Richard Morris stated that A Natural History of Rape caused "a great deal of controversy" and that some critics objected "quite violently" to its authors' ideas in The Evolutionists (2001). He considered it unfortunate that the controversy obscured the fact that their work was not only about rape, but was also a defense of evolutionary psychology. Pinker described the work as among the most "incendiary" books of recent years in The Blank Slate (2002). He compared it to The Bell Curve and the psychologist Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption (1998). He credited its authors with bringing attention to scientific research on rape and its connection with human nature, but observed that they also "brought down more condemnation on evolutionary psychology than any issue had in years". According to Pinker, they had been attacked by both the left and the right for acknowledging biological influences on human behavior. This included a Feminist Majority Foundation spokesperson calling A Natural History of Rape "scary" and "regressive" and a spokesperson for the creationist Discovery Institute calling it a threat to morality. Pinker agreed with Thornhill and Palmer that rape is sexually motivated. However, he criticized them for establishing a dichotomy between the suggestion that rape is an adaptation and the suggestion that rape is a byproduct, writing that this diverted attention from the more basic claim that rape is related to sex. He considered their proposals for preventing rape untested and questionable, but added that critics reacted to them with unjustified outrage.
