Pretty much what you'd expect, leaving the deets to
Stuart Ritchie's review.
Before I started TR and then while I was reading it, I wrote two posts (here and here)
about Fine’s claim that there’s no evolved differences in male and
female behavior. I also criticized her completely muddled and erroneous
claim (based on bogus statistics) that sexual selection doesn’t work
because the “Bateman experiment”—showing a greater variance in
reproductive success among male than among female fruit flies—was wrong.
Well, it wasn’t wrong, it was inconclusive, and later work, as Ritchie
notes, has supported the sex difference in reproductive-success-variance
that’s a crucial assumption of sexual selection. Bateman’s result was
just a one-off that tells us nothing. Sexual selection is alive and
well, and supported by tons of data. Nevertheless, Fine’s argument,
which is really dumb if you know even a bit of biology and math,
persuaded many people, including a Guardian reviewer, and Ritchie takes it apart in his review.
In that
second link (which I missed earlier), Coyne quotes a
review by the politically-motivated P.Z. Myers ("Myers has always rejected biology that is ideologically unpalatable to him"):
In a rare occurrence at his site, the commenters, usually a choir of
osculatory praise, gave him pushback. In fact one, “Charly”, did the
math correctly and showed that males in relationships with multiple
females (bigamous or polygamous) have the potential to have more
offspring than do monogamous males, supporting the ideas that men are
selected to compete for women. (Duh!) Charly ended his calculations with
this statement: “But maybe my reasoning and math is wrong, I am sure
someone will point flaws out.”
In the next comment, Myers admitted that Charly’s math was actually
right—math that invalidates Fine’s argument—but then he said this:
And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters: an
admission that the biology is right, at least in theory, but the person
who did the calculations is immoral.
This is what we're up against.
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