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Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology

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It's painful to say this, because I greatly admire the work of many of these contributors, but this book was a huge disappointment to me. It is not a cohesive critique of the field at all, nor does it detail any specific excesses or flaws in actual evolutionary psychology research programs. It is largely a collection of philosophical essays, some of which are recycled arguments from the earlier sociobiology wars so well chronicalled in "Defenders of the Truth" by Ullica Segerstrale.

The arguments still seem to be motivated by the fear that a rigid biological view of human nature will leap the great divide and dominate social sciences. And the responses to these critiques seem to verify that indeed the central issues are how mutable we view culture, how we characterize cultural evolution, and what it means for social and political policy. The verification of specific scientific theories gets surprisingly little attention.

I was expecting more detailed essays on the legitimate technical issues such as the problem of confirmation of evolutionary adaptations, the problem of psychological types, the problem of psychological modules, the definition of adaptation, the developmental systems theory challenge to so-called genetic determinism, the theory of inclusive fitness, and the theory of reciprocal altruism as an explanation of human kindness.

Unless I missed it, I couldn't find any mention of the use of evolutionary game theory in EP in this book, a particularly sad omission because it is one of the most reasonable bridges between biological and social science thinking, and so its status is critical what seems to be the agenda of the critics here.

What little of the essays addresses these pretty much assumes the battle is won and argues from there. I found it unconvincing. For example, geneticist Gabriel Dover's ("Dear Mr. Darwin") critique of selfish gene selectionism is very interesting but odd in relying so heavily on his molecular drive theory and inexplicably avoiding raising many of the excellent points that others like Sober and Eldredge have made about selection dynamics at different levels. Not that I found much wrong with it, it would stand alone well by itself. But it illustrates the general problem with this book, that it makes some good specific points but never quite ties them together as a constructive (or even coherent) critique of EP.

Compared to Paul Ehrlich's "Human Natures" for example, this book is very poorly researched in my opinion, though both will likely be about as equally despised by many evolutionary psychologists, for different reasons. "Alas" because it mainly just opens up old wounds without contributing much to the dialog, and "Human Natures" because while more scholarly than "Alas," and more educational about evolution generally, it still argues largely orthogonally to EP rather than constructively about it.

Surprisingly, both books largely avoid much of the useful critique of evolutionary psychology that comes from within that very field. Understandable, I suppose critics don't trust scientists to be competent at critiquing their own field. But in this case of "Alas," especially, it would have strengthened the book tremendously.

In spite of the disappointment, there are some very good essays here, even where they may miss their mark on current evolutionary psychology. In one of the best essays, Patrick Bateson argues persuasively that the word 'instinct' has become scientifically ambiguous and even meaningless. Mary Midgley points out some of the now fairly well known weaknesses in the concept of selfish memes as a theory of cultural transmission.

Countering what many of the contributers here characterize as the conservative bias of EP, Anne Fausto-Sterling argues for a feminist perspective on science and Barbara Herrnstein Smith gives a fairly generic critique against aspects of the cognitive model of the mind. Both make good points, though a bit unfocused and neither points out that the same critiques have been made from within the field as well, such as by Geoffrey Miller. Nor do they explain why they characterize the entire field as politically conservative older white males, when that image seems to me to better characterize its populists than its researchers. There is little evidence that any of the authors went even as far as journalist John Horgan ("The Undiscovered Mind") went in interviewing or debating any of the researchers directly on any specific points for this book.

I appreciate the underlying theme of many of these authors that human nature (or as Ehrlich puts it, "natures") is complex and often oversimplified, but they authors give the impression of throwing up their hands rather than giving it a try. That seems to be the point of EP research programs, however their current status is perceived, to try to find real, testable patterns in our lives that we can use to understand and improve ourselves. It is in the specifics of testing and testability that I expected to see criticism, and found little to feed my hunger here. The reader with little time can skip the chapters if they are looking for a critique of EP and simply read a summary of Steve Rose's good final chapter arguing against ultra-Darwinism, and go from there to the technical work that supports it and to the EP work itself that deals with it. Here are Steve's main arguments against "ultra-Darwinism":

1. naked replicators are empty abstractions

2. There is a non-linear relationship between genes and phenotypes

3. Individual genes are an important level of selection but not the only one

4. Natural selection is not the only mode of evolutionary change

5. Not all phenotypic characters are adaptive

There are reasonable arguments for and against each of the above points in other literature. Unfortunately, this book lists these points without discussing them very far or how they apply to actual current EP research programs.

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.

I like Darwin, Dawkins and Dennett just fine. The problem I've always had is the claims made by memetics and evolutionary psychology as sciences. Speculations that can not be tested are not sciences no matter how you slice it, so I was looking forward to a book that contributes to this great, important discussion. In all the frenzy of excitement about memes and EP, criticism is too easily dismissed.

This book seriously dropped the ball. Most of the essays here were whiny and irrelavent tot the topic at hand. The first essay tries to find commonality between EP and religion for no apparent reason than to tell us "Since EP uses religious metaphors like 'revelation,' and since religion is bad, EP is bad, too." Unfortunately, the book is chock full of hasty non-sequitors like that one. Hilary Rose's chapter, by way of another unfortunate example, laments EP because it is threatening to take the fun out of social science by threatening to intoduce the empirical method into the otherwise free-flowing humanities. Gasp, what a concept!

The best essay is far and away that of Steven Jay Gould who distrusts EP not because its un-PC or because it uses religious metaphors, but because it assumes that any observable behavior must have an adaptationary explanation. Not true, says Gould. There are such things as spandrels, or neutral traits that get selected for, incidentally, with more useful traits. Also, punctuated equlibrium (all Dawkinites should check this out, it's really not as bad as you think) and environmental flukes (like metoer-caused mass-extinctions also give us reason to suppose that EP's faith in incremental linear adaptation is a chimera.

I'm quite suprised that no one but Gould touched on the extremely speculative, theoretical and by extension, untestable nature of EP which is the biggest argument I could think of against it. The problem, can anyone think of any one trait that could disprove EP? No! It's explantations are and always will be post hoc. This book ignores that. I guess I'm not really suprised as it would ruin the books intellectually light-weight theme. But if you do read this one, read Steven Pinkers "The Blank Slate" as an accompaniment so you aren't fooled when certain authors incorrectly demonize EP.

Although it includes a few thoughtful essays (e,g., Gould's, but this was previously-published), Alas Poor Darwin reads as a biased demolition of straw man after straw man. To my mind, it is doubtful if some of the contributers have actually read some of the seminal work in evolutionary psychology. For example, evolutionary psychologists are repeatedly attacked as doctrinaire, quasi-religious, reductionist fundamentalist who espouse the "Nature" side of the "Nature-Nurture" controversey. But evolutionary psychologists - most notably Cosmides and Tooby in their introductory chapter of the Adapted Mind - try strenuously to bury the "Nature-Nurture" dichotomy as simple-minded ignorance that instinct (nature) and behavior (nuture) are intricably linked, and cannot be separated.

Alas Poor Darwin is frequently ad hominem. It attempts to link the EP perspective with eugenics, even Naziism. Its language is often contemptuous and dismissive. It grossly over-simplifies. From a psychological perspective, it reflects a projected fundamentalism.

I bought the book because I have been excited by the insights of an evolutionary perspective on behavior. I am not a eugenicist. I had hoped the book would provide an intellectual challenge, but I was disappointed.

Milt Harris

This book is mixed. It has some useful critique, and also highlights the need for constructive criticism against ANY scientific idea or 'revolution' (eg Kuhn and others), but it also has some rather reactionary, predictable and unenlightening counterpoints. Tension, doubt, and critique is good, knee-jerk reactionary resistance and selective patronising of humanly mistakes is unhelpful to all concerned.

I was impressed with parts of this book. The argument against a narrow-minded understanding of change (subsitute 'species-change' or 'evolution') is perennial, and has not been resolved either in biology or physics. Is evolution gradualist, or punctuated, and does it make a difference anyway? Is one simply a variation of the other?. Is time granular or a continuum?. Is time multidimensional?. If so, and by corrollary, are species multi-dimensional and/or can they inherit multi-dimensional and/or 'splitting' mechanisms to deal with different and/or stressful environments? These ideas and their associated problems are not just confined to evolutionary biology, but also physics, history, and mathematics, amongst other disciplines. One highlight for me in the book therefore, was the bringing to mind these sorts of problems and their relevance to evolutionary analysis of mind. Ohter examples include: can some aspects of mind be selected by 'default', and emerge as advantageous in a differnt enviroment?. Are various aspects of culture and mind merely side effects of other selected mental mechanisms, or do they represent specific advantageous predispositions for specific environments. In the way that the book highlights possible alternative notions regarding evoltionary theory and change, and their relevance to an evolutionary analysis of mind, I was impressed. In the way that the book seemed in some instances to revert to outmoded notions that we are instrinsically and by definition separate to the animal kingdom, I found uninspiring. It is plainly obvious that this paradigm has been dying a long and strangling death in the last several hundered years at least. The question is asked, does our behaviour, and by association, our 'minds', have anything to do with our evolutionary past. And if so, what kind of reasons are there that people resist this idea, or the associated paradigm shift which seeks to pursue this.

The disappointment in this book for me is this, its' reactionary attempt to diminish analysis of the mind as something which is partly, largely, or entirely something which can be explained by evolutionary processes. It counterpoints selfish gene theory (personally poking Richard Dawkins-what do personal remarks possibly achieve?), genes and their influence in general (something that will be further studied with continuing genomic investigations of various organisms), 'sociobiology', 'instinct' (it's ok if applied to animals) and other notions. It cites instances or "religious-like" mentalities in the new paradigm (what if "religion" itself, in its various manifestations, has evolved, and is the way we are programmed to behave?). "Arguments against Evolutionary psychology". Sad. They may argue against specific ideas applied to specific instances, and the way human nature understands and or selectively exploits this, but not a paradigm shift which has obvious scientific basis. Such a move is destined to fail, and rightly so. The progress of scientific understanding is a re-analsysis of 'who we are' in the light of evolutionary theory-physically AND mentally. Sure, with any paradigm shift there are going to be mistakes, fanatics, free-riders, vested interests, and so on, but this is true of ANY change-scientific or otherwise-it does not follow that the paradigm is at fault because of this. The book would be better off in confining itself to constructive criticism and caution, and not knee-jerk partronising remarks regarding those all too humanly mistakes and derivations.

The tensions which remain are not whether or not this mind of ours has evolved, but to what level various forms of behaviour have direct phenotype and/or genotpye influence, and how this relates to the 'self' and the brains various learning, monitoring, processing and constructive modules. To leave wider evolutionary theory out of this is both childish and outmoded. I laud the books focus on caution and doubt, not its general censoring and reactionary approach to new ideas.

The title of my review derives from Pascal -"you would not search for me, if you had not already found me". This is true of the notion that our behaviour is influenced by evolutionary processes, (something science has already discovered), and indeed such is the progress of all science within the human condition. By corollary is the opposite "you would not contend with me if you had not already decided against me". The book seems to have 'already decided', before the 'human jury'-the search for truth and enlightenment, or understanding if you prefer-is out.

One is hardly onto to the second page of this misguided, miss-conceived and miss-edited book than the illogic and misrepresentations begin. The authors begin by branding evolutionary psychology "henceforward EP" as "a particularly Anglo-American phenomenon," and reference this claim with a footnote on page 16 stating that "Other European countries, notably France, have been less overwhelmed by Darwinian evolutionary theory." One wonders at the point of this. How does it play in China or Japan? On the other hand, maybe they're after evolutionary theory itself and not just EP! One also wonders what the acceptance of "Darwinian evolutionary theory" by some countries and not by others (even if that was somehow demonstrated) has to do with a critique of evolutionary psychology. If France has not been "overwhelmed by evolutionary theory" perhaps the worst for France. And who says Anglo-Americans have been overwhelmed by Darwinian evolutionary theory? Most Americans, at any rate, still believe in angels!

This sort of slippery, non sequitur-filled prose is, alas, typical of much of what follows. Here's another quick example, in a footnote on page 16. They authors reference a poll from the journal Science showing "that a great majority of life scientists are now non-believers." Incredibly, they follow this immediately with the nonlogical: "Physicists are less hostile to religion..." seemingly innocent of the fact that being a non-believer does NOT necessarily imply hostility to religion! Still on page two the authors write, "It [evolutionary psychology] claims to explain all aspects of human behavior...on the basis of ...features" formed "during the infancy of our species some 100,000-600,000 years ago." ALL? Who said "all"? There is no footnote. Evolutionary psychologists emphatically do NOT claim to explain all aspects of human behavior. EP is a guide to human tendencies based on insights provided by the process of evolution, nothing more, and, importantly, nothing less.

By the way, this fictional character that attempts to explain all aspects of human behavior with EP, is straw man number one. There are, alas, many more to come in this book. As other reviewers have pointed out the style here is to set up easy targets that have little or nothing to do with evolutionary psychology, and then throw rocks at them. They are afraid of something and that something is the truth.

I'll skip past the rest of the Introduction penned by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose and go on to the articles edited. The first, by sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, doesn't even attempt to address the validity of evolutionary psychology at all. What it attempts to do, and it does that poorly enough, is to claim that the proponents of EP are using "missionary fervor" (p. 23) and a "quasi-religious narrative" (p. 30) "seeking to convert others to their beliefs" (p. 23), an accusation that is practically laughable, but even if true would amount as a criticism of EP to nothing more than another non sequitur. Nelkin uses as support for her (totally irrelevant) argument the religious fervor displayed by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson in his book, Consilience (1998). She also brings physicists Leon Lederman, Steven Weinberg, and Stephen Hawking into it because of their apparent religious fervor in expressing the wonders of physics. (By the way, both Nelkin and the author of the next essay bring the physicist's dream of a "Theory of Everything" into the discussion as an analogue of EP; but again that is a straw man: evolutionary psychology does not pretend to be a theory of everything, psychological or otherwise.) One wonders why the physicists are brought into the fray. Perhaps it is because they are "hard" scientists (those meanies) and not sociologists. Anyway, I guess Nelkin thought it would be cute to accuse evolutionary psychology of being too religious.

The second essay by Charles Jencks would appear to be mostly an ad hominem attack on E.O. Wilson, albeit gently and cleverly done. Actually it is a rather well-reasoned satirical critique of EP, lambasting its limitations in a comedic rhetorical style sure to delight "non-believers," using an observation of Wilson during a conference on postmodernism in Boston in 1998 as a narrative device. Jencks is an architect and Mr. Postmodern who is also to my mind a very fine creative writer. But I would remind him that ALL psychologies are limited, and so to criticize evolutionary psychology for being limited in what it can tell us about ourselves, isn't much of a criticism, unless one can also argue that cognitive, or behaviorism, or psychoanalytic, or some other psychology is superior. I happen to think, as I have said before, that the psychologies found in the great world religions are superior to any of the academic psychologies. Only evolutionary psychology is able to offer something with the same kind of antediluvian power. Jencks does not mention other psychologies. He does claim that Wilson, at the end of his lecture, went from the "is" of evolutionary psychology (which is really how to understand and appreciate EP) to the "ought" of a moral imperative, the classic error incidentally made by many who criticize EP. Problem is, Jencks doesn't reveal what Wilson said that convinced him that Wilson had gone too far (maybe I missed it). I do know from having read several of Wilson's books that he knows better than to fall into that trap. I wish I could say the same for the Roses.

This is by way of signing off: I am about to exceed Amazon.com's 1,000-word limit. Some of the other reviews below comment very intelligently on some of the other essays. I particularly recommend the reviews by Todd I. Stark and A.P. Jackson.

Like many edited books, the contributors' approachs to the subject matter differ so as to make it difficult to provide an overall review. The editors admit as much, observing that the contributors "do not speak with a single voice" (p9), which seems to a coded admission that they frequently contradict one another. For example, Fausto-Sterling chides evolutionary psychologists for sexism in viewing the female orgasm as a mere by-product (women "did not even evolve their own orgasms" (p176) she complains) while Gould (p103-4) chides them for purportedly viewing every trait as an adaptation and ignoring the possibility of by-products.
Some chapters are essentially irrelevant to the project of evolutionary psychology. One, that of Dawkins-stalker (and part-time philosopher) Mary Midgley, critiques the separate field of memetics. A singularly uninsightful chapter by 'disability activist' Tom Shakespeare and a colleague seems to say nothing with which an evolutionary psychologist would disagree.
Only at the end of their chapter do they make the obligatory reference to 'just-so stories', and, more bizarrely, to the "single-gene determinism of the biological reductionists". Of course, evolutionary psychologists emphasise to the point of repetitiveness that, while they may employ this as a form of shorthand, nothing in their theories implies a one-to-one concordance between single genes and behaviours. The irrelevance of some chapters to their supposed subject-matter makes one wonder whether some contributors have ever actually read any of the primary literature in the field - or whether their entire knowledge (or lack thereof) of evolutionary psychology is filtered through to them via the critiques of their fellow contributors.
Annette Karmiloff-Smith's chapter is a critique of what she refers to as nativism. It may have value as a critique of some strands of EP. However, the nativist thesis she associates with evolutionary psychology is rejected by many evolutionary psychologists (e.g. Human Evolutionary Psychology) and not integral to evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology posits that behaviour have been shaped by natural selection to maximise the reproductive success of organisms in ancestral environments. It therefore allows us to bypass the proximate level of causation by saying that, how ever the brain is structured and develops in interaction with its environment, given that this brain evolved by a process of natural selection, it must be such as to produce behaviour which maximises the reproductive success of its bearer under ancestral conditions (the 'phenotypic gambit'). The issue of nativism is therefore bypassed.

SJ Gould: A Convert?
Undoubtedly the best known contributor is the late Stephen J Gould. Such is his renown that he evidently did not feel the need to actually contribute an original chapter to the volume, but rather felt it sufficient to recycle a NYT book-review.
It is a critical review of a book (DARWIN'S DANGEROUS IDEA: EVOLUTION AND THE MEANINGS OF LIFE), itself critical of Gould. Neither the book nor the review by Gould deal primarily with the field of evolutionary psychology, but rather address more general issues within evolutionary biology.
The most remarkable revelation of this chapter is that the best-known and most widely-cited erstwhile opponent of evolutionary psychology, is apparently no longer any such thing. On the contrary, he now views evolutionary psychology as potentially "quite useful" (p102).
Most strikingly, he acknowledges that "the most promising theory of evolutionary psychology [is] the recognition that differing Darwinian requirements for males and females imply distinct adaptive behaviours centred on male advantage in spreading sperm as widely as possible... and female strategy for extracting time and attention from males" (Ibid.). In other words, he accepts the position of evolutionary psychologists in that most controversial of areas, innate sex differences.
His criticisms of evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, retread familiar grounds. He repeats the tired charge of 'ultra-Darwinism', whereby evolutionary psychologists purportedly view every trait as an adaptation (p103-4). This claim is easily rebutted by simply reading the primary literature. For example, Daly and Wilson see the high rate of homicide of stepchildren, not as adaptive, but as a by-product of discriminative parental solicitude, whereby parents care less for such children (The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (Darwinism Today series)). Similarly, the authors of A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, are divided as to whether rape is an adaptation or a by-product of men's greater desire for commitment-free sex.
[Evolutionary psychologists generally prefer the term by-product to Gould's coinage 'spandrel'. The invention of jargon to baffle non-specialists (e.g. referring to animal rape as "forced copulation" as the Roses advocate: p2) is the preserve of subjects suffering from 'physics-envy', according to 'Dawkins' First Law of the Conservation of Difficulty'.]
Gould then claims sociobiological theories are untestable. As evidence, he cites Robert Wright's claim (The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology), that our sweet tooth evolved "in an environment in which fruit existed but candy didn't". Bizarrely he chides Wright for citing "no paleontological data about ancestral feeding" (p100), ignoring the fact that Wright is a populariser not an academic. (Gould evidently believes we need "paleontological data" to demonstrate that fruit is not a recent invention and that chocolate bars are not.)

Straw Men and Fabricated Quotations
Rather than countering the claims of actual evolutionary psychologists, contributors resort to misrepresenting and caricaturing evolutionary psychology. In the case of co-editor, Hillary Rose, this crosses the line from rhetorical deceit to outright defamation of character when, on p116, she attributes to David Barash an offensive quotation violating the naturalistic fallacy by purporting to justify rape by reference to its biological function. "If nature is sexist, do not blame her sons," she quotes Barash, a reputable academic, as writing.
However, Barash simply does not say the words she attributes to him on the page she cites or any other page in Whisperings Within. On the contrary, after a discussion of the adaptive function of rape among mallards, he merely ventures tentatively that, although vastly more complex, human rape may be analogous.

Is Steven Rose a Scientific Racist?
Steven Rose is not a creationist. He is therefore obliged to reconcile his opposition to evolutionary psychology with recognition that the brain is a product of evolution. Ironically, therefore, this leads him to employ evolutionary arguments against evolutionary psychology.
For example, Rose defends group-selectionism (p257-9). Similarly, he argues that sufficient time has elapsed since the Pleistocene for complex adaptations to have evolved (p1-2). Finally, he rejects a modular model of the human mind (p260-2). If Rose is right on these matters, it would suggest, not the abandonment of an evolutionary approach to psychology, but rather the need to develop a new evolutionary psychology stressing the importance of these factors.
Actually, this new evolutionary psychology may not be all that new. Rose may find he has unlikely bedfellows.
Group selectionism (which implies that conflict between groups such as races is inevitable) has already been defended by figures such as Kevin Macdonald (A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples) and Philippe Rushton (1989). Similarly, the claim that sufficient time has elapsed for significant evolutionary change to have occurred since the dawn of agriculture necessarily entails the belief that sufficient time has also elapsed for the different races to diverge (The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution). Finally, as Rose himself observes (p261), rejection of modularity is consistent with emphasis on the general factor of intelligence (but see Kanazawa 2004 for a view of general intelligence as itself a domain-specific module.)
Therefore, in rejecting the tenets of mainstream evolutionary psychology, Rose inadvertently advocates, not so much a new form of evolutionary psychology, but rather an old form of scientific racism.
Of course, Rose is not a racist. On the contrary, he has built a literary career smearing those he characterises as such. However, descending to Rose's own level of argumentation (i.e. guilt by association), he is easily characterised as such. By rejecting many claims of evolutionary psychologists - about the EEA, group-selectionism and modularity - he ironically plays into the hands of the racists he purportedly opposes.

Kanazawa, S. (2004) 'General Intelligence as a Domain-Specific Module' Psychological Review 111(2) 512-523

Rushton, JP. (1989) 'Genetic similarity, human altruism and group-selection' Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12(3) 503-59

The mistake of EP is to map so direct a link between human cultural accretions and a hardwired and immutable survival function. Two confounding factors ruin the attempt.

First, there's the reductio ad absurdum element of these inquiries. To take but one representative instance, the BBC once reported that two Brits had proven conclusively that people are evolutionarily hardwired to stand in line. Genius! Clearly, this is a field of inquiry entering its heyday. Shame the team was never nominated for the Ignobel.

Second, there is what Pierre Duhem, WVO Quine and others have characterized as the "holism" problem in grounding a new fact. This is particularly a conundrum in the human sciences. Given that all human sciences proceed from within the lexical web, we are prone to find a favored construct and retroductively prove what we want to see. There simply is no reason that one causal finding for an element of human culture trumps an alternative explanation. That brute cultural fact can be framed a myriad different ways (narrated through different nodes on the lexical web), and different perceivers are attracted to different explanations. Hence the proponents of evolutionary psychology have a hard time making inroads against other explanations in circulation. Furthermore, they have a hard time making a case that their own causal interpretations are externally valid: Particular 'findings' from evolutionary psychology do not inherently convey a greater 'survival advantage' on the perceiver, hence why should we necessarily restrict ourselves to such direct mappings in any other domain of culture? In that sense, many of the findings out of EP can be called 'epiphenomenal'.

Once evolutionary psychologists dig a little more thoroughly into the lexicon, and the creative uses to which language constructs can be put by the mind, then it seems to me the endeavor will be headed back in the right direction. At that point, though, it'll simply be folded into the work of social neuroscientists.

I can't agree more with the previous reviewers who describe this collection as a mixed bag. Some of the contributions are a bit dismissive. Yet I've sensed the same dismissiveness from many of the partisans of evolutionary psychology against their critics, and I don't know that those rebuttals win the day.

This is the kind of controversy that requires fashioning one's own critique. This volume does not develop a systematic alternative, and that is its weakness. Its strengths are in supplying food for thought -- for getting the debate off the ground.

I am an evolutionary psychologist, and so perhaps biased.

I would like to encourage debate on the issues in my chosen field. In science, as in the courtroom, the rigorous debate of relevant issues, at its best, distills truth.

"Alas Poor Darwin" perverts the dialogue of scientific debate. The Roses argue against positions evolutionary psychologists do not hold. Genetic determinism. Panadaptationism. Unfalsifiable storytelling. The Roses and their contributors are correct to reject these ideas. They are, however, ideas evolutionary psychologists themselves reject. Repeatedly. Everywhere. In virtually the sources cited in the text. I encourage any reader genuinely interested in evolutionary psychology to return to the sources the Roses and their colleagues cite and decide if the field is being characterized accurately.

Productive debate is the engine of science. Arguing against straw man positions is distracting and destructive, and an impediment to progress. "Alas Poor Darwin" is the latest attack on a field that is perceived as politically noxious (which it is not) and scientifically promiscuous (which it is not).

I look forward to a book that engages evolutionary psychology in an intellectually honest and scientifically responsible way. (Karmiloff-Smith's chapter, by the way, is a step in the right direction - the issues she raises are legitimate, and can be addressed empirically.) "Alas Poor Darwin" is useless to anyone who is interested in understanding arguments for and against the evolutionary approach to human behavior. It might, on the other hand, be of use to sociologists of science who are interested in just how far some are willing to go in distorting other scientists' views.

This is a collection of essays purporting to be arguments against the emergent science of evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately most of the writers are more concerned with defending a retro socialist position than with examining the tenets of evolutionary psychology. Sadly they allow their political agenda to dominate their thinking so completely that in most of the essays evolutionary psychology is addressed only tangentially or not at all.

In the first essay, by sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, evolutionary psychologists are accused on page 23 of religious "fervor" in trying "to convert others to their beliefs," and on page 30 of employing a "quasi-religious narrative." What this ad-hominem attack has to do with the arguments of evolutionary psychology is exactly nothing. Strangely enough, not a single argument from evolutionary psychology is even addressed!

In the next essay, postmodernist Charles Jencks devotes himself to an attack on Edward O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology and a most persuasive proponent of the ideas of evolutionary psychology. Again no attempt is made to address the issues. This is just an attempt to discredit Wilson and, by the by, to satirically point out the limitations of evolutionary psychology. Certainly evolutionary psychology is limited, but so are all other psychologies. The difference between an evolutionary approach to psychology and say something like the delusive, cocaine-addled daydreams of Sigmund Freud, or the severely limited behaviorist construct, is like night and day. It is no criticism of evolutionary psychology to say that it is limited unless you can show that some other psychology is less limited. None of the essays in this book attempts that.

Putting aside the largely irrelevant essays, let's look at the apparent basis for sociologist Hillary Rose and her husband biologist Steven Rose's position in their Introduction. The clearest statement of why they are opposed to evolutionary psychology is that "It claims to explain all aspects of human behavior...on the basis of ...features" developed "during the infancy of our species some 100,000-600,000 years ago." (p. 2) The problem with this statement is it is simply not true. Evolutionary psychologists do NOT claim to explain all aspects of human behavior, period. What evolutionary psychologists, and those who employ evolutionary ideas in their studies of human beings, do claim is that an understanding of ourselves as evolutionary beings will help us to better appreciate who and what we are.

Evolutionary psychologists such as David Buss and Nancy Etcoff, to name just a couple, who have been trained in cognitive psychology as well as in evolutionary biology, are helping to formulate a psychology based on both biological and cultural evolution. Their thinking and the thinking of others employing this approach is what is really exciting in psychology today, and it is something so completely removed from the world view of the Roses and their fellow essayists as to make their texts appear as relicts from a by-gone age.

It is unfortunately true however that at present EP's position with the public is reminiscent of the position of evolution among the Victorians. The gender feminists don't want it widely known that the woman's first desire is to mate with the leader, almost regardless of who he is, rather than the nerdy guy next door, just as the Victorians didn't want it widely known that we are related to apes and monkeys, even if it's true. Also it is not nice in polite society for a man to admit that he prefers runway models to Rosie O'Donnell, or the more general truth that beauty and youth and healthy looks is what attracts men, and that there is absolutely nothing that an older woman can do about that regardless of what the cosmetic industry and "feel good" babble books and seminars would have women believe. I will tell my daughter when she has lost "the glow" and is fretting over it, that it is the same lesson that an old man learns, only sooner, and the solution is an adjustment in values and a belief in the worth of things beyond the biological.

The usual bugaboo encountered in criticism of EP (and encountered here) is that it is a collection of "just so" stories. This criticism has some validity; however the critics usually do not point to any "story" in particular, but from the generalization move on as if all insights from evolution are to be dismissed. This is a grave error and is the sort of illogical attack that is all too common. The critics usually are not specific because if they were they would give away the reasons for their bias, and would not further their position because the insights that offend them are often not "just so" stories. For example, perhaps the most hated revelation from EP is the knowledge that women have a dual purpose in their reproductive strategy, namely that of securing the services of a male who will help raise her children and in upgrading the genetic input when possible. This accounts for the tendency toward duplicity in women and the fact that about ten percent of a woman's children are not biologically related to the apparent father. This is a most uncomfortable truth, but one that has been supported with a wealth of evidence.

The way out of this sadness is not to deny the truth or to slander it, as is attempted in this book, but to realize that biology is not destiny. That, just because it can be demonstrated that we humans have certain biological tendencies, it does not follow that we should or will exercise them. There are reasons over and above the biological imperatives to be true to your mate, to not kill the other guy, to help your neighbor, etc. Denial of the kind that the Roses engage in is not the answer to our imperfect nature.