Alas, Poor Darwin - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099283190 ISBN 13: 9780099283195

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

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About this title

Review:

Turf battles are always interesting and occasionally enlightening. Social scientists have been fairly slow in responding to the encroachment of biologically oriented evolutionary psychology, but they have come to mount a vigorous defense against what they perceive to be an oversimplified and dehumanizing theoretical scheme. Alas, Poor Darwin, edited by sociologist Hilary Rose and neuroscientist Steven P.R. Rose, collects essays from scientists and social critics united in their disdain for the extremes of such EP proponents as Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson. Though many writers rely on arguments based on our seemingly innate revulsion for determinism, often enough they rise up out of their easy rhetoric to score more legitimate points. Evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, for example, reprises his spandrel metaphor to show that not all biological features were forged in the fires of natural selection. Unfortunately, the reader has to wait until the book's end for the only critique of evolutionary psychology that is both thorough and scientific; Steven Rose's piece is engaging and challenging, pursuing the invaders back to their own territory using the only arguments they're likely to take seriously. Alas, Poor Darwin won't fully satisfy any reader, but it will provoke thought, discussion, and probably more argument among all who are interested in the nature of human nature. --Rob Lightner

From the Inside Flap:

In recent years, the claims of genetics and evolutionary psychology to explain and indeed legislate on the human condition have been loudly trumpeted in a host of popular books. Genes are said to account for almost every aspect of our lives. Evolution is supposed to explain alleged human universals, from male philandering and female coyness to children's dislike of spinach. There are even claimed to be genes that account for differences between people -- from sexual orientation to drug addiction, aggression, religiosity, and job satisfaction. It appears that Darwin, at least in the hands of his popularizers, has replaced Marx and Freud as the great interpreter of human existence.

Biologists, social scientists, and philosophers have begun to rebel against this undisciplined approach to their different understandings of the world, demonstrating that the claims of evolutionary psychology rest on shaky empirical evidence, flawed premises, and unexamined political presuppositions. In this groundbreaking book, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose have gathered the leading and outspoken critics of this fashionable ideology in a shared and uniquely cross-disciplinary project. Contributors range from biologists Stephen Jay Gould, Gabriel Dover, Patrick Bateson, and Anne Fausto-Sterling; to anthropologists and sociologists Dorothy Nelkin, Tim Ingold, Tom Shakespeare, and Ted Benton; to philosopher Mary Midgley and cultural critics Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Charles Jencks.

The result of this joint work, Alas Poor Darwin, is a sharply engaged, accessible, and highly entertaining critique of evolutionary psychology's tenets. What emerges is a new perspective that challenges the reductionism of evolutionary psychology and offers a richer understanding of the biosocial nature of the human condition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0099283190
• ISBN 13: 9780099283195
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Steven Rose, Hilary Rose