Darwin’s Legacy: What Evolution Means Today
by John Dupré
OUP, £7.99 (pbk), ISBN 0-19-928421-0
Dupré, a philosopher of biology, asks: “What does evolution tell us about ourselves and our world?”. His answer is: nothing. After several rather banal and unoriginal chapters on religion and basic evolutionary theory that Dupré patronisingly states will be ‘the heaviest going for the lay reader’, we learn that empiricism and Darwinian naturalism leave no room for ‘superstitious mythologies’ like religion. So far, so obvious. His main theory is that gene selection and evolutionary psychology are reductive and just plain wrong because, along with natural selection, they fail to explain human diversity.
His proposal is that cultural evolution happens faster than physical evolution; learning and environmental factors play significant roles in the development of the individual. He says: it is hard to separate biological and social causes of IQ scores, that the behaviour of the sexes is culturally determined, that language makes us different from other animals because it allows the development of more complex cultures and that “no history of the giraffe’s neck (…) is independent of the history of the giraffe”. Then he says: “If it is part of our biology, the thought goes, we might as well just learn to live with it. No such implication is necessary, however”. These blindingly obvious statements and platitudes are offered up as a challenge to mainstream evolutionary thinking. They are in fact more indicative of Dupré’s willfully narrow reading of current theory and his over-reaction to it.
While he is right to warn against convenient, over-simplified comparisons between human and animal behaviour, the comparison is not as inherently “flawed”, “suspect” and useless as he claims. His big conclusion, that “development must somehow be put back into our view of evolution”, ignores three things. Firstly, that to respond to learning and the environment we need evolved (genetic) capabilities; secondly, that natural selection is a response to the environment; and thirdly, that the majority of evolutionists are more than aware of the effect of both environment and learning on the individual. His targets, with almost no exceptions, do not exist.
Tessa Kendall
