book reviews

sociological stories that are even more with determinism but impossible without it. problematic. Rose and Rose ask in their intro- A minor theme of this anthology is post- Genes, free will and duction why evolutionary psychology has modernism, represented by a hodgepodge of become so popular in recent decades. Their views that emphasizes the power of language intracranial musings answer is that it is the result of the “search for and downplays the sort of knowledge provid- Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments new apparent certainties” as “old seeming ed by science — “facts are socially construct- against Evolutionary Psychology certainties and indeed hopes for a more ed”. At one extreme, this claim can mean that edited by Hilary Rose and Steven P. R. Rose socially just future have crumbled”. I fail to see we can construct the empirical world in any Jonathan Cape: 2000. 242 pp. £17.99 how that is any less of a just-so story than the way we see fit. Having paralysed legs is a ‘dis- David L. Hull ones the book’s authors decry. ability’ only if one defines it that way. A more The basis of many objections to evolu- reasonable position is that, in the vast major- The major theme of this anthology is that tionary psychology is the ancient philosophi- ity of human environments, having paral- the work of evolutionary psychologists, the cal problem of free will. Biological (genetic) ysed legs is certainly an impediment, but dis- lineal descendants of sociobiologists, is too determinism seems to preclude human abling environments also play a central role. simplistic to handle the incredibly complex beings, at least occasionally, from acting As we design buildings and sidewalks to phenomena they purport to explain. These freely: ‘It’s not my fault; my genes made me do accommodate wheelchairs, having paralysed critics round up the usual suspects (such as it’. Instead, they emphasize the role of the legs becomes less disabling. E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Dan Den- environment. But environmental determin- Charles Jencks’ paper is the only contri- nett, Helena Cronin, John Tooby and Leda ism is no less deterministic: ‘It’s not my fault; bution that is post-modern throughout. One Cosmides) and raise familiar objections to my environment made me do it’. The next of the strengths of post-modernists is that the usual conceptual culprits (genetic deter- step is to recognize that genes and environ- many of them write entertainingly. After all, minism, reductionism, gene selectionism, mental variables are intimately intertwined: many of the elements of post-modernism Panglossian adaptationism, and so on). ‘It’s not my fault; my intimately intertwined came from literary criticism. In spite of As always, the authors involved in these genes and environment made me do it’. myself, I enjoyed Jencks’ intracranial disputes caricature one another’s views but Although a desire to establish the musings as he sat through a paper being object to being caricatured themselves. For existence of free will seems to motivate sev- delivered by E. O. Wilson — or “Mr. Darwin”, example, Dawkins claims that genes are self- eral authors in this book, none of them as Tom Wolfe baptized him. His remarks are replicating entities. Steven Rose spends sever- presents much in the way of a satisfactory playful, but have bite. I also enjoyed Mary al pages arguing that genes are not literally defence of free will. Nor have professional Midgley’s paper, but for the opposite reason; ‘self’ replicating — for starters, all sorts of philosophers over the past two millennia it was measured and considerate. additional cellular constituents are needed — been any more successful. To paraphrase one Rose and Rose’s introduction claims as if Dawkins thought that a strand of DNA all philosopher, free will is not only compatible that the anthology combines criticisms of by itself on a glass slide might suddenly start replicating. Rose admits that Dawkins knows all this, but goes on to complain that the tenor of Dawkins’ writing leads his readers to ignore these other constituents. EVANS MARY Authors engaged in controversies such as this one are seldom charitable in interpreting each others’ prose. In addition, they seem to vacillate between strong and weak versions of their views. Genes are the fundamental units of replication. Genes are the fundamental units of selection. All there is to selection is replication. Misrepresentation and equivo- cation over precisely what is meant are so common that one need not be a Panglossian adaptationist to suspect that such practices are doing some good. One ‘just-so’ story is that it helps authors to clarify their ideas as they reformulate them under the pressure of being misconstrued. Regardless of our desire, few of us know precisely what we mean when we are developing new ideas. Seeing what others have taken us to mean forces us to re- evaluate our earlier pronouncements. The critics of evolutionary psychology are also of two minds when it comes to such just- so stories. Gabby Dover complains that in “modern-day story-telling we are free to imagine any ecological ‘lock’ in the distant days of hunting and gathering by our proto- human ancestors to which the ‘key’ of con- temporary behaviour (such as sexuality, aggression, fear, parental investment) has been selectively fashioned”. But then, these critics of biological just-so stories provide How did the elephant get its trunk? But just-so stories extend well beyond Kipling’s collection. © 2000 Macmillan Magazines Ltd 124 NATURE | VOL 406 | 13 JULY 2000 | www.nature.com book reviews evolutionary psychology with the develop- ment of alternative explanatory perspectives. However, the book’s subtitle is “Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology”, and the

contributions in this anthology are primarily BETTMANN/CORBIS critical in character. Nothing like the detailed, highly confirmed theories that the book’s contributors demand of evolutionary psy- chologists can be found in these pages for ‘alternative perspectives’. We get hints, and explanations of why we are given only hints, but that is it. The phenomena are all too com- plicated to do more. The mistake evolution- ary psychologists make is to provide simplistic explanations for such complex phenomena. A famous historian of science claimed in 1950 that hereditary phenomena are so com- plicated that no molecule could ever do what genes are supposed to do. A couple of years later, James Watson and Francis Crick came up with an amazingly simple molecule. The immune system is extremely complicated — so complicated that I cannot claim to under- stand it very well — but it is there to be under- stood, no matter how complicated it might be. Rose and Rose remark that “bad theory can never be driven out solely by criticism”. If so, the critics of evolutionary psychology could make better use of their time by developing these alternative theories, no matter how complicated they turn out to be. Repeating overly familiar criticisms of evolutionary psy- chology and sociobiology is unlikely to have much effect. For all their crudity and lack of sophistication, evolutionary psychologists keep churning out book after book, paper after paper, both popular and technical. They are not content to carp on the sidelines. I David L. Hull is in the Department of Philosophy, Down and out: unemployed workers demonstrate in 1932 over ‘technological unemployment’. Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA. Depression was steadily cleansing American Amy Sue Bix’s impressive book provides a business of its accumulated laziness, ineffi- rich historical and contemporary context for ciency and technological obsolescence, even comments such as Ford’s. No historian before within the automobile industry; and second, her has examined systematically what she the so-called contemporary ‘Machine Age’ rightly calls the American debate over the role Crushed by the was just beginning and would eventually of machines in either reducing or increasing create unparalleled long-term prosperity. jobs. Far from being decided by the early Frankenstein monster Ford took particular exception to the 1980s, moreover, that debate continues in Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? growing notion that machines of all kinds our high-tech era, as Bix makes clear. America’s Debate over were putting ever more people out of work But Bix’s focus is the 1920s and ’30s, when, Technological Unemployment, and that ‘technological unemployment’ — for the first time in American history, the pub- 1929–1981 as this phenomenon had begun to be termed lic made inventors, scientists and engineers as by Amy Sue Bix — was the wave of the future. “It is non- responsible for economic bad times as greedy Johns Hopkins University Press: 2000. sense,” Ford argued, “to call the machine a industrialists. Previously, only the Andrew 376 pp. $45, £35 Frankenstein monster which is crushing its Carnegies and John D. Rockefellers had been Howard P. Segal creator.” On the contrary, the Ford Motor condemned. The Thomas Edisons and Company’s “experience for thirty years is George Westinghouses had not only escaped On 1 February 1933, at the height of the that every time we reduced the number of any blame but had been elevated to hero Great Depression, the New York Times pub- men on a given job, and thus lowered costs, stature. Now, however, even President lished a front-page interview with car-maker we had to hire even more men on account of Herbert Hoover, long praised as the “Great Henry Ford. As unprecedented numbers of increased business”. Equally important, the Engineer”, was not spared. The very techno- Americans endured economic catastrophe, machines that brought about such changes logical expertise he had brought to govern- Ford proclaimed that these were “not bad “must be built by other machines, and it ment service years before, as a distinguished times but good ones”, and that the nation was takes men to build them and other highly mining engineer and then visionary social “on the threshold of an inconceivably bright paid men to design them”. As the Machine engineer, now haunted him as he proved in- future”. Ford based his seemingly perverse Age evolved, there would be ample employ- capable of alleviating, much less preventing, position on two principal points: first, the ment for all, including women. America’s greatest economic crisis. © 2000 Macmillan Magazines Ltd NATURE | VOL 406 | 13 JULY 2000 | www.nature.com 125