In our interaction with our environment, we go way beyond our basic genetic inheritance to the point where the mere fact of that genetic inheritance really explains very little. Only Judith Shulevitz, writing for the online magazine Slate , really took this point up in any detail. And that's a real shame, because hard-core evolutionary biologists like Palmer and Thornhill are not merely arguing against the data that exists on rape, they are committing what is at heart the logical error. It is a mistake that hard-core evolutionary biologists keep making. And they keep making it in the teeth of our very real and enormously complex cultural evolution, which has led to us understanding ourselves as rational free agents.
Rape only has definitional meaning by virtue of it being nonconsensual.
So, in a sense, both authors are merely saying that men have an urge to reproduce at all costs, and will take advantage of any situation to enhance the gene pool. It's irresponsible, it's tendentious, it's an advocacy article and the science in sloppy. There are some aspects of human behavior that are fairly clearly evolutionary. Evolutionary biology and psychology as ways of practicing science were not really open for criticism, despite that being the fundamental critical point. This is not to disparage the empirical evidence on rape that also runs counter to Palmer and Thornhill's thesis, it is merely to point out the missing subtext from the media coverage.