Sense and Nonsense by Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown, Oxford University Press, 拢16.95, ISBN 0198508840
IN 1975 a book changed the landscape of the social and biological sciences. Edward O. Wilson鈥檚 mammoth 697-page Sociobiology: A new synthesis lumbered off the press at Harvard University and caused a sensation. Wilson鈥檚 audacious final chapter proposed that natural selection for survival and reproductive success could lie behind human kinship practices, cooperation, mate preferences, our thoughts and our culture.
Was he right? Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown evaluate the flood of Darwinian scholarship applied to human culture that followed Wilson鈥檚 revolution. How much of our behaviour, ideas, thoughts, predilections, and practices can feed the seemingly insatiable appetite of Darwinism? Where do we stand?
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The authors have chosen a subject racked by tendentious debate. Journalists and endless rounds of social scientists, literary critics and poets appearing on radio and television programmes are kept busy serving it up for the chattering classes. But most of their interpretations are remarkable for their ignorance, and their arguments seldom move beyond the achingly unsophisticated presumption of the evils of genetic determinism. A few are motivated by the political agendas of a small group that seeks to distort or withhold information from the public because it would abuse such knowledge.
A deeper answer requires the sort of book that Laland and Brown have written: a methodical, fair and thoughtful treatment of the big sociobiological questions. Although deliberately pluralist in its stance, Sense and Nonsense is not of the anodyne and excessively timid school of writers who devise textbooks designed not to tread on anyone鈥檚 toes. Neither is it of the 鈥渁 scholar is a library鈥檚 way of making another library鈥� pop-science variety.
What Laland and Brown show is that major intellectual and philosophical themes of the Darwinian view of human nature and behaviour are replacing those that went before them. What are the tenets of this new world view? We do have a human nature (few of us would wish to live like a bat or a naked mole rat, regardless of how we were brought up). Like it or not, all signs point to the fact that a significant number of our best and worst tendencies may have a basis in our genes. Equally, there is good reason to believe cultural practices such as patterns of wealth inheritance and marriage patterns, which were traditionally the preserve of the social anthropologists, can be understood as adaptive responses to varying environmental conditions, even if not genetically programmed.
Laland and Brown write clearly and calmly. Their analysis should dispel the nonsense surrounding this subject. On these grounds alone, I recommend everyone with some influence or interest in popular culture read this book. We鈥檙e still feeling the effects of the revolution Wilson helped to create, and the intellectual fault lines can still reverberate. But Laland and Brown鈥檚 pluralistic approach may signal human evolutionary studies are, like their predecessors on other animals, becoming 鈥渘ormal science鈥� in a Kuhnian sense. It is time for the debates on these subjects to move to a higher plane. Sense and Nonsense is a good place to start.