Product Description

At the beginning of the 21st century, genes are used to explain almost every aspect of human life, from social inequalities to health, sexuality and criminality. This book offers a criticism of this so-called evolutionary psychology, arguing that it rests on shaky empirical evidence, flawed premises and unexamined political presuppositions. The editors have gathered together some of the most eminent and outspoken critics of this fashionable ideology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #322273 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 292 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Alas, Poor Darwin is a multidisciplinary collection of essays from Stephen Jay Gould, Patrick Bateson, Mary Midgely, Charles Jencks, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Gabriel Dover and editors Hilary and Steven Rose, which aims to challenge what they see as the flawed premises and shaky empirical evidence supporting the claims of evolutionary psychology.

The main argument of the book is that "the claims of EP in the fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and philosophy are for the most part not merely mistaken, but culturally pernicious". What really upsets the contributors is the claim that the view of human nature held by evolutionary psychologists ought to inform the making of social and public policy.

As a whole the arguments against evolutionary psychology have real critical bite which is balanced by alternative views which appear to have a much closer tie to empirical reality. It is this which justifies the editorial claims of the book's importance. The weakness of the book--and particularly the introduction--is that it often fails to make any distinctions between the political views of the writers under discussion and the political meaning of their arguments. Thus evolutionary psychology--and all who are associated with it--is smeared by association with Nazi eugenics, religious fundamentalism, social Darwinism and, last but not least, sociobiology. The recent historical emergence of gene-centred views and even the emergence of the Darwin seminars based at the LSE is given a sinister, politically-motivated character which seems to be based on nothing more than innuendo. Yet despite the questionable cultural analysis this book is a must-read, of interest to specialists and interested lay-folk alike.--Larry Brown

Review
"At last! With humor and expertise, this diverse group of critical thinkers -- social and natural scientists and philosophers -- take on sociobiology, reincarnated as evolutionary psychology. In the current haze and maze of genes, it is a relief to read these earnest, funny, and always intelligent essays."
-- Ruth Hubbard, Harvard University professor emereta of biology and author of "Exploding the Gene Myth" and "The Politics of Women's Biology"
" 'Evolutionary psychology' is the latest episode in the misuse of biology. Hilary and Steven Rose have been leaders in the struggle against this kind of pseudo-science and in Alas Poor Darwin they bring together a superb collection of essays debunking this latest attempt to hijack Darwin. Anyone who has been seduced by the claims of 'evolutionary psychology' should read this book."
-- Richard Lewontin, Harvard University professor of zoology and biology, and author of "The Triple Helix"
"Darwin clearly loved his distinctive theory of natural selection -- the powerful ideas that he often identified in letters as his dear 'child.' But, like any good parent, he understood limits and imposed discipline. He knew that the complex and comprehensive phenomena of evolution could not be fully rendered by any single cause, even one so ubiquitous and powerful as his own brainchild."
-- From ""More Things in Heaven and Earth"" by Stephen Jay Gould, in Alas, Poor Darwin.

"From the Hardcover edition."

From the Author
Brown on eugenics
While welcoming Larry Brown’s "must read" recommendation - we were a bit saddened by his use of the word ‘smeared’. A loaded term to say the least. The historical record documenting the profound continuities of the ideology of ‘biology as destiny’ is formidable. Historically eugenics has been the other side of the coin of genetics. History as surely we know has to be confronted not denied. In consequence eugenic denial is no solution for either contemporary geneticists or for evolutionary psychologists who draw so heavily on a geneticised narrative. Incidentally we make very clear the improvement of EP over sociobiology in that EP argues that there is one human race and thus disassociates itself from the often racialised discourse of sociobiology. It gender narrative remains narrative is unreconstructed – above all see Thornhill and Palmer’s rape book.

Further Brown goes on to demonise our discussion of eugenics by associating it solely with the Nazis. Historians of eugenics have shown that there was an active policy of sterilisation, predominantly of women, and particularly in the Scandinavian countries right up until the mid 1970s. To confine eugenics to the Nazis is to fail to confront the widespread commitment to eugenics by left, liberal and feminist intellectuals right up to the death camps. Incidentally the word eugenic /s is used three times in the book and readers are invited to judge for them selves.

"That Hogben was one of the first among the British left to spot the inexorable and fascist direction of eugenics and became one of the most powerful voices against the new trend in the thirties is a happy irony." (INTRO – H ROSE AND S ROSE - PAGE 6)

"The Nazi genocide of the Gypsies and the Jews generated such world-wide revulsion that many felt that this of itself would terminate such evil racism. Certainly the widespread support during the nineteen thirties for eugenics by left and liberal intellectuals, feminists, geneticists and welfare reformers faded in the face of the horror of the death camps. Thus to dissociate science from racism became a crucial cultural objective at the end of the 1939-45 war." H. ROSE PAGE 112

"The ontogeny of evolutionary psychology’s ways of thinking about the living world – its roots in sociobiology and before that eugenic and social Darwinist thinking, discussed by Hilary Rose and Ted Benton - goes a long way towards explaining both its current agenda and its biological misconceptions. " S. ROSE PAGE 254

Customer Reviews

War of the Roses
Alas, Poor Darwin is a disparate collection of essays by scientists, philosophers and social commentators all attacking the emerging field of evolutionary psychology. It's a familiar set of complaints: evolutionary psychology is "simplistic", "reductionist" and "adaptationist". But many of the attacks are just political and there's a blatant attempt to smear the subject with morally bankrupt beliefs like eugenics. So what exactly are the nasty ideas advocated by these deluded evolutionary psychologists? Well, er......

1) The mind is what the brain does.

2) The brain is a biological organ that shows enormous adaptive complexity.

3) The only known non-miraculous mechanism that can account for the origin of adaptive complexity is natural selection.

4) Hence, many (though certainly not all) aspects of our psychology are likely to have been moulded at least in part by natural selection. The brain is not a general all-purpose problem-solving device. It solves some classes of problems brilliantly and others surprisingly badly. The evolutionary psychologists are simply asking why? Their answer, in broad terms, is that the brain (and hence the mind) is brimming with specifically evolved features that are adaptively useful - or at least were in the ancestral environment in which we evolved. Furthermore, these features are likely to be present in all neurologically normal members of our species. They include not just things like visual awareness and the other senses, but many other psychological attributes such as sexual desire, the emotions, the ability to gauge the mental states of others and perhaps even the way we think about logical problems.

5) Because different mental adaptations are specialised to solve different types of problems, the mind is likely to be modular. In this view for example, the capacity for language is a specifically evolved mental feature whose adaptive complexity clearly reveals the fingerprints of natural selection. By contrast, the idea that language just emerged as a non-selected by-product of a general increase in brain size (Stephen Jay Gould' s "spandrel" theory), seems utterly ridiculous and really is a "Just So Story".

I'll take Hilary and Steven Rose seriously when they provide examples of societies with no anger or sexual jealousy; societies whose members smile when they are disgusted; societies where young men are more sexually attracted to 90 year old women than to 20 year old women or societies where no one wants to form friendships and alliances. Of course evolutionary psychologists accept the importance of "learning" and "culture" to influence our minds. But "culture" doesn't just float around us like some mysterious ectoplasm. It's the product of interacting minds, the product of our brains. Now the adaptive complexity and developmental plasticity of the human brain are precisely those features that make culture possible - but these are both evolved properties that need explaining in their own right.

Like the proverbial curate's egg, this book is good in parts, though indigestible when taken whole. The worst essay is from the postmodernist Charles Jencks. His contribution is little more than pretentious hot air. Indeed, it's so daft that at first I half thought it might be an Alan Sokal-style hoax. Can the scientists do any better? Some, like Patrick Bateson have important and subtle things to say. Others such as Gabriel Dover are content merely to attack straw men. But mostly the authors just ritually condemn the usual suspects. Pinker, Dawkins, Wilson et al are WRONG, so there! But what's the alternative? All we get is a lot of hand waving about how it's so very, very complicated. This is not to say that individual evolutionary psychologists have got it all right. Like any science, there is good work and bad work. Predictably, the Roses criticise Randy Thornhill's theory about rape. Fair enough; but there is much better than this. For example, Simon Baron-Cohen's insightful studies on autism are first rate, and clearly influenced by the ideas of evolutionary psychology, yet they don't get a single mention in the whole book. Steven Rose in particular should reflect that his own field (the biochemical basis of vertebrate memory) was initially dismissed by many biochemists as cranky and ironically, "too reductionist". There was good reason for this scepticism as some embarrassingly dire stuff was done in the very early days. But that doesn't mean that the whole enterprise was fundamentally misguided. Indeed today, with proper controls, the field is perfectly respectable.

So, the evolutionary psychologists may well be wrong about specific details and some of their theories probably are too simplistic; but it's a start and at least they're doing experiments. As for the claim that it is morally pernicious, well this is just the naturalistic fallacy. But if you really do insist on a moral message, it could be argued that evolutionary psychology caries a cautiously positive one: that the wide cultural variations between different peoples are more apparent than real, because fundamentally, deep, deep down, our minds are all built to the same basic recipe.

Scientific infanticide
If this book was a compilation of short fiction, it would deserve the highest marks. It's creative in style, vividly presented, with inventive characterization. There are villains galore, tarnished heroes, even a ghost to add a metaphysical aspect. The language is animated and mesmerizing. The authors all exhibit a fine sense of invention in dealing with their chosen subjects and the persona involved. In one sense, this book is a treasure. It's hard to know where one could find such a collection of provocative and beguiling essays in one binding.

Unfortunately, instead of fiction, this series purports to be works of science. The authors are well-known in the scientific community. Yet each blithely ignores the actual expressions of those scientific peers they heartily condemn. They simply categorize without evidence, or twist words to fit some preconceived niche. They have no qualms about inserting words and meaning into a science that they both fail to comprehend nor have worked in themselves. The common target of these authors is the new science of evolutionary psychology, a derivative of Edward Wilson's Sociobiology, published a generation ago. Without reserve nor hesitation, the authors condemn this nascent field as "determinist," "fatalistic," or "simplistic." In short, just plain wrong.

What compels a task force of scientists to attack an emerging science? Wilson's 1975 call for further research in animal behaviour resulted in a wealth of new information - but much of it on "other" animals. The authors here ignore that work entirely. The basic issue, of course, is how dependent human behaviour is on the evolutionary process. It's impossible to discern what alternative to evolution there is in determining our roots. Certainly, none of these essays proposes other mechanisms. What is terribly awkward about these essays is not simply that they're wrong, but wrong and misleading in so many ways.

While all of these essays are built upon contrived issues and arguments, three stand out as particularly noxious examples of politicized science. [We will pass over the departed Gould's final sally attempting to restore his discredited idea of "punk eek."] Hilary Rose attempts to discredit Darwin on the basis of his being a man of his times. Her essay reminds us that there is a clear distinction between a "feminist scientist" and a woman researcher such as Helena Cronin. Steve Rose carries politicization of science to almost desperate extremes in the concluding essay, asserting evolutionary psychology is an "ideology" [which it most certainly is not]. He, along with the other authors, falls back on the tired and tiresome cliché of EP research as "Just So" stories. Of all the essays in this set, it is Mary Midgley's on memes that evokes the deepest emotions. Hilarity, compassion, resentment, unease, all arise as a result of reading this wandering, facile attempt disparage something she's wholly unable to understand. She begins with a wrong definition of the term, then wanders, phantom-like, over the philosophical countryside "in her stout British walking shoes" to arrive - simply lost in her own rhetoric. Her presence in this collection is an embarrassment to friend and foe alike.

The only value this book has is its demonstration of the mind-set of a few self-deluded and outmoded commentators. The title itself is a giveaway. "Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology" is no more valid than "Arguments Against Cosmology," or "Quantum Physics" or "Paleoanthropology" or whatever science is striving for standards in assessing elusive evidence. The book does not, can not, even answer its own opening question: "Why is this book important?" None of these authors work in the field [Midgley, for example is a "philosopher"], and none deal directly with the research involved. They are outsiders, sniping away at a science they neither comprehend nor are qualified to critique. How then, do they expect a reading public to take them seriously? If you must read this book, do so, but don't encourage such twaddle by spending your money on it. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Difficult to read unless you already know about EP
This book's remit (outlined in its introduction) is to warn the reader of a new intellectual school of thought known as "Evoloutionary Psychology". We are told that "EP" is fast becoming a new force behind political and social thought, in the western world at least, and the book goes on to explain why the authors believe this is a dangerous and undesirable development.
I am a "layperson" who is interested in such things; but confess I found the book difficult to read and gave up after a few chapters. Fortunately I had borrowed the book from the library and had not wasted my money.
Basically I think to get anything out of this book you first need to have read about the ideas of "EP" because only then can you judge whether "Alas, Poor Darwin" makes a fair point in issuing its warning.
I hope to read up on "EP" and return to this book later, but at the moment I would not recommend it to anyone who, like me, is not an intellectual.