Alas Poor Darwin

PeterDF · Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2003 10:53 am Post subject: Alas Poor Darwin

A review of: "Alas Poor Darwin - Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology." edited by Steven Rose and Hilary Rose.

Alas the Misty Mountain by Peter Fisher

I had been looking forward - with some trepidation - to reading this book.

With such eminent contributors as Mary Midgeley, Stephen Rose, and the late Stephen J. Gould, I was expecting a devastating and effective rebuttal of the views of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet and the evolutionary psychologists.

So have the most capable and lucid thinkers in the field managed to create a great unclimbable misty mountain to challenge Dawkins’ famously climbable “Mount Improbable”?

Except for Mary Midgely and – of course - Steven J. Gould’s essays. Much of the book seemed filled with post-modernist, obscurantic jargon. It would be wrong to suggest that the writers were being deliberately evasive, but when the big words were decoded I was left with the impression that they had little worthwhile to say.

One of the writers seemed to think that, because his daughter was not afraid of spiders - and therefore not everyone is - there could not be a universal human behavioural trait for fear of spiders. If everyone had fear of spiders there would be no genetic diversity for natural selection to act on. It should have been perfectly obvious that no one expects that human universals would be found in every individual human being. Least of all fear of spiders, for which trait, there has probably been no selective pressure for thousands of years. (There are no poisonous spiders in Northern Europe.)

Another completely false argument is that because genes often act in concert with other genes in ways that often seem tortuously complex, that we humans ought not to think that genes can be selected in a simple way as the selfish gene idea implies. It is true that most genes do not have a simple one to one relationship with their phenotypic effects; It may be that a complex of genes may produce the effect, but if the effect is visible to selection, that particular complex of genes will be either favoured (or disfavoured). If someone has a particular genetic makeup, which renders that particular complex of genes less likely they will be at adaptive advantage (or disadvantage). As the writers of this book all accept that evolution did happen and that natural selection was its principle driving force, denial that the system works like this means that they would have to accept that they themselves could not have evolved – so who wrote the book?

However take out the jargon and we are left with two or three worthwhile, lucid and interesting essays. There is no denying the clarity and elegance of Gould’s prose. He eloquently attacks his favourite stalking horses – the Darwinian fundamentalists, repeating his famous argument that contingency has a profound effect on the evolution of life: previously expounded in his book “Wonderful Life” based on his interpretation of the astonishing Burgess Shale Fossils. Unfortunately though, his interpretation has already been effectively challenged, if not rebutted, by Simon Conway Morris in his book “Crucible of Creation” and by Dawkins in his latest book “A Devil’s Chaplain”.

Midgley attacks Dawkins’ meme idea, arguing that human beings are holistic beings and that a particulate method of understanding them is inappropriate. But isn’t denying the particulate viewpoint reducing the totality of the holistic whole?

I have read dozens of popular science books recently, this was the only time I got to the end of one and wondered why I had bothered picking it up:

A mountain then? – No! Only mist!

Edited by: PeterDF at: 8/25/03 5:45 pm

Jeremy1952 · Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2003 4:42 pm Post subject: Re: Alas Poor Darwin

PeterDF

Quote:
One of the writers seemed to think that, because his daughter was not afraid of spiders - and therefore not everyone is - there could not be a universal human behavioural trait for fear of spiders.

There is a rather famous series of experiments which should have laid this nonsense to rest; in fact it did, for most educated people. It was found that monkeys are not innately fearful of snakes. However, it is easy to teach a monkey to fear snakes, and difficult to teach it to fear flowers. Here is a more recent update, from the researcher who did the original work in 1992 (Mineka (1992) Evolutionary Memories, emotional processing, and the emotional disorders. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 28 161-206) The Malicious Serpent: Snakes as a prototypical stimulus for an evolved module of fear

Thanks for the review.

BTW: I slogged through Lewontin, Rose, Kamin Not In Our Genes on much the same principle: Someone of Lewontin's stature has to have a substantial defense of his position, doesn't he? No.

Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived. E.O.Wilson

PeterDF · Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2003 12:41 pm Post subject: Re: Alas Poor Darwin

And Rose attacks Pinker and co for politically motivated science.

The best case of pot calling I've heard for a long time


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