Evolutionary Psychology and Its True Believers

It’s a particular kind of Darwinism that has the left-wingers worried. Twenty-five years ago it ran under the name sociobiology; since then it has been slightly modified and rechristened “evolutionary psychology.” Under either name it is an ambitious enterprise that claims to explain the patterns of human behavior — everything from child-rearing practices to religion to shopping habits — as a consequence of Darwinian natural selection. Sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology, or neo-Darwinism; we can use the terms interchangeably) has become a favorite of such conservative polemicists as Charles Murray, James Q. Wilson, Tom Wolfe, and Francis Fukuyama. At the same time, polemicists on the left compare it to Nazism (polemicists on the left compare lots of things to Nazism, of course, but now they seem to mean it).

Right-wingers suddenly embracing Darwin, while left-wingers try furiously to contain him — we’ve come a long way from the Scopes monkey trial. This makes for one of the more unexpected disputes in recent intellectual history, though it’s hard to keep the sides straight without a program. Luckily, a spate of recent books helps the layman put the bickering in perspective. And as good a place as any to begin is with Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, a collection of essays edited by Hilary and Steven Rose and published late last year.

Hilary is a sociologist, Steven a biologist, but both, more pertinently, are grizzled veterans of the 1960s New Left. So are their contributors, among them the postmodern theorist and architect Charles Jencks and the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Alas, Poor Darwin is merely the latest in a series of essay collections, going back to the late 1970s, that Steven Rose has edited for the purpose of placing sociobiology beyond the bounds of polite society. One of his earlier collections, Not in Our Genes (1984), drew such a blistering review from the sociobiologist Richard Dawkins that Rose threatened to sue for libel. These scientists don’t fool around.

Rose sums up the sociobiological view neatly: “It claims to explain all aspects of human behavior, and then culture and society, on the basis of universal features of human nature that found their final evolutionary form during the infancy of our species some 100,000-600,000 years ago.” Roaming the African savanna for thousands of centuries, homo sapiens adapted to environmental challenges through the process of natural selection, developing the genetic tendencies that shape our behavior today. The application of this view knows no limit. As Rose points out, sociobiology has got into our “cultural drinking water.” It’s not at all unusual to switch on, say, the Today show — if you’re the sort of person who switches on the Today show — and see one or another pop psychologist tracing, say, the American male’s love for golf to the evolutionary development of the species: The golf course’s rolling landscape, dotted with water and clumps of trees, appeals to our genetic memories of the long-ago savanna.

“It is the argument of the authors of this book,” writes Rose in his introduction, “that the claims of [sociobiology] in the fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy are for the most part not merely mistaken, but culturally pernicious” — not just bad science but bad politics, too: right-wing politics. Roughly half the essays in the book are explicitly political, though the political objections bubble unmistakably through the others.

From the progressives’ point of view, the objections are perfectly understandable. Sociobiology aims to identify human nature: genetic, irreversible, “hard-wired” in the current cliche. Essential to the progressive world view, however, is the belief that such an intractable human nature doesn’t exist. Culture, not stubborn nature, determines behavior; change the culture, and human behavior will change along with it. Sociobiology, in other words, strikes at the heart of every large-scale progressive project to remake society.

But it is not merely the suggestion of a universal human nature that unsettles the leftist critics; it is the nature of that nature they really don’t like. The seed of human nature is the “selfish gene.” A gene’s sole purpose is to survive, by whatever means necessary, and so to reproduce itself into further generations; it thus programs the organism to favor some kinds of behavior and shrink from others. As it happens, one behavior that the selfish gene favors is altruism, since an organism’s willingness to help its pals can often serve to perpetuate its genes. But still, much to the chagrin of romantics, the archetypal human sociobiology posits isn’t so much a sensitive, bearded NPR talkshow host as a loud, tank-topped announcer for WWF Smackdowm! You can’t blame liberals for being upset.

This unhappy truth has political consequences, which sociobiology’s most enthusiastic supporters are delighted to specify. Programmed for self-interest, human beings will respond more efficiently to the incentives of the market than to schemes of economic redistribution. Evolution, say sociobiologists, has made women less aggressive and less inclined to sexual promiscuity, men more aggressive and more prone to philandering; the popularizer Robert Wright has even asserted that evolutionary psychology disproves the assumptions of feminism. Similarly, sociobiologists stress the durability of family ties, and many trace the traditional family structure back to genetic impulses. Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist from MIT, says that phonics, as a method of language instruction, conforms much more closely to our mental architecture than the “whole language” approach favored by progressive educators. Edward O. Wilson, a founder of sociobiology (and the “Darwin II,” according to Tom Wolfe), has even argued that a taste for traditional artistic forms — classical architecture, for example — is planted in our genes. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but there are few things on the right-wing wish list that don’t seem to conform with the human nature that sociobiologists claim to have discovered. Up next: Sociobiology proves Alger Hiss was guilty.

As several essayists note in Alas, Poor Darwin, the ascendancy of evolutionary psychology in the late 1970s and 1980s coincided with the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism in our politics. “The political agenda,” writes Rose, “is transparently part of a right-wing libertarian attack on collectivity, above all the welfare state.”

Some of the essayists have another beef: Far worse than playing politics, sociobiologists are practicing religion. Perhaps the most amusing feature of the debates between sociobiologists and their critics is the ferocity with which each side accuses the other of harboring religious sentiments, as though nothing could be more contemptible. When they get really mad the combatants hurl imprecations like “true believer” and “choirmaster.” Stephen Jay Gould calls sociobiologists “Darwinian fundamentalists.” His opposite number, Richard Dawkins, says that critics like Gould are “demonological theologians.” Dorothy Nelkin, a sociologist from New York University, is on Gould’s side. She devotes her essay in Alas, Poor Darwin to arguing that sociobiology is merely religion in disguise and, for that reason (though she doesn’t have to say so explicitly), illegitimate as either science or philosophy.

Given that every prominent sociobiologist, from Pinker to Dawkins to Wilson, has ardently declared his atheism, you might think Nelkin has a difficult case to make. Dawkins, who is the most outspoken in this regard, calls religious belief a “virus of the mind” and says that anyone who believes that the existence of the universe implies the existence of a creator is by definition “scientifically illiterate.” Wilson is emphatic that religion and science are incompatible, and that the practical achievements of science make religion intellectually untenable. Sociobiology routinely dismisses religious belief as a delusion that long ago may have had some “adaptive function,” helping humans to survive and flourish, but which is no longer necessary.

In what sense, then, is evolutionary psychology a religion? “Scientists who call themselves evolutionary psychologists,” Nelkin writes, “are addressing questions about meaning, about why things happen, about the ultimate ground of nature. . . . More than a scientific theory, evolutionary psychology is a quasi-religious narrative, providing a simple and compelling answer to complex and enduring questions concerning the case of good and evil, the basis of moral responsibility and age-old questions about the nature of human nature.”

Anyone familiar with evolutionary psychology will see her point. One of the first things a layman notices upon wading into the literature is the grandiosity of its claims. The titles of the books, by both popularizers and scientists, are spectacular. Wilson himself has written On Human Nature and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge; Robert Wright, who used to be a journalist before he moved on to much, much larger things, writes books with such subtitles as Why We Are the Way We Are and The Logic of Human Destiny. Other sociobiology titles: The Web of Life, Evolution and the Meaning of Life, The Origins of Virtue, and The Biology of Morality. The hyperbole is more than a publisher’s marketing ploy. This is really the way sociobiologists think.

So of course the immodesty extends beyond the titles. “If the theory of natural selection is correct,” Wright wrote, “then essentially everything about the human mind should be intelligible in these [Darwinian] terms. . . . Slowly but unmistakably, a new world view is emerging,” he went on. “Once truly grasped . . . it can entirely alter one’s perception of social reality.” Laura Betzig, editor of a collection of sociobiology essays called, typically enough, Human Nature, introduces the book like so: “It’s happened. We have finally figured out where we come from, why we’re here, and who we are.”

Sociobiology is a theory of simply everything. Darwin’s original version of natural selection was already comprehensive, claiming to account for almost all the physical attributes of the planet’s animal and vegetable life. But evolutionary psychologists extend Darwin’s principle to bear on the mental life and cultural practices of human beings. Like most religions, evolutionary psychology tells a story — a myth, in the sociological sense of the word.

The story begins during the late Pleistocene era back (of course) in the African savanna, or the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation,” as the sociobiologists call it. The EEA is a Garden of Eden for materialists — unimaginably remote, cloaked in mystery, a place of origin where our earliest ancestors, in tribes of hunter-gatherers, did the things that have made us what we are.

By the late Pleistocene, natural selection had already conditioned the human body into the organism we know today — giving it opposable thumbs, upright posture, an enlarged cerebral cortex. But in the EEA the same evolutionary pressures worked on human behavior as well. The organisms that flourished were those whose genes disposed them to behave in ways best adapted to the environment. Consider, for instance, differences in sexual roles — sex being a favorite point of dispute for sociobiologists and their critics.

Life was rough out there on the savanna. Resources were scarce. Given their obvious physiological differences, human females and males developed different strategies for perpetuating their genes. Under the best conditions, women can reproduce only once a year. But men can reproduce without limit. A female organism who was more sexually selective — who chose her mate for his ability to protect her and her off-spring, for example, rather than for his physical attractiveness — enhanced her chances of passing along her genes. As a consequence, women even today are more likely to select a mate for his ability to bring resources to the relationship, and more likely thereafter to savor the nurturing virtues of security and stability. “Coyness,” in the jargon of sociobiology, is the defining characteristic of female sexual behavior.

To spread his genes, however, the male organism requires only a woman young and healthy enough to bear children. A man is thus likely to be much less discriminating sexually. On average, under the same pressures of natural selection, he will also be more competitive than a woman, and more inclined to take risks, as were those hairy hunter-gatherers back in the savanna. He will be more ambitious and more obsessed with status, since gaining status will make him more attractive, which in turn increases his sexual opportunities and his chances for spreading his genes.

For the sociobiologist, the ramifications of this view of sexual roles range from the relatively trivial to the cultural and the political. But the important point is to reduce all of human behavior to evolutionary (and hence genetic) process. This is the sociobiological imperative. For example, an entire field of “Darwinian aesthetics” has sprouted from evolutionary psychology to explain why men like the types of women they do. It turns out that what we consider beautiful in the opposite sex is merely a measure of reproductive fitness. In his well-written textbook Evolution and Human Behavior, published last year, John Cartwright summarizes the latest findings.

Men prefer women with childlike features, Cartwright notes, because a small chin and nose “indicate a low level of testosterone” and thus increased fecundity. Both sexes prefer symmetry in facial features because “symmetry is an indicator of physiological precision, protein heterozygosity and hence resistance to or freedom from pathogens.” The evolutionary psychologist Devendra Singh, meanwhile, discovered that waist to hip ratio (now known as “WHR” in the acronym-happy literature) is an important indicator of child-bearing ability among women. The optimum WHR is 0.7. And that, says Singh, is the waist-to-hip ratio that men around the world, from all cultures, in all regions, prefer in their women. Coincidence? Absolutely not, say the sociobiologists. Nothing will budge them from their scientific discovery that men (on average) would rather have sex with young and pretty women than old and ugly ones.

But sociobiology delivers news even more startling than this. Darwinian theorizing about sex has led Robert Wright and many other sociobiologists to conclude, for example, that “women will never break through the glass ceiling because, biologically, they have less of men’s innate ambition and willingness to take the risks necessary for success.” This paraphrase comes from an essay in Alas, Poor Darwin by Anne Fausto-Sterling, a geneticist and professor of women’s studies, who surveys the sociobiological literature and is not pleased.

She quotes one prominent sociobiologist’s overview of Darwinian sexual roles — that women in the EEA solved the problem of food scarcity during “harsh winters” by “preferring mates who show the ability to accrue resources and to share them.” Leaving aside the question of how those harsh winters reached the African savanna, she asks “the hypothesis-builders of evolutionary psychology at least to postulate at what point in human or hominid history they imagine contemporary reproductive behaviors to have first appeared.” And she has a point. The sociobiologists are unscientifically vague on these and other crucial questions — so vague, indeed, that their “hypotheses” about the origin of sexual roles can’t really be tested, as scientific theories are supposed to be. “Without this greater specification,” she continues, “evaluating competing hypotheses becomes very difficult. . . . Why isn’t it just as likely that the females who passed on more genes to the next generation were the ones who hedged their bets and slept with more than one male?”

To answer Fausto-Sterling’s objection — that natural selection might just as easily have favored promiscuous women over coy women — Cartwright and other sociobiologists can adduce reams of contemporary evidence that show, anecdotally and statistically, that women are indeed, on average, less sexually promiscuous than men. Surely this demonstrates that our ancestors, from whom we got our genetic tendencies, behaved likewise, with women favoring coyness as a strategy for survival in the Pleistocene.

But this (rather obviously) begs the question. Are they arguing forward from the conditions of EEA (the scarcity of resources and women’s limited ability to produce offspring) to predict that women will be coy nowadays? Or are they arguing backward from modern women’s coyness to the conditions of the EEA?

Many of sociobiology’s speculations rest on similar question-begging and circularity. In his textbook, John Cartwright includes dozens of examples, with varying degrees of plausibility. He wonders, for example, why human beings crave salty and fatty foods. Surely this is “non-adaptive,” unhealthy behavior. By sociobiology’s own logic, natural selection should have “selected out” such cravings; that is, organisms who ate too much fat and salt should have perished earlier and so passed on fewer of their genes. But now here we are, millennia after the close of the Pleistocene, neck-deep in chilicheese fries. What happened? Like a good sociobiologist, Cartwright takes a leap into the speculative blue yonder. “Our taste buds,” he says, “were probably a fine piece of engineering for the Old Stone Age when [salty and fatty] foods were in short supply and when to receive a lot of pleasure from their taste was a useful way to motivate us to search out more.”

Aside from being untestable, Cartwright’s theorizing (which he has borrowed from other sociobiologists) tells us only that we like food that tastes good to us. He still hasn’t explained why natural selection has programmed us to prefer unhealthy foods high in fat over healthier foods that are, say, high in protein or rich in complex carbohydrates. One possibility is that not all human behaviors are (or were once) adaptive in Darwinian terms — that our inconvenient food preferences are explainable by other, non-Darwinian means. Maybe our preference for fatty foods didn’t originate in the Stone Age, after all. Maybe it has nothing to do with natural selection.

But this is the kind of heresy that cannot be allowed. Sociobiology is a closed system. As the science writer Edward Skidelsky has pointed out, evolutionary psychologists can’t seem to decide whether theirs is an inductive or deductive science — whether, that is, they are shaping a theory about the past to account for a contemporary fact, or whether they’re asserting that what we know of the past will reveal something about contemporary behavior. In practice, sociobiology moves in both directions, forward or back, depending on what’s required to sustain the reductionist premise: Natural selection must be shown to be the root cause (and often the proximate cause) of whatever tendencies human behavior exhibits.

As a theory, it is one size fits all. In a famous example, Steven Pinker accounted for mothers who kill their newborns by pointing to the pressures of natural selection and reproductive fitness that young mothers suffered back in the EEA. Of course, the same pressures, the same overriding criterion of reproductive fitness, are used to explain why mothers will die for their children. Kill them, die for them: Sociobiology explains it with the same set of theories.

And even then it might not be explaining what it thinks it’s explaining. The assumption that every “universal” disposition is a product of natural selection and thus genetic, rather than a consequence of cultural influence or shared experience or accumulated wisdom, creates as many problems as it solves. Return once more to female sexual coyness: Even if one grants that it is found across cultures, can we be certain that the trait is instinctual?

“It seems just as plausible — if not more so — that these preferences derive from rational, conscious deliberation,” writes the science writer John Horgan, in a thoughtful dissection of evolutionary psychology included in his recent book, The Undiscovered Mind. “By puberty, most females recognize that even if they employ contraception, they are at risk of becoming pregnant during a sexual encounter; it is thus quite rational for females to be more wary of casual sex than males are. Similarly, the female preference for males with resources might simply reflect females’ rational recognition of their relatively precarious economic status and prospects.”

Horgan is guessing, of course. But so are the sociobiologists. Evolutionary psychology generates this kind of unbridled speculation — often it is nothing but speculation — because its standards of evidence are unusually low. Conventional Darwinians, studying the physical development of organisms, have a fossil record (however imperfect) to pore over and argue about. Sociobiologists set themselves a trickier task: They hope to study the history of our behavioral and mental life. And so, in place of the fossil record, they conjure up the EEA. A plausible reconstruction of the EEA is essential to their discipline, since it was there that our genetic natures were formed. To recreate the lives led by the earliest humans, sociobiologists bring in contemporary data about the behavior of primates and ethnographic studies of the few Stone Age tribes that survive today. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the contributors to Alas, Poor Darwin, remarks on the flimsiness of this approach: “How can we possibly know in detail what small bands of hunter-gatherers did in Africa two million years ago? . . . The chief strategy proposed by evolutionary psychologists for identifying adaptation is untestable, and therefore unscientific.”

Sociobiologists are aware of this criticism, of course, and some have even tried to take it into account. As Cartwright points out, the EEA is now most often considered “a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of the ancestral environments encountered by members of ancestral populations.” The EEA has thus been evolving, too — from a real place, the African savanna, to a “statistical composite.” This is probably not progress, scientifically.

Nor does the “ethnographic record” really help; it is much thinner, and often much less suggestive, than sociobiologists pretend. Pinker’s infanticide speculation, published in the New York Times in 1997, offers a good example of how sociobiologists use ethnographic studies. Pinker relied on the work of sociobiology’s favorite ethnographers, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. “If we wish to understand human characteristics,” Daly and Wilson had written, “we should study the hunting and gathering lifestyle in which and for which those characteristics have been shaped by natural selection.” In their book Homicide, to which sociobiologists return again and again, they claimed to have discovered, through a dazzling extrapolation, how our prehistoric ancestors raised infants a million years ago.

How did they discover this? By means of a study, conducted and published in the 1980s, of the San bushmen in the Kalahari desert. Europeans first mingled with the !Kung San several hundred years ago, but certain groups within the larger native population have retained traditional cultural practices that might date back to the Stone Age. Then again, they might not. No matter. The study showed that during the 1980s, !Kung San women on average had babies several years apart, nursed them for as many as four years, and averaged five births over their reproductive lives.

“The general features of a !Kung San woman’s reproductive career,” Wilson and Daly asserted, “are indeed representative of hunter-gatherers and of the life history that characterized Homo for thousands of millennia.” There is no way to know whether or not this statement is true; it is just surmise. But Pinker then passed it on to his popular audience in the New York Times: “Until very recently in human evolutionary history,” Pinker announced confidently, “mothers nursed their children for two to four years.”

No, no, no: The only thing that can be confidently said here is that in the 1980s, a small number of primitive women in the African desert (not even the savanna!) nursed their children for four years. We have learned nothing with any certainty about “human evolutionary history.” But this is how sociobiology works: A conjecture becomes an assumption, an assumption morphs into fact, and the fact is then used to prove the conjecture. Or you can characterize it this way, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith does in Alas, Poor Darwin: The sociobiological method “is a process of self-enclosed speculation directed by a set of mutually determining, mutually validating assumptions, descriptions, and hypotheses . . . a virtual prescription for self-affirming circularity.”

There’s nothing particularly startling about bad science. More often than not, though, good science intercepts it before the media conveyor belt can carry it into the popular imagination. This hasn’t happened with sociobiology. It has gone (to switch to Steven Rose’s metaphor) straight into the drinking water, and conservative publicists in particular have drunk deep. Dorothy Nelkin is right that sociobiology is a religion, if one means by this a worldview that must invoke faith at those points where reason and evidence fail it. But what the left-wing critics understand that the right-wing enthusiasts fail to grasp is that sociobiology is a particularly pernicious religion. It is a theory of everything, aiming to explain all of human life — but only in the most cramped and desiccated terms.

Evolutionary psychologists like to reduce human love to a genetic survival strategy: genes calling out to other genes in a bid for self-perpetuation. But most other nonmaterial aspects of human experience elude them. For example, sociobiology has come up with no explanation, plausible within its own system, for music (“auditory cheesecake,” Pinker lamely calls it). It cannot account for acts of kindness performed between strangers. It cannot account for Mother Teresa. It cannot account for literature, poetry, the arts generally, or, for that matter, religion itself. It cannot account, in other words, for the richness of life.

Among its desiccations, one of the most ominous is its account of morality. This would seem of particular interest to cultural conservatives, who claim to have a special interest in instilling virtue, maintaining civilization, securing the sanctity of life — that sort of thing. But for sociobiologists, a system of moral values is just another genetic artifact, shaped by natural selection, a survival strategy cleverly disguised. “Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate,” wrote the Darwin II, Edward O. Wilson. As it turns out, the workaday experience of human beings is a tangle of illusions. Darwinian theory, especially as applied in sociobiology, has been hailed by its enthusiasts as the “universal acid” that erodes all such mental errors.

It is crucial to the scheme of sociobiology that human organisms are utterly mistaken in their most fundamental understandings of themselves. We’re chumps, duped by natural selection. As a branch of materialism, sociobiology teaches, of course, that life is random and pointless. Yet a belief in life’s purpose is often “adaptive” — a way of preserving the organism and spreading its genes. And so we succumb. A belief that moral precepts are rooted in something beyond mere self-interest can be adaptive, too. But the sociobiologist knows that this view is mistaken. Ethical precepts, as Wilson puts it, are “entirely material products of the mind,” constructed as the organism tries to preserve and reproduce itself. The organism’s belief in its own free will is likewise fallacious: a trick that the organism plays on itself.

Perhaps the organism’s most consequential mistake is the intuition that it possesses some kind of unitary, irreducible identity — a self. No such identity can survive the universal acid. The self too is a trick the organism plays on itself to survive. A belief in a “self” is adaptive; an organism that conceives of itself as an independent entity, an enduring identity, will increase its chances of survival. But the belief is an illusion. Under the pitiless investigation of the sociobiologist, the self turns out to be a conflation of material processes, all of which are themselves the product of natural selection.

How then — in the absence of a self, without objective categories of right and wrong and the ability to choose freely among them — how is moral reasoning to proceed? The sociobiologists answer with near unanimity: We are to pretend that what science tells us is true, is false. Ethical theory, properly understood, is a game of as if: We proceed as if we were free, irreducible, unitary selves making choices for which we deserve to be held responsible, even though the sociobiologists know those selves and those choices to be nonexistent.

As the journalist Matt Ridley puts it in Genome (subtitled, with typical sociobiological modesty, The Autobiography of a Species), they are “necessary fictions.” “Full responsibility for one’s actions,” Ridley writes, “is a necessary fiction without which the law would flounder, but it’s a fiction all the same.” Just don’t tell anybody! And sociobiology itself shows us why maintaining these fictions isn’t so difficult. Robert Trivers, R. D. Alexander, and many other well-known sociobiologists claim to have proved that deceiving ourselves on precisely these matters is an evolved adaptation. We are programmed to think we’re not programmed. We are designed to be chumps.

Of course sociobiologists, especially those with a popularizing bent, rouse themselves occasionally to sing hymns to the beauty and complexity and elegance of life as revealed by their discoveries, rhapsodizing about how ennobling it is to live in a random, pointless universe, where a person’s most basic beliefs about himself are misinterpretations of purely material activities. But it’s fair to say that the sociobiological worldview strikes ordinary people as pretty creepy. Which makes it all the queerer that so many conservatives have rushed to embrace this latest manifestation of Darwinism.

“Conservatives need Charles Darwin,” wrote Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, in a recent issue of the journal First Things. “Adopting a Darwinian view of human nature and ethics would have both theoretical and practical benefits for conservatism.” First, it would “provide a solid basis for conservative political thought.” Conservatives can at last find support for the traditional idea of natural moral law in the very latest findings of science rather than in the dreamy wish-fulfillment of metaphysics. Second, says Arnhart, a “Darwinian conservatism” would sustain conservative ideas in public policy. He concedes that Darwinism doesn’t “prescribe specific policies.” Nevertheless, he offers some ideas of how Darwinian insights might be applied in the areas of crime control (“channel the male propensities [of young, unmarried men] into socially acceptable behavior”), family life (“regulate sexual mating, conjugal bonding, and parental attachment”), and military policy (“natural differences . . . will always impede any attempt to eliminate sexual differences in military service”).

But do any of these policy ideas, vague as they are, really require bringing out the heavy artillery of either natural law or Darwinian science? Surely they can be judged and decided on empirical grounds, among others. Even if you accept uncritically the claims of sociobiology, as its conservative champions always do, the support derived for particular policies is much wobblier than they might hope. Does sociobiology suggest that many traditional social arrangements are rooted in evolution? Marvelous — how nice to learn that they are not, after all, the consequence of the powerful classes exploiting the weak. But what does this sociobiological insight (assuming it is an insight) tell us about the merit, the justice of traditional social arrangements? Nothing, alas. The argument for traditional marriage, social hierarchies, and so on, and the arguments against radical egalitarianism, left-wing feminism, and so on, will have to be made by other means. Which leaves us right back where we started.

Even some sociobiologists acknowledge the problem. In an interview quoted in Ullica Segerstrale’s Defenders of the Truth, a very long account of the sociobiology wars, Richard Dawkins goes on at some length about this mistake — an error made, as he notes, by both critics of sociobiology and its most enthusiastic supporters, who “are too stupid to understand the distinction between what one says about the way the world is, scientifically, and the way it ought to be politically.”

Here’s an example of how difficult it is to keep the sides straight in the sociobiology debates. Dawkins is the scourge of sociobiology’s left-wing critics. But he is also a self-described man of the “liberal left.” The same goes for Robert Trivers, a founder of sociobiology, and for two of the most prominent neo-Darwinian popularizers — the socialist economist Robert Frank and Peter Singer, the “controversial bioethicist,” as the newspapers like to describe him. Together they constitute a left-wing rump of the sociobiology movement. And it seems they understand the ramifications of their creed far better than its enthusiasts on the right.

This is especially true of Singer, whose 1999 monograph A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation, offers a fitting note on which to close this survey of sociobiology and its critics. “Can the left swap Marx for Darwin?” Singer catchily asked. His answer is a resounding: You bet. “The left needs a new paradigm,” he wrote, in a mirror image of Arnhart’s assertion that “conservatives need Charles Darwin.” And the new paradigm is sociobiology (though he rejects the term itself, presumably because it is ideologically fraught). “It is time,” Singer goes on, “for the Left to take seriously the fact that we are evolved animals, and that we bear the evidence of our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but in our behavior too.”

This fact, says Singer, demands that leftists make a few concessions. They should acknowledge that certain kinds of behavior — sex roles in child-rearing, for example — are cross-cultural and probably arise from a fixed human nature. They should abandon their belief in the perfectibility of man and other utopian schemes. But once these concessions to science are granted, Singer makes clear, the old socialist agenda can advance unimpeded. His Darwinian argument for the redistribution of wealth and the equalization of incomes is too elaborate to be recounted here, but it is no more implausible than the arguments made by right-wing Darwinians for, say, the free market.

What is most interesting is the depth of Singer’s devotion to sociobiology, to the “Darwinian paradigm.” It is interesting, but not surprising. He believes that the enduring value of sociobiology will be its use in the “debunking or discrediting of politically influential, non-Darwinian beliefs and ideas.” Prominent among these is the distinction that has traditionally been made between human beings and animals. “Speciesism” is a word that Peter Singer, like many sociobiologists, takes seriously and employs liberally as an imprecation. “Darwinian thinking,” he writes, “tells us that we have been too ready to assume a fundamental difference in kind between human beings and nonhuman animals.” With Darwin as our guide to understanding human beings, we are prepared for a “revolution in our attitudes.”

Students of Singer will be familiar with this argument, and where it leads. The reason the newspapers nowadays tag Singer as a “controversial bioethicist” is that he is — to put it more plainly — the world’s most celebrated advocate of infanticide. “Killing Babies Isn’t Always Wrong” was the title of a famous essay he published in the London Spectator in 1995. Singer’s line of reasoning goes roughly like this: If we leave aside the arbitrary bias of speciesism, we see that moral respect is owed to organisms on the basis of their attributes. We agree that any being that can reason, that can recognize others, that possesses some form of self-consciousness is a being worthy of moral respect.

Singer believes, with good reason, that sociobiology validates his new, non-speciesist understanding. That understanding has both philosophical and practical effects. One philosophical consequence is to elevate the moral status of animals, like cats and dogs, who possess some form of self-consciousness and can recognize others over time. Another is to lower the moral status of human beings, like Alzheimer’s victims, newborn infants, and the mentally disabled, who may not possess such attributes. He worries about “granting every member of our own species — psychopaths, infants, and the profoundly intellectually disabled included — a moral status superior to that of dogs, pigs, chimpanzees, and dolphins.” The practical consequences are just as direct. Singer has no trouble advocating euthanasia for old people with reduced mental capacities. He has no trouble advocating a twenty-eight-day waiting period for parents to assess the mental and biological health of a newborn, before deciding whether to let it live.

Nothing in sociobiology requires an acceptance of infanticide or euthanasia, needless to say, any more than it requires political conservatism or liberalism. But Peter Singer is the real thing: a True Believer in the new Darwinian faith.

And it isn’t hard to see why sociobiology is Singer’s religion of choice. Subtly and quietly, it removes the barriers that have traditionally stood in the way of “controversial” views like his — barriers put in place by other, older religions. The new Darwinism may tell us nothing about whether women should serve in the military, or whether family-friendly tax credits are a good idea, or how much income should be redistributed to whom and why. But it does try to tell us what a human being is — and isn’t. And before too long, after a few more years in the drinking water, its “controversial” views won’t seem controversial at all.

 

Evolution and Human Behavior:

Darwinian Perspectives on Human Behavior

by John Cartwright

MIT Press, 376 pp., $ 60

 

The Undiscovered Mind

How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation

by John Horgan

Free Press, 288 pp., $ 25

 

Alas, Poor Darwin

Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology

edited by Hilary and Steven Rose

Harmony, 352 pp., $ 25

 

Genome

The Autobiography of s Species

by Matt Ridley

HarperCollins, 344 pp., $ 26

 

Defenders of the Truth

The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond

by Ullica Segerstrale

Oxford University Press, 464 pp., $ 30

 

A Darwinian Left

Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation

by Peter Singer

MIT Press, 370 pp., $ 9.95

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.