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57 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good points that don't hold together as a coherent critique, January 10, 2001
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.
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51 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
War of the Roses, October 31, 2000
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.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Title misleads and so do the polemics!, November 29, 2002
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.
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