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