. This shooting led to a reckoning among geneticists and other scientists about the misappropriation of their research and even a call to stop using plots that made races look more discrete. Is there any evidence that without some ideas from population genetics, or citations to mainstream journals, the Buffalo shooter would have stayed home reading White Fragility instead? No.

Left coded foundations of violence rarely experience such scrutiny. The trans gunperson responsible for the Nashville Shooting in 2023 had a manifesto as well, whose pages showed a motivation to kill children with “white privlages” (sic) [addendum: the Nashville shooter had a diary, not a manifesto]. Conservatives have speculated that this manifesto was not released because the shooter was trans and motivated by anti-Christian and anti-White animus. But, regardless, I have not seen anyone say that ideas about racism or White privilege need to be communicated more carefully or be censored altogether. Moreover, the Nashville shooter may have been taking testosterone, a hormone that contributes to aggressive behavior. But, few would argue that natal females taking testosterone is an existential threat to children. Looking for disliked ideas in the writings and social media posts of violent maniacs has become the macabre pastime of culture warriors in the wake of attacks.

Only a tiny minority of violent offenders are motivated by political ideology or scientific findings. I don’t agree with censoring violent video games or music, but such a policy has similar evidence (read none) as the case for altering genetics plots or how we communicate about human sex differences.

So I’m sticking my neck out. And I’d encourage my level-headed colleagues to do the same. The manosphere and our peers who cater to it don’t represent our field.

-Daniel Conroy-Beam

Second, the idea that experts dispel the misappropriation of research fundamentally misunderstands the nature of influence. Even before Covid, admiration and regard for experts was on the wane. But in disagreeable male-dominated communities like the manosphere or incels, a typical academic’s expert opinion has negative value. What these group believe about the nature of women and relationships is shaped by the personality characteristics that bring them together, and their shared ideology. A “debunking, ”unless presented by one of their own (see more on that below), is unlikely to make any difference.

Furthermore, any whiff of an idea that a group of experts wants you to believe what suits their ideology, rather than the capital T Truth, will instantly lose you credibility in most online communities. That’s why anthropologists at this symposium complained that people online are constantly talking about genetics, race, and ancestry without consulting them. And, ironically, by holding a symposium about how important it is for the public to believe them for the common good, they eroded their credibility with the public even more.

Geoffrey Miller dispelled manosphere myths back in 2015

In the article, DCB links to the infamous 11 year old “fat shaming” tweet from Geoffrey Miller² and to a Kanazawa blog to point to some “bad actors in the field”. DCB needs to reach all the way back to 2011 and 2013, flexing his offense archaeology muscles back to the Obama administration to find someone to chastise. From this, one might infer that the field has kept a clean slate for longer than DCB has had a PhD. 

When DCB was excavating Geoffrey Miller, he could have wiped off his glasses and seen that there is a more recent Miller layer, the one where he wrote an entire book to dispel manosphere, red-pill and incel ideas about evolutionary psychology. Mate was the best attempt at telling young men, in a popular and easily accessible medium, and with a coauthor who is wildly popular in manosphere communities that evolution does not commit them to a “regressive worldview”. Mate tells men that women are not only interested in dominant men, that dating and relationships are not a zero sum game, and that if you want to be sexually or romantically successful, you can’t rely on tricking women into sleeping with you, the way some pick up artists have endorsed.

Here are some excerpts to show that all the way back in 2015 someone “stuck their neck out” to the manosphere:

The more cynical manosphere writers think women are just trying to con men out of their resources, while men try to con sex out of women—as if all of human mating is just one big argument between greedy hookers and horny clients. This perspective fails to recognize that men substantially benefit from marriage in emotional, social, and physical ways.

Mutual benefits are the expectation, not the exception, because people avoid relationships where they don’t benefit. If human mating wasn’t mostly a positive-sum game that yielded “win-win” experiences and relationships, then neither sex would agree to play the game in the first place. Don’t think of mating as fighting women for victory. They are not your enemy. Think of mating as finding women who want the same things you want—so you can both win.

Geoffrey Miller responded to DCB here with more links to his work opposing the manosphere.

There is no grift

Daniel Conroy-Beam (DCB) writes:

Like any biological approach to behavior, evolutionary psychology has always been controversial. In part, this is owing to some truly bad actors in the field. All it takes is some thoughtless tweets or blog posts for the entire field to earn a reputation as a safe space for provocateurs. This initiates a vicious cycle, where rabble rousers flock to the field, establish academic journals where they publish inflammatory work, get invited to speak on popular manosphere podcasts, and then use the publicity to sell books and garner enough career success to inspire the next generation of charlatans.

This grift cycle produces a small number of loudmouths who end up being the public face of evolutionary psychology. From the inside, I can promise you that most of our research is genuinely boring. But cool as this work is to nerds like myself, the good research doesn’t get you booked on Joe Rogan.

Daniel Conroy-Beam (DCB) is a prolific and rigorous researcher who applies complex, difficult and ingenious new methods to understanding mate choice. What he does is, as a scholarly matter, of potential value. But, that doesn’t mean, however, that people who entertain, inspire or educate others are charlatans or engaging in a grift. In the above paragraph, DCB links to a Joe Rogan podcast with Gad Saad that has 3 million views. Gad Saad is wildly popular on the podcast circuit, but I would be at a loss to explain what exactly is “grifty” about what Saad is doing in the clip. A “grift” is where someone acquires money through deception or trickery. In the clip, Saad isn’t trying to sell you pills made of goat testicles. He’s just talking about his opinions on evolutionary psychology. Maybe after you hear Saad on Rogan you buy his book, which is also full of his opinions on evolutionary psychology. Or you listen to his podcast, which is also full of his opinions. This isn’t a grift, this is how every successful author makes money. This, compared with other ways you can make money with influence and expertise, seems pretty honest to me.

Evolutionary psychologist provocateurs

DCB laments that evolutionary psychology has earned a reputation as a “safe space for provocateurs.” The foundations and core tenets of evolutionary psychology, that we evolved, that we are animals, that a selfish gene’s eye view can explain stuff like love, altruism, and cooperation are all provocative ideas. DCB and my shared advisor, David Buss, has suggested in popular books that lying, stalking, and murder are adaptive. Celebrated evolutionary psychology cofounder John Tooby argued that modern life means people with genes that would have previously been selected out can now reproduce, putting us at risk of genetic meltdown. There’s another word for this, dysgenics: a concept some evolutionary researchers want scrubbed from our field because of its association with eugenics.

The fact that evolutionary psychology is provocative is one of the main reasons this field has so much influence- we talk about what everyone is interested in, love, sex, family, sociality, and conflict, often with a delicious scientific cynicism. It’s also a reason it attracts edgelords and detractors and the reason it gets disproportionate attention relative to the number of people actually studying it. Does this make it a “safe space” for provocateurs? I don’t know if an early career researcher who espoused ideas about rape or murder being adaptive, or genetic engineering as necessary to prevent dysgenic effects would manage to get a good academic job in the current climate. In fact, there are even conversations in public about how to gatekeep people like me and Geoffrey Miller out of evolutionary psychology- In the clip below my former colleague Bridget Waller asks “What should we do about people like Diana Fleischman and Geoffrey Miller?” after a talk from Rebecca Sear³.

When DCB says he is “sticking his neck out”, who is holding the axe? Certainly not progressives who read the Boston Globe or other evolutionary psychologist who read the piece. His piece has been out a week and there are a handful of mean tweets about him from manosphere types.

DCB is not, really, worried about how ideas in evolutionary psychology will be used. Evolutionary Psychology is two steps removed from the examples he cites. If he were really concerned, he would have shown how an actual bad actor was influenced by actual ideas in evolutionary psychology. And he’s not really worried about evolutionary psychologists publishing—grifting—in mainstream outlets. I mean, the piece itself appears in the Boston Globe, perhaps establishing his public presence so he, like Gad Saad, can publish a book where you can get more of his opinions. Instead, DCB’s article should be understood for what it is, a signal of his virtue, defending, White Knight style, women from the influence of the bad, bad people in the manosphere. He is broadcasting to his tribe—fellow progressive social scientists—that he has the “right” moral views, in contrast to the people who either don’t like women or like too many of them.

Addendum:

William Costello and David Buss published this paper with evidence showing incels are less violent than the general male population, and much less violent than the terrorist groups they have been compared to.

1. Daniel Conroy-Beam and I both studied with evolutionary psychology pioneer David Buss at UT Austin.

2. While I disagree with the implication of the tweet, that obesity should be used as a heuristic for hiring decisions there is good evidence that obesity is associated with less self-control aka willpower.

3. Here is a 25 minute recording of the Rebecca Sear talk encouraging greater gatekeeping in evolutionary science, from the 2022 Conference of the International Society for Human Ethology. It was sent to me because I was explicitly mentioned.