Here are excerpts from a New Statesman book review by Bryan
Appleyard, about Evolutionary Psychology.
Steve
==========================================================
http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/200008210006.htm ... New Statesman
... Darwin wars Book Reviews by Bryan Appleyard 14th August 2000
Alas, Poor Darwin: arguments against evolutionary psychology Edited by
Hilary Rose and Steven Rose Jonathan Cape ...
The succession of more or less destructive intellectual superstitions
following the 19th-century crisis of faith is clear. First Marx, then Freud
and now Darwin has been nominated as the patriarch of an all-
encompassing system explaining human life and history. The latest,
Darwinian phase is most characteristically expressed by the discipline of
evolutionary psychology (EP), which insists that, because we are animals,
our behaviour can be understood only as the result of evolution by natural
selection.
So, for example, we like pictures of countryside featuring grassland, water
and trees because our ancestors spent so much time on the African
savannah; and our sexual mores - male promiscuity, female coyness - are
entirely determined by the evolved differences between male and female
investments in the reproductive act. Plainly, there is a chance that such
explanations are at least partly true; but, equally plainly, there is a good
chance that they are not. There is no conclusive evidence either way. But
the Darwinian faithful insist that they must be true. Why?
The short answer is that Darwinism is the one clear, self- organising
principle that science has yet produced. It shows how complexity can arise
without external intervention. That much cannot be denied. What can be
doubted, however, is that it is the only way complexity can arise, or that it
is sufficient in itself to explain any complex biological system. Darwin
himself had both these doubts; his current followers have neither.
[In fact there is little or no evidence that Darwinism can *even* show "how
complexity can arise without external intervention"! If there was such
evidence, Darwinists would not have to keep citing as their best evidence
such trivial examples as fluctuating colours in moths and length of beaks of
finches. But if Darwinism is *not* "the only way complexity can arise" and
it *cannot* "explain any complex biological system" then it should be an
open scientific question whether in fact "external intervention" by an
Intelligent Designer is in fact, after all, the correct explanation.]
Alas, Poor Darwin is a selection of essays designed to undermine such
faith. It is bracing and fun, especially in the repeated pot-shots taken by
the writers at grand figures of neo-Darwinism such as Steven Pinker,
Daniel Dennett, Edward O Wilson and Richard Dawkins. Its primary
weakness is an excess of politics. ...
The main scientific problem is that EP relies too heavily on the simple
faith that Darwinism must explain almost everything in the human realm.
We cannot know this because the evidence from pre-history is all but non-
existent. We know nothing of the selective pressures arising from the long
human residence of the African savannah, and any extrapolation
backwards from our present behaviour must, first, be highly speculative
and, second, effectively ignore the influence of the intervening millennia
of cultural influences. ...
[Indeed. But the same lack of "evidence from pre-history" means that the
guidance or intervention in natural history of an Intelligent Designer
*could* have been responsible for the observed `vertical' build-up of
design, especially since the best naturalistic candidate fails so miserably.
And in fact there *is* evidence from "pre-history" - in the ancient source
tablets which Genesis 1-11 was based on!]
Furthermore, the centrality of the role of the gene - essential to EP - is
controversial. Current discoveries in genetics seem to be dethroning the
gene as the clear, chemical foundation of our destiny. It does not, as
several writers point out here, replicate itself; rather, it requires the whole
paraphernalia of the living cell. Its ultimate reductive and metaphysical
power as what Dennett calls "the unmeant meaner" is, therefore, dubious
in the extreme.
[Indeed. The fact is that the gene itself doesn't replicate itself, but needs
enzymes like RNA polymerase to do that. In fact the genes themselves do
anything-it is only information encoded on the passive storage medium of
DNA. It is the *cell's* machinery which reads the DNA and transcribes it
into RNA and then translates it into proteins which *do* do something.
There is a better case that the *cell* is the true irreducible unit of life.]
None of this is intended to overthrow Darwinism itself. Evolution through
natural selection is accepted by every scientific writer as a potent force in
biology. But what the sceptics - led, as usual, by Stephen Jay Gould -
argue is that there are so many other factors, known and unknown,
involved in the process that an extrapolation of Darwinism into all other
realms is reckless in the extreme.
[That "every scientific writer" is required to accept that "natural selection"
is a "potent force" is more an example of the ultimate sanction of
naturalistic orthodoxy than the evidence. A "potent force" that has trouble
even showing that it was responsible for peppered moth colour changes
and finch-beak length fluctuations needs a big dose of Viagra! :-) If science
cannot know there were not "many other factors, known and unknown"
then it cannot know that an Intelligent Designer has not decisively
intervened in and/or guided the origin and developement of life on Earth
over the last 4 billion years.]
One of the most famous of these extrapolations was the idea of the meme,
tentatively advanced by Dawkins ... In the finest essay of Alas, Poor Darwin - "Why Memes?" - the
philosopher Mary Midgley quietly and amiably takes this absurdity apart ... She also
notes the inhumanity involved in seeing ourselves, as does the meme
prophet Susan Blackmore, as "meme machines" - "constructions produced
by alien viruses for their own purposes and incapable of having any
purposes of their own". This gloating, nihilistic impulse is, in fact, what
lies behind much EP and geno-centrism; it is the simple desire to sneer at
our own sense of what is good and unique in human life.
[Nevertheless, it is in fact the logical conclusion of Darwinism. If the
universe just popped into existence in a quantum fluctuation and "human
life" is "the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not
have" it "in mind" (Simpson), then "what is good and unique in human life"
is ultimately just our species' collective illusion.]
There is much that is good in this book, but the best is Midgley. This
thoughtful old lady taking on these grand, highly paid global figures and
pointing out, quietly and utterly persuasively, that they are wrong about
almost everything is one of the most heartening spectacles in
contemporary intellectual life.
[Midgley is *devastatingly* good at critiquing evolutionism as a
religion (see tagline), but like Appleyard, being an agnostic/atheist she
has nothing to replace it with. I have an article where in order to
discredit Christian theism, she praises Darwin's view of the apes,
neglecting to mention that Darwin predicted they would all have to go
extinct to prove his theory!]
(c) New Statesman Ltd. 1999 All rights reserved.
==========================================================
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But in our own culture, where many people officially have no religion at
all, and those who have can chop and change, new faiths have much more
scope and can become more distinctive. They are hungrily seized on by
people whose lives lack cleaning. When this happens, there arise at once,
unofficially and spontaneously, many elements which we think of as
characteristically religious. We begin, for instance, to find priesthoods,
prophecies devotion, bigotry, exaltation, heresy-hunting and sectarianism,
ritual sacrifice, fanaticism, notions of sin, absolution and salvation, and the
confident promise of a heaven in the future. ...Marxism and evolutionism,
the two great secular faiths of our day, display all these religious-looking
features. They have also, like the great religions and unlike more casual
local faiths, large-scale, ambitious systems of thought, designed to
articulate, defend and justify heir ideas - in short, ideologies." (Midgley M.,
"Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears," [1985],
Methuen: London, 1986, reprint, p.15)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Aug 28 2000 - 18:01:43 EDT