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Reply to dickemann

The ethology of variant sexology

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Abstract

This paper is a response to Dickemann’s review ofPedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions. Her main criticism of the book is its inappropriate application of ethology to human sexology and its natural variations. She proposes instead the superiority of the “social constructionist” perspective. The “Phylogenetic Fallacy” of which her review speaks results from her erroneously having attributed ethological arguments about the phylogeny of coordinated motor patterns and sensory releasing stimuli to higher levels of behavioral-ecological strategies to which such arguments were never applied. Because no convincingly adaptive function of human pedophilia could be found at this higher level, as a working hypothesis, variant erotic age and gender orientations were both tentatively conceptualized as by-products of Darwinian natural selection for heterosexual “adultophilia.” The social and political implications of this perspective, when compared to social constructionism, are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of New Mexico, USA

    Jay R. Feierman

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  1. Jay R. Feierman
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This paper was an invited submission by the editor ofHuman Nature, Jane Lancaster.

Jay R. Feierman is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico and Founding Membership Chair of the International Society for Human Ethology. For the past 15 years he has worked clinically with Catholic priests who have engaged in sexual improprieties with minors. He is currently working on a book,Gender Ethology: “Masculine” and “Feminine” in the Context of Evolutionary Biology, which is an illustrated ethological atlas of sexually dimorphic, coordinated motor patterns in humans.

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Feierman, J.R. Reply to dickemann. Human Nature 3, 279–297 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02692242

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