BOOKS
The good, the bad and the ugly
Hugh Lawson-Tancred
ALAS, POOR DARWIN edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose Cape, £17.99, pp. 292 hat a splendid subject for a 17th- century Dutch seascape the 'Darwin wars' would have made! The sky dominated by huge, dark, billowing clouds of confusion, perversity and institutional chauvinism, but rent with lightning flashes of insight and discovery to be followed by the ominously rolling thunder of vituperative controversy, the surface of the water whipped by squalls of egotism and vendetta and choppy with the constant interplay of the currents and counter-currents of fashion and media fawning, in the centre (or over to the right) the diminutive gaff-rigger of truth appar- ently blown helplessly about before the titanic forces of the environment and on the cliff-top, framing the composition, the lone spectator of educated opinion, still to be engulfed in the tempest, looking out m innocent bewilderment at the appalling but intriguing scene. If we were to add the detail of an elderly sage philosophising on the text of the storm, this is perhaps how his Story So Far might go. After about a century (1859- 1945) in which the application of evolution- ary theory to human life had given every impression of being a moral and intellec- tual catastrophe, the discovery of the struc- ture of DNA inspired new efforts in the Sixties (conspicuously by Konrad Lorenz, Desmond Morris, Robert Ardrey, E. 0. Wilson and Richard Dawkins) to come to terms with the fact that, like all animals, we are both physiologically and psychologically structured by our genes. Originally, this took the forms of ethology (the general sci- ence of animal behaviour) and sociobiology (the general science of animal society), but in the Eighties and Nineties it hardened, especially in the writings of Pinker, Wright and Dennett, into what is now known as Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Psy- chology is an infant, wildly fashionable, rapidly developing and little disciplined sci- ence, not lending itself well to summary, but its central claims are as follows.
Human nature evolved through environ- mental pressures connected with the diver- gence of our species from the other primates and stabilised in the Palaeolithic era (about 600,000-100,000 years ago), long before the dawn of agriculture. Evolution has no momentum, and species only change in response to external pressure and do so very gradually. Man, uniquely, has come to control his environment and is therefore immune to external forces, and, in any case, the paltry 3,000-odd genera- tions since the end of the Pleistocene are insufficient time for any real evolution. We are therefore shaped by our early ancestral environment. This can be reconstructed from palaeontology, the study of contem- porary 'primitives' (of whom the Amazoni- an Yanomamo have been most extensively investigated), and the observation of other primate species. One of the most interest- ing and controversial of the many (usually provocative) findings relates to gender roles. Given the primary Darwinian imper- atives of survival and reproduction, men will tend to adopt a radically different strategy (promiscuity) from women (coy- ness). Further extensions of Evolutionary Psychology are the theories of the selfish gene, memes (units of purely cultural evo- lution which propagate through the noo- sphere in much the same way as genes do through the biosphere) and the modularity of cognitive processes (also championed by some, like J. A. Fodor, who seem to have little time for Evolutionary Psychology).
This conception of human nature flies full in the face of the traditional human, and especially social, sciences, which tend to assume that human nature, if it exists at all, is indefinitely malleable and is there- fore shaped entirely by cultural forces and that it is best studied by social theory, anthropology etc, sciences which are not even in principle reducible to any form of biology. This antagonism has made the arrival of Evolutionary Psychology explo- sively controversial, and some of the fall- out from the explosion is collected in Alas, Poor Darwin.
This book is the product of a seminar held in Scotland, apparently in something called a 'DNA garden of the senses' (full of garden genomes, perhaps), and it has something of the bunker mentality about it. The wagons have been drawn round the camp fires, and the faithful can safely cheer each other up with denunciations of the folly of a world gone mad. Nevertheless, it gives a good overview of the range of objections currently being made to the dreaded Evolutionary Psychology. These can be classified as the good, the bad and the ugly. Let us take them in ascending order of merit.
Ugly objections claim that Evolutionary Psychology has a dubious motivation and that it cannot be right because it would entail the closure of sociology departments. It is disconcerting, for instance, that the collection opens with a piece, by the sociol- ogist Dorothy Nelldn, accusing Evolution- ary Psychology of quasi-religious conviction. It is hardly fair to blame people for being convinced or for wanting to evangelise, and even if there were a kind of mutated reli- gious motivation at play, which there patently is not (for all the missionary zeal of Dawkins's militant atheism, irrelevant in this context), exposing it would not con- tribute to a refutation. Theories stand or fall on their grounds, not on their back- grounds. Similarly, Hilary Rose's chapter on the political roots of Social Darwinism, though readable, provides little substantive ammunition for rebutting the claims of Evolutionary Psychology, and Patrick Bate- son's remarks on the history of the concept of instinct seem, frankly, to amount to little more than slurs.
Bad (but not ugly) objections include notably those which make a point about one part of the theory and seek to gener- alise it against the whole. The most obvi- ously extended and vulnerable part of Evolutionary Psychology is the theory of memes. So Mary Midgley's attack on the 'granular' view of thought in which the the- ory trades is plausible enough but makes little headway against the central picture of human nature offered by Evolutionary Psychology. From the perspective of soci- ology, the defection of Gareth Runciman was a bitter blow, and Ted Benton makes a stab at settling the score by rubbishing Runciman's meme-based account of social practices. Both Midgley and Benton are pushing the concept of holistic meaning over that of atomistic information (anoth- er battleground of the soft sciences) as a tool for the explanation of cultural phenomena, but both also fight shy of the central target. Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, by contrast, uses holistic arguments too but directs them at the core of Evolution- ary Psychology, as manifested in Pinker's account of the mind as an information- processing, problem-solving machine. Her position is perfectly reasonable, but she simply does not engage with the empirical evidence. Another wearily familiar type of bad argument, committed by Midgley in the past, is trotted out by Gabriel Dover against selfish genes. Of course, genes are selfish only in the sense that they provide the logic of evolution, and to do so they must co-operate on a huge scale to pro- duce reproductive organisms. Merely mak- ing the obvious point that it is organisms that actually reproduce does not under- mine the deep claim of Dawkins that which ones continue to do so is a matter to be decided by the genes. Similarly, Tim Ingold's claim that even so simple a prac- tice as walking is culturally sensitive hardly amounts to a heap of beans — no one thinks that the claim that there is a lan- guage instinct depends on our all speaking in exactly the same way.
There are, however, some good argu- ments to be made against Evolutionary Psychology. Conspicuous among their pro- ponents in the past few decades has been Stephen Jay Gould. Some of his most telling points are that evolution is not (and was not claimed by Darwin to be) purely adaptational, that it can occur pretty rapid- ly, that it produces crucial side-effects (for which he has happily borrowed one term, 'spandrels', from architecture and coined another, `exaptations), and that, in any case, we have no good evidence of what the early ancestral environment was really like. In this anthology, Gould (without whom you could not really produce an anti-Evolutionary Psychology collection) is represented by a recycled review from the New York Review of Books of Daniel Dennett's hard-line broadside Darwin's Dangerous Idea. He lands his usual deft blows against some particular claims of Evolutionary Psychology as being `just-so stories' (e.g. Wright's remark that having a sweet tooth, now something of a gastro- nomic collar-bone, was adaptive in the early ancestral environment).
Another good piece of reasoning is Annette Kanniloff-Smith's rejection of the inference to innate modularity from the modularity of adult behaviour. She argues that modularity is a product of develop- ment rather than of selection. Similarly, Anne Fausto-Sterling marshals some fasci- nating evidence from feminist primatology to correct assumptions about inherited gender roles. Here a respectable empirical debate is shaping up.
Evolutionary Psychology is clearly destined to set the agenda of the human sciences for at least the next generation, and we can await with interest the empirical findings for and against. The debate will be con- ducted in the semi-public domain (scien- tists leading, band-wagoners piling in behind), and, that being so, at least the ugliest arguments should be disposed of as soon as possible. Sociology departments have no more divine right to survive than nationalised utilities and must adapt or perish in the academic jungle. More inter- estingly and importantly, there is nothing intrinsically `Thatcherite' or anything else- ite about Evolutionary Psychology. As the introduction to this volume rightly says, it is 'recruitable around almost any political agenda — except that of racism, which is ruled out by its insistence on the unity of the human species'. Quite so. Whatever human nature is like, we can seek to struc- ture human society as we please. Only, to do so, we had better know what we are up against. This is surely a paradigmatic instance of Wittgenstein's remark to the effect that we feel that when all the questions of science have been answered the really important issues are still left completely open.
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