Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology

A good read but nothing to getting really appreciate or get excited about!

Before writing this review I read the book and previous reviews. Opinions seemed to fall into two distinct categories. On the one hand evolutionary psychology is depicted as a load of dangerous nonsense, infecting clear thought with biological determinism in support of right wing political racism and sexism which is unacceptable in a neo-socialist society. The alternative view is that evolutionary psychology is the key to understanding universal human nature which can be determined by rejecting the blank page theory of the Standard Social Science Model and replacing it with a new model based on the evolutionary adaptation of basic human psychology of aggression, parenting and sexuality.Evolutionary psychology is a development of the gene centred theories of Richard Dawkins and E O Wilson. In their introduction to the book Hilary and Steven Rose see in evolutionary psychology the same impulse which led to support for Social Darwinism and eugenics most of which was thought to have been discredited half a century ago. In attacking the supposed right wing agenda of evolutionary psychology the various authors also attack the presuppositions underlying it.The contributors come from a variety of fields which evolutionary psychology claimed to over-ride in seeking to understand human nature. Dorothy Nelkin suggested the new discipline was attempting serve as a form of scientific Christianity. Others attacked Dawkins's theory of The Selfish Gene and his idea of memes while the notion of human behaviour as being partitioned between learned and instinctive is rejected on the grounds that it ignores the concept of process.E O Wilson appears to believe he discovered that evolution was an explanation for everything, or as he put it, "science is religion liberated and writ large". Unfortunately Wilson's new theory appears to have been less of a paradigm and more of a parody. He sought to explain the human social order in biological terms. This tends to ignore changes attributable to other factors. Underlying Wilson's claims is the belief that Darwin was right, materialism is all there is and philosophy is a waste of intellect. Wilson appears not to understand that rather than liberating science from religion he has sought to replace religion with science by assuming the former is inevitably wrong and the latter inevitably right. Ultimately, of course, it remains an assumption.That assumption needs to be questioned philosophically. Are we driven by sex, power and money or by truth, beauty and goodness? Is everything we do the expression of our basic sex drive?. Are we what we are by nature or by nurture? Evolutionary psychologists are criticised for adopting a universalist approach which avoids specific studies of variation in behaviour and relies on artificial modular analysis. They are accused of being reductionist, internally self-referring and resistant to valid social and philosophical criticism, rather than being comprehensive.The jargon of evolutionary psychology - and it is jargon rather than terminology - is a regurgitation of ideas first peddled by Ricardo, Malthus et.al., some of which provided Darwin with the intellectual justification for claiming evolution by natural selection. Darwin's own studies identified adaptation but no more. It was Malthus's bad socio-economic analysis which provided him with an intellectual framework within which he could wrap a new theory for the chattering classes. Anyone assuming Darwin was right tends to avoid addressing this point.Many of the book's critics claim it has a political purpose. This is true. However, to dismiss criticism as ideology masquerading as science is an over-simplification.Evolutionary psychology is based on assumptions which look increasingly tenuous and research which is bland to the point of meaningless. One does not have to be a creationist to wonder if there is a teleological purpose to the universe, or question the historical accuracy of evolutionary theory. Such thoughts appear anathema to those who expect everyone to share their opinions because they believe they know better. In that sense those reviewers who expected a critique of evolutionary psychology in its own terms have missed the point. For philosophers and social scientists evolutionary psychology is an irrelevance to detached intellectual study.There are far better intellectual critiques of the concept. What this book does is to attack the pretentious nature of the discipline (if indeed it is a discipline), denying its claim to introduce a new way of thinking about, or an understanding of, human nature. It is at times polemical rather than neutral but it was designed to cricitise evolutionary psychology for claiming to provide a model which is applicable outside its own terms. For many, people such as Wilson and Dawkins are fanatics who have long since given up any serious notion of competing in the marketplace of ideas but have sought to monopolise the market with scientism. Straw men they may be but they are well known scarecrows.This is not a book which will appeal to those who share evolutionary psychologists' assumptions and are unwilling to have their assumptions questioned. It will, however, appeal to those who are able to distinguish between polemics and purpose. Hopefully there are still people who can read a book they dislike without dismissing it as rubbish.