Alas Poor Darwin Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, eds. Fifteen leading biologists, anthropologists, and cultural critics attempt to stem the flow of opinion toward nature and from nurture as the shaper of human behavior. Recent advances in deciphering the human genome have given weight to arguments that behaviors are biological adaptations.
Some people argue that genes dictate everything from drug addiction to food preferences.
Contributors to this book hold that such ideas rest on faulty data. The writers take turns assailing various aspects and proponents of evolutionary psychology. Charles Jencks ironic essay takes issue with Edward O. Wilson s notion of consilience. Mary Midgley offers opposition to Richard Dawkins idea that there are basic units of culture that spread among peoples in the same way that gene mutations move between generations. Patrick Bateson reviews how ethologists and then evolutionary psychologists tried to dissect instinct both failing miserably, he says.