I think part of my pushback against the whole "but it's science!" thing is that it feels like yet another variation on "
Born This Way!", which to me implies a certain level of "this is only socially acceptable if it's biological imperative"... to which I say
bullshit. My
queerness is a choice to be open to experience, my polyamory is a choice to love who I love unapologetically and without constraint. I don't need it to be justified by some "natural" instinct.
I think it best to think about this particular area of evolutionary biology in terms of philosophy rather than science. Philosophy can be a precursor to science, often handing over the baton when the scientific method may be applied. However, philosophy in of itself is not bound by the scientific method, therefor it gives one free reign to dream and try different ideas on for size regardless of validity. People often confuse the words with each other, I suppose it is natural for a philosopher to strengthen their claims by saying they are supported by science (because every human *want's to be "right"), just because someone says it does not make it so... Atheism is a good example of this logical folly; one cannot apply the scientific method to the question of whether god exists, therefor science has no opinion (because science is a data driven, experimentation based system); Atheism has no scientific validity contrary to popular arguments, it falls squarely under a philosophical thought process, not a scientific one...
Every scientific discipline has a philosophical fringe. For example the Higgs field was first theorized in the 1960s; however the scientific method could not be applied to this sort of study with the technological limitations at the time. In 2012, the Higgs boson was empirically discovered and became scientific theory, until that point in time the Higgs field was more philosophical theory than scientific. On the same note, Einstein was more of a physics minded philosopher than anything else, the unprecedented degree to which his theories were verified via the scientific method is simply astounding, he certainly earned his title as the best theoretical physicist to ever live, but there in lies the tricky distinction between science and philosophy... What title would Einstein have earned if his theories were wrong? And some of them were by the way. A majority of theories are ripped apart by the scientific method. I imagine that is why faith based philosophies are so wary of it...
The way I see it, early human sexuality is on the philosophical fringes of evolutionary biology. Every assertion about early human sexuality is a rearward projection and succumbs to whatever bias the researcher carries. Bias is possible because of an acute lack of evidence in this particular aspect of the field. Sex at Dawn was a good book, I enjoyed reading it. In a nut shell, the book cherry picks different studies and applies assertions of non-monogamy to them, it is quite compelling, philosophically speaking...
The book also ignores anything that might point away from polyamory. NRE for example, some sort of evolutionary remittent that makes a person completely obsessed with another, and it happens to last about as long as gestation.... Sex at dawn didn't touch this topic... Is it because NRE is a trait more aligned with serial monogamy than polyamory? Bonobos, our closest poly ancestors don't appear to experience NRE... Humans also experience very strong maternal instincts, and that does not fit so well within the books assertions of communal child rearing, another topic that was ignored...
Sex at Dawn is an entertaining read... However, it falls short of offering scientific evidence that early human sexuality was polyamorous. The book does attempt to confuse science with philosophy, which is so enticing for a collective group of people looking to strengthen there own poly philosophies. But this mind trick is old as atheism itself...