Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong

Book Description

Marc Hauser's eminently readable and comprehensive book Moral Minds is revolutionary. He argues that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Experience tunes up our moral actions, guiding what we do as opposed to how we deliver our moral verdicts.

For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that moral judgments arise from rational and voluntary deliberations about what ought to be. The common belief today is that we reach moral decisions by consciously reasoning from principled explanations of what society determines is right or wrong. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is founded entirely on experience and education, developing slowly and subject to considerable variation across cultures. In his groundbreaking book, Hauser shows that this dominant view is illusory.

Combining his own cutting-edge research with findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, he examines the implications of his theory for issues of bioethics, religion, law, and our everyday lives.

Customer Reviews:

Natural Morality.......2007-09-17

Over the last decade the study of the human brain has moved out of the leafy halls of academia into many different fields, including ethics and the law. If socially unacceptable behavior is being driven by some wiring problem in the brain, is a person legally liable? Or is the brain just one part of the chain of causes with learning and experience playing a larger part? The lion's share of the evidence indicates that genes and the brain determine how we interact with the environment rather than determining how we behave, but there is still a great deal of research that needs to be done.

This book has been getting a lot of attention and for a very good reason: not only is it a well-written account by someone who is an exceptionally clear thinker, but the implications of his book stretch far beyond simple academic discussions: they have implications not only for neuroscience, but for ethics, spirituality and the law.

Marc Hauser is a biologist at Harvard and in this book he argues that the human moral sense is inbuilt and the product of evolution, much like our capacity for language. He suggests that the structure of our minds - or at least our brains - reflect our egalitarian hunter-gatherer past and reveals "left over circuitry from the cavemen."

Hauser begins by contrasting three approaches to moral thinking:
The first was espoused by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century, who proposed that we follow a categorical imperative. In Kant's view, we could and should live by the Golden Rule, treating others as we would have them treat us, and never using people merely as a means to something else.

The second approach was proposed by the eighteen century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who came to the conclusion that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. So if we do something because we are frustrated or angry, we should be castigated and punished because we failed to express out true nature.

The third approach is that of the political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls - like the Harvard linguist Noam Chomsky - proposed that there are deep similarities between language and morality. Chomsky believes that we are hardwired to understand and produce language, while Rawls believes that we all have an innate moral faculty. What that means is that we are all born with an ability to form moral judgments, and that we do not simply embrace the views of our family, tribe or church. The rub is this: because it is an innate ability bred of countless millennia of evolution, we often have no idea why we hold the views they we do.

The parallels between our innate morality and language are explored in this book.

When a twenty-nine year old Chomsky produced his first book in 1957 it created a firestorm of protest as well as some enthusiastic acceptance. We know that people the world over utter grammatical sentences in their own language, but it had been assumed that it began as simple mimicry: children copied the language, syntax and grammar of their parents and others. But Chomsky proposed that the ability is hardwired into the structure of the brain, and that is why we have little or no insight into how grammar works. By analogy, Hauser proposes that children and adults construct moral codes and make judgments without any insight into their reasons for doing so.

Hauser is an acclaimed academic, and it is no surprise that he supports his hypothesis with an array of thought-provoking examples, some better known than others.

One of the better known has been used in psychology and philosophy classes for years. It is the Trolley Problem, taken from a classic set of moral dilemmas proposed by the philosopher Phillipa Foot. The story goes like this. A bystander named Denise is a passenger on an out-of-control railway trolley, which is speeding down the track with an incapacitated driver. The vehicle is heading directly toward five people on the track ahead, bringing with it certain death. Denise can flip a switch that would turn the trolley onto a sidetrack with just one person on it. That one person will die, saving the other five. Should she flip the switch? Hauser's own intuition is that she should, and he marshals various moral arguments to support him.

But now comes the second part. Consider another bystander named Frank. He is on a footbridge over the same railway trolley with the same five endangered people. On the bridge is a large man whom Frank can push off the bridge and so stop the trolley and save the five. Should he do so? Should he sacrifice one man to save five?

Here Hauser's view is that he should not. But exactly why not? Is it because of Denise and Frank's intentions? Is it because Frank would be using the man as a means? In each case the result is the same, one person is killed and five are saved. This is interesting, not as an academic exercise, but because most people come up with similar responses to the dilemma.

Here is another example: what if a surgeon can save the lives of five dying people by taking organs from one perfectly healthy person? Almost no one says that this action is justified, but why not? In fact when such a thing was actually done during the Holocaust, the prosecutors at Nuremberg considered it to be one of the most egregious of all the crimes committed. The utter breakdown of agreed moral norms during those dark years and continuing depravity in some parts of the world remains a challenge for philosophers and scientists to this day; including the author of this book.

Hauser is evidently a good teacher, and he constructs a number of variations of these themes to show us that, with the kinds of exceptions that I just mentioned, the intuitions of very different people are usually much the same. Second. He shows how difficult it is to provide logical justifications for those intuitions. Like all good teachers he includes some personal disclosures, and tells an amusing tale about his own father, who, despite being an intelligent and well-educated physicist, became confused and frustrated when he tried to find logical justifications for his immediate responses.

Hauser reviews evidence from different cultures and from his own research using an online Moral Sense Test, to show how little judgments vary between people of different backgrounds and cultures.

This leads to another important similarity between language and morality. Languages are not chaotic: they follow certain constraints. All known languages follow a set of universal principles. But there are also a set of variable parameters that include the order of words, different ways of making plurals, gender attributions and all those other nuances that can frustrate anyone trying to master a foreign language. Hauser argues that it is the same with morality: there are universal principles and culture-bound parameters. He continues the parallels to point out that as with a language, once people acquire their specific moral grammar, other grammars may seem as incomprehensible as does Japanese to a native English speaker.

He illustrates his thesis with valuable discussions about murder and manslaughter, the treatment of women in different cultures, attitudes to abortion, euthanasia, pedophilia and incest, together with notions of fairness and punishment.

The book is illustrated by some delightful little drawings that do an excellent job of breaking up the narrative.

Marc Hauser if a very good writer and the book is not a difficult read, despite weighing in at over 400 closely reasoned pages. He makes many points that need to be heard. Not only by his colleagues and by people curious to understand more about themselves and those around them, but also by politicians, lawyers and ethicists.

Highly recommended.

Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life

A poor collection of sophomoric philosophy.......2007-04-01

In a grand way Marc Hauser represents centuries of philosophy intermingled with anecdotes from psychological, anthropological, and economic research. Unfortunately, what he doesn't do is provide a scientific grounding for understanding moral choice.

To understand why people call things right and wrong you need to start with the biology of learning, expectation, and cognition. Given that we are just barely now scratching the surface of these topics Hauser's attempt was bound to fail. His own morals pervade the book and act as logical starting points for his arguments, but rarely does he act as a scientist and dismiss his own morality to seek out the real question which is, "How does the brain create a sense of right and wrong, and is there any definitive proof that there is a universal biological morality?"

Neuroscience tells us that there are very few things we are hardwired to do that we cannot unlearn or adapt to deal with our environments. Hauser spectacularly fails to convince that any moral code is anything other than a learned societal norm.

great idea, poor execution.......2007-03-31

I agree with Rick: great idea, poor execution. Various moral and social systems have long tried to codify and explain away through religious and other naratives what is only natural to us. Kudos to Mark Hauser for bringing our innate "moral organ" to broad attention.

His writing however is another matter. I suggest, read his introductory chapter "What Is Wrong?" and then cherry-pick from the rest of the book as much of the following material is highly repetitive. This is topic waiting to be tackled again by another, stronger writer.

Placing morals into the biological realm where they belong.......2007-03-23

This book affirms something that I have thought true for some time now - that morality is governed by instinctual paradigms in healthy individuals. Hearing from birth and from right-wing sources on the news daily that our morality can only be saved by a reversion to "biblical" mores, I had always wondered why the statistics do not back this "moral majority" up. For instance, in countries like Sweden and Iceland and many other European nations where secularism is high, they have much lower rates of crime and their citizens are just as happy if not more so than the average Sunday-bible-toting-American who thinks they have a "higher" version of morality than the "godless heathen."

Hauser cites empirical data that shows that morality is often operating at an unconscious level in human beings as evidenced by tests where subjects make a moral choice but then can offer only incoherent justifications. Hauser's parallel to our "Language Instinct" here is spot on, given that most native speakers can form perfectly grammatical sentences, but if asked about detailed grammatical structures and relationships, they fail miserably. This, I think, is one reason that religion enjoys its ascendant status (at least in America) in regards to morality. Religion is an overt manifestation of moral principles, something people otherwise have little or no conscious access to. It doesn't matter how outdated or ridiculous religious "morals" are, people will cling to them because in their minds it is the only available source of a description of morality. The faster that science can describe these principles, the better off humanity will be.

Taking in relevant topics from moral philosophy, economics, psychology, and of course, the meat of his argument, socio-biological findings from our primate and animal cousins, Hauser shows that the precursors of human morality, at least in rudimentary form, are present in many other animals. This presence gives science a strong foothold in the arena of ethics. These findings must be to the chagrin of such writers as Francis Collins who invoked the god of the gaps in "The Language of God" to explain that human morality must be due to divine fiat. Indeed it is not.

It's just not written well.......2007-03-21

I got this book after hearing Hauser give a very illluminating and fascinating interview on NPR. Sadly his book is not as nearly interesting as his interview technique is. He repeats his thesis into the ground many times. His clever examples are sometimes not so clever. The book is too long and wordy. Being a lover of philosophy, I of all people never thought I would say that about a book. That can be a good thing in capable hands, but Hauser is definitely a scientist and not a writer. Some better editing and tightening of the text would've made this book a real winner. Finally, the link to linguistics, a main theme of the book, is a turn off for me personally as the linguistics field in no way interests me. However, one refreshing aspect is that he amdits its a theory. Sometimes I feel contemporary science books are too ready to start claiming themselves to be fact. Only get it if you can find it cheap, and hopefully Hausers honesty, enthusiasm and knowledge will get you past the poor writing, sadly it wasn't the case for me.

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

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Great Book
Worth slogging through Part 1 to get to Part 2
So interesting...
The implications to the future human civilization are staggering
Too serious / intense - Not for casual reading

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
Matt Ridley
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0060556579
Release Date: 2003-04-29

Book Description

Referring to Lewis Carroll's Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass, a character who has to keep running to stay in the same place, Matt Ridley demonstrates why sex is humanity's best strategy for outwitting its constantly mutating internal predators. The Red Queen answers dozens of other riddles of human nature and culture -- including why men propose marriage, the method behind our maddening notions of beauty, and the disquieting fact that a woman is more likely to conceive a child by an adulterous lover than by her husband. Brilliantly written, The Red Queen offers an extraordinary new way of interpreting the human condition and how it has evolved.

Customer Reviews:

Great Book.......2007-03-27

I can't add very much to the excellent reviews already posted. I'll just say quickly that I enjoyed very much the fresh insight into mating practices among the "lower animals" and among humans. I've read a lot about evolution and biology and so forth, and still found much new material here. I really enjoyed learning about how scientists finally discovered the rampant adultery among birds and how incredible they are at hiding it.

Several reviewers warn about having to "make it through" the first part, and I certainly understand that if your primary interest is in the evolutionary origins of human sexuality. However, I really enjoyed the first part as well, because it provides a broad understanding of sex in evolution and give lots of fun examples about different behaviors and adaptations.

Although I didn't give the book 5 stars (I reserve that for the best of the best), it showed me that Mr. Ridley is a great writer and I'll check out his other books (I think I'll start with Genome).

Worth slogging through Part 1 to get to Part 2.......2007-01-30

Some of the ideas expressed in The Red Queen are brilliant, and their applicability to the nature of human sexuality are quite interesting. However, Ridley's very methodical approach to categorizing and cataloging the varieties during the first 120-150 pages can be painfully slow.

Once Part II kicked in, I was glad I persevered. After the first part apparently sets the stage for some descriptions related to human beings, I found myself unable to put the book down during second half. No need to add on to what has been written by others, but if I had to do it again, I definitely would have skimmed Part 1.

Still worth the effort and quite a conversation piece. In the month since I finished, I find I bring it up in casual conversation regularly, and even during the course of book club conversations about male and female perspectives to similar actions, perceptions, or mating rituals. Definitely recommended!

So interesting..........2006-12-14

I remember flying on an airplane 6 years ago and having the stranger sitting next to me highly recommend this book. It ended up taking me three years before I finally obtained a copy!

This book is phenomenal. Starting from the first organisms on the planet and building up to modern day human beings, this book gives a detailed account of evolution and covers numerous theories, supported in great detail, as to how humans are they way we are.

The only reason this book gets 4 stars from me is because it is written in text book language and it can be hard to follow at some points. But stick with it - the end of the book is where most of the interesting points emerge.

The implications to the future human civilization are staggering.......2006-11-10

Science writer Matt Ridley's book "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" is outstanding. I have read at least 20 other books by various authors on this subject, and yet Ridley's book contains a vast amount of original work and brilliant viewpoints.

His language is accessible, witty, and moving. His explanations and arguments are well researched, and elegantly written.

Ridley takes you on a journey, for those willing, into nature's infinite world of sexual evolution using existing species as examples. You'll end up realizing how constricted our society is in relation to our nature. The book opened my mind to how diverse our society can be, and how we limit and restrict ourselves. I find this book to be one of his best works.

Experts in every field of living systems should read this book, the implications are staggering. Although written entirely from a biological / genetic / nature point of view, anyone could use the material to develop an improved system. For example, improved political systems, draft laws that make sense, market products more successfully, understand the criminal mind-set, raise children better, better discern the cause of war and violence, etc.

In a nut-shell, if you want to understand the infinite possibility of human potential, this book gives you the "theory of operation" and should be considered the bible on how central sexuality is to the nature of humankind and our modern civilization.

Too serious / intense - Not for casual reading.......2006-11-06

This is interesting only if you want to do a very detailed study on Sex and Evolution of Human Nature. Not something I would recommend if you are just looking for some dating techniques or How to....type suggestions.

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.)

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Tiger by the Tail?
Another high quality Diamond
Better understanding our evolution - and our nature
I'm 98% chimp
Wonderful book by Diamond

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.)
Jared M. Diamond
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality (Science Masters)
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ASIN: 0060845503
Release Date: 2006-01-03

Amazon.com

Jared Diamond states the theme of his book up-front: "How the human species changed, within a short time, from just another species of big mammal to a world conqueror; and how we acquired the capacity to reverse all that progress overnight." The Third Chimpanzee is, in many ways, a prequel to Diamond's prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns examines "the fates of human societies," this work surveys the longer sweep of human evolution, from our origin as just another chimpanzee a few million years ago. Diamond writes:

It's obvious that humans are unlike all animals. It's also obvious that we're a species of big mammal down to the minutest details of our anatomy and our molecules. That contradiction is the most fascinating feature of the human species.

The chapters in The Third Chimpanzee on the oddities of human reproductive biology were later expanded in Why Is Sex Fun? Here, they're linked to Diamond's views of human psychology and history.

Diamond is officially a physiologist at UCLA medical school, but he's also one of the best birdwatchers in the world. The current scientific consensus that "primitive" humans created ecological catastrophes in the Pacific islands, Australia, and the New World owes a great deal to his fieldwork and insight. In Diamond's view, the current global ecological crisis isn't due to modern technology per se, but to basic weaknesses in human nature. But, he says, "I'm cautiously optimistic. If we will learn from our past that I have traced, our own future may yet prove brighter than that of the other two chimpanzees." --Mary Ellen Curtin

Book Description

The Development of an Extraordinary Species

We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet -- having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art -- while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins? In this fascinating, provocative, passionate, funny, endlessly entertaining work, renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author and scientist Jared Diamond explores how the extraordinary human animal, in a remarkably short time, developed the capacity to rule the world . . . and the means to irrevocably destroy it.

Customer Reviews:

Tiger by the Tail?.......2007-10-08

There's a lot to this very broad ranging and thoughtful book, some of which, but not all, seems intriguingly fresh and original. Jared Diamond takes off from the recently recognized biological fact that only about 1.6% of the entire human genome separates us from the chimpanzee, making that ape our nearest living relative. Of course, Diamond notes, there is quite an obvious gap between us and our closest relatives but it's a gap, he suggests, which is not nearly as great as we're likely to imagine from surface differences -- not least, perhaps, because a significant portion of the genetic differences between us and chimps is mere genetic "noise" with little or no implications for the creatures built to its blueprint.

For Diamond the obvious implication of this narrow genetic difference obliges us to reconsider ourselves, from the outside looking in, and examine what we are as we would examine any other creature on this planet. We must, he proposes, treat humanity as what it really is: a member of the animal world. Taking his own advice, Diamond proceeds to examine the history and development of man as a visitor from another planet might, as merely one species among many. What Diamond proceeds to describe for us is the appearance and evolution of an unusually successful, exceedingly voracious primate which has the propensity to devour its own environment if left unchecked. Diamond convincingly shows how humans may have developed characteristics which have their roots in, but are still unique and different from, anything found in the rest of the animal world. In the process he points out, repeatedly, how man's historic successes have resulted in loss for our fellow species, over and over again, as one after another is hunted to extinction with the advent of modern man beginning some 50,000 years ago. Nor is this limited to other species as Diamond notes for man has a propensity for hunting and killing his own along with other creatures.

Diamond's greatest concern, in the end, seems to be for the environment which he sees being eaten away everywhere man has appeared (by now roughly the entire planet, given mankind's ubiquitous success in the competitive game of evolution). As a self-described bird-watcher, he takes his lessons from the loss of bird species in New Guinea and other exotic locales where he has applied his skills and interests. He makes some good and fascinating observations along the way including: 1) his points about how our sexual characteristics would have evolved and might have contributed to our further evolution (reflecting the need for mates to bond long term), 2) how geographic factors might have influenced variation in civilizations' technological accomplishments in the course of human societal development (Africa and the Americas exist on a north-south axis, limiting the spread and cross-pollenization of agricultural technology among human groups, while Europe, the Middle East and Asia lie on an east-west axis), 3) how unwise modern governments and scientists may be in sending signals into outer space announcing our presence (since he concludes there's no reason to doubt the operation of evolutionary competition there, too), and 4) how the dynamic of human evolution seems to have placed us on a trajectory of inevitable self-destruction.

Diamond himself notes that in many cases he did not fully develop many of the ideas presented here, reserving that for subsequent books (Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed). His main goal in this one, besides outlining some of these ideas, seems to be to galvanize his readers to embrace his strong concerns for environmentalism. He repeatedly details the destruction of pristine ecological environments which follows on the appearance of man, from the earliest ages, when men may have speedily hunted the great mammals still preserved in the fossil record to extinction, to the era of European exploration only a few centuries ago when Europeans permanently destroyed the ecological systems they found on previously untrod oceanic islands. In the interim, he blames humans for destroying the majority of the creatures that have walked the Earth since man's first appearance and warns of worse to come.

In one interesting passage he recounts how a single development of a particular site for housing resulted in the destruction and loss of many species of small creatures found nowhere else on the planet, inviting us to imagine how many times, and to what devastating effect, this has happened before in our history. But this, certainly, is the flaw in what is an otherwise compelling narrative of human development. It is certainly true that man's presence alters his environment wherever he finds himself and that that alteration is generally permanent, irrevocable and, indeed, terrible for the creatures on the receiving end. Diamond calls on us to adopt a supportive stance toward environmentalism based on this knowledge, even as he has done in his work. But the truth is that humans cannot avoid leaving a footprint wherever we tread and it is certainly true that each and every tiny corner of this earth may, and probably does, harbor various unique species if only on the microscopic level.

His advocacy for environmental awareness is certainly wise and good advice for humankind overall since it is better to preserve and nurture our environment than devour it like locusts. As far as we know, at least for now, there is only one Earth and, thus, one human home so we must attend to it. But it's unrealistic to imagine that man can avoid impacting his environment entirely or sufficiently so as to avoid displacing other species at all. That one development Diamond cites is a useful example but how many other developments, as he rightly notes, have done as much or more around the planet? We can't cease developing the world around us unless we alter our own growth trajectory and aim to diminish rather than enhance our numbers.

But diminishing the number of human beings, besides being against our natural biological imperative (to pass on our genes), intoduces the risks of civilizational breakdown and failure since fewer and fewer members of the various population groups will be called on to support more and more of the aging members of their groups. At the same time, unless all of mankind can be diminished in numbers simultaneously, there will be competition for space and resources which will see larger and more robust population groups impinging on the holdings of the diminishing groups (as we see in Europe today where an aggressive external Muslim population presses on a more inward-looking diminishing native population). This must lead to its own conflicts and disasters. Perhaps a worldwide plague or devastating war would do the trick but to what terrible effect for those living through it? And what about the tangential effects on the environments in which the self-destroying human populations are enduring plague and/or war?

Despite Diamond's important points about the human propensity to eat its own, we are chimps hanging onto an evolutionary tiger by its tail. We cannot let it go without being devoured but suspect that holding on will not be in our own best interests either. Diamond's written a good and important book here with lots of insight and new perspectives worth pondering. But he has no solution for us because, in the end, we are evolution's children. Perhaps we may grow ourselves out of this present quandary. Or perhaps not. Either way, it's certainly worthwhile reading Diamond's take on this.

SWM

Another high quality Diamond.......2007-09-29

The Third Chimpanzee is another contribution by Jared Diamond that forces people to think about man's past as well as what we are doing, and could be doing, for our future. He makes you think.

Better understanding our evolution - and our nature.......2007-09-19

Jared Diamond explains in his awesome style how we are related to the various ape species and why the chimps are our closest cousins (or rather brothers). Based on the differences and similarities between us, do we have the right to consider ourselves so much different from animals, and do we have the right not to grant at least some human rights to our closest relatives...

I'm 98% chimp.......2007-09-12

What species is most closely related to the chimp? If you guessed humans, you're right! Chimps and humans share more than 98% of the same genes. Given this fact, Jared explores human behavior and is somehow able to do this from outside of the human perspective. While we like to think of ourselves as being far above other species, Jared is careful to recognize other less flattering and uniquely human traits such as our addiction to chemical substances and our practice of genocide. The Third Chimpanzee offers a unique and balanced perspective of the human animal and the role we play in the global environment. Read this book to gain a more complete understanding of what it means to be human, where we came from, and where we might be headed.

Wonderful book by Diamond.......2007-07-12

Biologist Jared Diamond's book, originally published in 1992, doesn't have a unifying theme as in his later "Guns, Germs and Steel". Rather, we have different themes tackled in different chapters. Among those themes are the origins of the Indoeuropeans (the mysterious people, also knowns as the Aryans, from whom most Europeans and Indians descend), why Europeans were able to conquer much of the world in the last century (a subject he would later return to in Guns...), why he believes the attempts to overcome aging will fail, his skepticism about the possibility of contacting extraterrestrial civilizations (even if we are able to contact the few aliens that might exist, they might try to conquer us, he claims), the last first contacts between modern civilizations and bands of hunter gatherers still living on the Stone Age, an explanation of sexual selection and the origins of the human races, why the handicap principle bring forward by biologist Amotz Zahavi explain many seeming self-destructive behavior by human beings, an interesting overview of genocide in human history, and so forth. Diamond's environmentalism is quite radical: he believes for example, as some luddites do, that man's fall started when he switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Still, this is a wonderful book, enlivened by Diamond's erudition and wonderful writing.

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion

Average customer rating:

De-simplification
The Facts, yes--but still more Drama than Debate
Great coverage of the trial; of its aftermath, not so much...
The Echoes of the Past
Pulitzer-prize winning book

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion
Edward J. Larson
Manufacturer: Basic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0465075096

Amazon.com

If you haven't seen the film version of Inherit the Wind, you might have read it in high school. And even people who have never heard of either the movie or the play probably know something about the events that inspired them: The 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," during which Darwin's theory of evolution was essentially put on trial before the nation. Inherit the Wind paints a romantic picture of John Scopes as a principled biology teacher driven to present scientific theory to his students, even in the teeth of a Tennessee state law prohibiting the teaching of anything other than creationism. The truth, it turns out, was something quite different. In his fascinating history of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson makes it abundantly clear that Truth and the Purity of Science had very little to do with the Scopes case. Tennessee had passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, and the American Civil Liberties Union responded by advertising statewide for a high-school teacher willing to defy the law. Communities all across Tennessee saw an opportunity to put themselves on the map by hosting such a controversial trial, but it was the town of Dayton that came up with a sacrificial victim: John Scopes, a man who knew little about evolution and wasn't even the class's regular teacher. Chosen by the city fathers, Scopes obligingly broke the law and was carted off to jail to await trial.

What happened next was a bizarre mix of theatrics and law, enacted by William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. Though Darrow lost the trial, he made his point--and his career--by calling Bryan, a noted Bible expert, as a witness for the defense. Summer for the Gods is a remarkable retelling of the trial and the events leading up to it, proof positive that truth is stranger than science.

Book Description

Reissued with a new preface: the Pulitzer Prize-winning book that is "quite simply the best book ever written on the Scopes Trial and its place in American history and myth."

In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the 20th century's most contentious dramas: the Scopes trial that pit William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher named John Scopes into a famous debate over science, religion, and their place in public education.

That trial marked the start of a battle that continues to this day--in Dover, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Cobb County, Georgia, and many other cities and states throughout the country. Edward Larson's classic, Summer for the Gods, received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1998 and is the single most authoritative account of a pivotal event whose combatants remain at odds in school districts and courtrooms. For this edition, Larson has added a new preface that assesses the state of the battle between creationism and evolution, and points the way to how it might potentially be resolved.

Customer Reviews:

De-simplification.......2007-08-21

A Tennessee newspaper called the Scopes trial at the time a 'publicity stunt'. Meaning publicity for the city of Dayton.
America never ceases to surprise me. Until not so long ago I had never heard of the Scopes trial. I stumbled over it once in a while when reading about the disputes between Christian fundamentalists and 'science', specifically evolutionists. I imagined something like a fight of the titans, Evolution versus Creation.
Not so. Now I learn from Larson that everything was a little different. (This is by now also a cliche: things are not what they seem. Are they ever?)
Actually it had aspects of a farce.
The more interesting aspects are not the farcical ones though, but rather how this event was the focal point not so much of two strong opponents clashing, but of a much more diverse field of issues.
I had forgotten that evolution, by the mid 20s, was a different thing from what it seems now. First of all, the so-called Darwinian synthesis had not yet happened, which led to 'neo-Darwinism', basing Darwin's theory of natural selection on knowledge of genetics (of which Darwin himself had had no idea yet).
In the 20s, Darwinism was much more attached to the smelly and dead ideology of so-called Social Darwinism (for which Mr.Darwin should not be blamed), than it is nowadays. At that time, eugenics were still considered an honorable pursuit, it appears. That was the attempt to improve mankind's genetic substance by a kind of human breeding program. Going for Nietzsche's Uebermensch. Now we know how it ended with the Nazis' euthanasia programs. Even World War I, which had been over not so long past, had brought implications of 'Darwinism' in the ideology of Wilhelminian militarism. Overall a rather dubious surrounding and not as squeaky clean as pure science.
At the same time there was the aftermath of the social earthquakes that WWI had shaken loose: the Russian revolution, the spreading hysteria in America about the 'Red Scare', labor prosecution, leading to McCarthyism later on. And among the Christian denominations the fight between the modernists and the fundamentalists, whose primary opponent seems to have been their deviating fellow Christians more than the evolutionists, who became sort of a derived target.
The trial itself is a ridiculous affair about a substitute teacher who used a book which mentions evolution, which broke a newly introduced law against teaching evolution in Tennessee. What a joke. Particularly as the teacher volunteered to be the defendant in this mock trial.
The book also de-simplifies the aftermath by showing how the real events were mystified in later texts, and by showing how fundamentalism, rather than accepting defeat, just moved away from the general public into an own strong subculture.

The Facts, yes--but still more Drama than Debate.......2007-08-15

In order to be credible to all sides in a highly-partisan cultural war, professor of law and history Edward J. Larson in his book "Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial And America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion" had to present the facts and nothing but the facts ("so help him God" or not). This is the book's necessary strength and its unfortunate weakness. I would like to have heard more reflection.

Much light could come just from placing the historical scene in a larger context. For example, what connections can be made between the meaninglessness and despair of World War I, the recent Marxist-Leninist revolution, the red scare of the 20's, Darrow's agnosticism and membership in the Communist party, and the fears of an attack on traditional values and beliefs this all must have engendered?

The facts about this "great," or at least highly significant, all-American trial are so often the exactly opposite of the myths that survived so long! Perhaps we now need a anthropologist of culture and religion to analyze how we could go so long believing utter falsehoods, and all without force of propaganda or threat of gulag.

Surely on the deeper issues of the philosophical debate between science and religion as reflected in American culture, Mr. Larson, whose background is exactly in this type of historical study, could lend a hand. Certainly he has done us a great service by his meticulously objective work for this well-deserved Pulitzer Prize winning effort, but there is little philosophical thought to be found.

The Scopes courtroom led to more drama than debate, more chance than justice or toleration. Both sides claimed to win, but all sides actually lost. Both the real trial and the mythic one reflected in the movie "Inherit the Wind" (and other cultural renderings passed down as folklore)--both failed to even satisfactorily debate let alone struggle with the underlying conflicts or seek answers to America's larger quest for clarity of identity.

Neither built toward a consensus. Hence our ongoing crazy cultural wars with Ten Commandments tablets allowed here but not there, all supported by highly reasoned legal arguments on both sides that will all look more like myth and superstition to the next eon--hopefully. Our capitalistic Mark Twainish show trial was mercifully free of the menace of Stalin's show trials of the 30's. Nevertheless, by failing to address the challenges of this chapter in our over-politicized mythic struggle, we neither evolve nor practice true religion.

Nevertheless, as a starting touchstone "Summer of the God's" deserves a place on all our book shelves. It has inspired me to want to read a biography about William Jennings Bryan, and Darrow's autobiography as well.

Great coverage of the trial; of its aftermath, not so much..........2007-07-05

The author did a great job of demystifying the trial, a task long overdue. The question was whether a state or community could prohibit teaching any theory or doctrine in the public classroom, and jury had decided that it could. If young Scopes was teaching Marx's theory of class struggle in history class, I think the outcome would have been the same, though I doubt there would have been even a fictionalized account opening on Broadway, thirty years later.

Yet somehow, because the theory in question was Darwinism, and because the trial was held in the Bible Belt, it has been misrepresented from the get-go as another icon in the ever continuing "...debate over science and religion." Unfortunately, this is the subtitle of this work, and the reason at least one star was dropped from my rating.

The author continued to equate "anti-evolutionists" with "Fundamentalists" throughout his book, which extended into the last decades of the 20th Century, long after the equation was valid. By this time, several scientists, many without any strong religious beliefs, had poked serious holes in Evolutionary theory, developing a formalized concept called "Intelligent Design." Furthermore, several other scientists, though not willing to dispute macro-evolution overall, had serious reservations about supporting Darwin's Natural Selection mechanism for the development of new species. Thus, Punctuated Equilibrium appeared on the scene, championed by the late Harvard paleontologist, Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, which weakened the theory most often taught in school, and understood by the public, even more.

Unfortunately, the author decided not to include these scientific controversies, perhaps not wanting to "dirty up the water."

But in doing so, he chose to represent the ongoing reluctance of some state and local school boards, some far from the Bible Belt, to teach Darwinism as anything more than a theory, as purely a product of "Fundamentalism."

He probably should have stopped his narrative about a chapter earlier...

The Echoes of the Past .......2007-05-28

Summer for the Gods

The echoes of the past continue to reverberate. Although it's been eighty years since the Scopes Trial, the debate over the teaching of the origins of life goes on.
The monumental intellectual battle pitted Williams Jennings Bryan against Clarence Darrow following the indictment and arrest of a Dayton, Tennessee public school teacher for violating a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution.

The controversy focused attention...not much of it favorable... on the South, which was still smarting from the Civil War and Reconstruction.
In "Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's continuing Debate over Science " Edward J. Larson takes the reader through the background of the Scopes matter; the involvement of the ACLU, which was seeking a test case at the time; and the role of the Prosecution and Defense. The media (or, the Press at the time) had an important role as well -- the Baltimore Sun's acerbic H.L. Mencken covered the story, and on one day of the trial journalists filed 200,000 words by telegraph. Larson's Pulitzer-prize winning account is an enjoyable and entertaining read. His "afterword," which compares the Scopes matter to the current debate between Science and "Intelligent Design", is especially useful. The recent attempts to restrict academic freedom in Kansas and other jurisdictions illustrate the currency of the debate.

A recent Google search revealed 29,600,000 hits for "intelligent design." There are societies, institutions, and now even a Museum designed to promote Creationism. (Interestingly, William Jennings Bryan founded his own college, Bryan College, to promote his views, much as the late Rev Jerry Fallwell.)

Larson makes ample use of the papers of Bryan, Darrow and other principals in the trial and contemporary news accounts. His book is an entertaining, enlightening, and gracefully-written addition to the literature on the subject.
As another reviewer has noted, the legal background of the story is of particular interest... particularly given than in 1925, many general principles which we take for granted today (for example, the application of the Establishment of Religion Clause to State as well as Federal law ) didn't exist at the time.

Pulitzer-prize winning book.......2007-04-30

It's easy to see why Edward Larson won a Pulitzer prize for this book. It's a fascinating, well-written account of the Scopes trial that avoids the hyper-partisanship that usually surrounds the issue.

Larson doesn't come across as an obnoxious evolutionist or an obnoxious creationist. Instead he comes across as a truly professional historian who gives a thorough and fair account of this famous trial.

Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect

Average customer rating:

Ehrlich as Sisyphus
Once more into the breach . . .
A weak intro and polemic
Excellent reading for both the scientist and lay person
A "must read"

Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect
Paul R. Ehrlich
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0142000531

Amazon.com

It's common to blame "human nature" for some of the unpleasant facts of life--road rage, say, or murder, or war. The problem with this convenient out, argues the distinguished scientist Paul Ehrlich, is that there really is no single human nature. Humans, it's true, share a common genetic code with remarkably few large-scale differences (if all but native Africans disappeared from the planet, he notes, "humanity would still retain somewhat more than 90 percent of its genetic variability"); and evolution has endowed us with capabilities shared by no other species. But for all that, he adds, our separation into haves and have-nots, weak and strong, and other such categories is more often than not a product of cultural evolution, a process far more complex than the mere mutation and adaptation of a few genes. And, in any event, those genes "do not shout commands to us about our behavior," Ehrlich says. "At the very most, they whisper suggestions."

In this wide-ranging survey of what it is that has made and that continues to make us human, Ehrlich touches on a number of themes--among them, his recurrent observation that science has taught us little about how genes influence human behavior. (Instead, he notes wryly, "science tells us that we are creatures of accident clinging to a ball of mud hurtling aimlessly through space. This is not a notion to warm hearts or rouse multitudes.") He urges that scientists take a larger, interdisciplinary view that looks beyond mere genetics to the larger forces that shape our lives, a view for which Human Natures makes a handy, and highly accessible, primer. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description

Why do we behave the way we do? Biologist Paul Ehrlich suggests that although people share a common genetic code, these genes "do not shout commands at us . . . at the very most, they whisper suggestions." He argues that human nature is not so much the result of genetic coding; rather, it is heavily influenced by cultural conditioning and environmental factors. With personal anecdotes, a well-written narrative, and clear examples, Human Natures is a major work of synthesis and scholarship as well as a valuable primer on genetics and evolution that makes complex scientific concepts accessible to lay readers.

"I doubt whether anyone will write as good a book of this sort on [human evolution] for another two or three decades." (Science)

"Ehrlich's book is so well researched and so elegantly presented that it stands as one of the best introductions to human evolution in recent memory." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

Customer Reviews:

Ehrlich as Sisyphus.......2005-11-25

Ehrlich's central thesis - that there is not just one human nature but many seems eminently reasonable on the surface. But Ehrlich sidesteps the most convincing evidence! His "culture theory" rebuttal of the straw man of "genetic determinism" singularly fails to review the many twin and adoption studies showing that people inherit their behavior as well as their appearance.

Ehrlich becomes especially annoying when he repeats the mantra that human races do not exist and brands the genetic argument over race and sex differences "racist" and "sexist." Consider the following sets of data. If race was an invalid concept and genes had little or no predictive power, the findings I summarize would not be so consistently found.

For example, although IQ tests were invented by Whites and standardized on mainly White populations, dozens of studies now show that East Asians, whether tested in North America or in Pacific Rim countries, typically average higher than Whites, scoring in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America and in Europe typically average an IQ of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, and in the Caribbean have mean IQs of from 70 to 90.

Ehrlich also fails to mention that IQ scores are related to brain size and that the races differ in brain size. Over a dozen magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have found a r = 0.40 relation between brain size and IQ. Racial differences in brain size have been established using four quite different procedures: MRI, autopsies, endocranial volume, and external head measures. The brains of East Asians (Koreans, Chinese, Japanese) and their descendants consistently average a larger volume (about 17 cm3) than those of Europeans and their descendants, and 97 cm3 larger than those of Africans and their descendants.

Changes in brain size have cascading effects on other traits, including athletic ability. Blacks have narrower hips than Whites or East Asians which gives them a more efficient stride and enables them to run and jump better. The reason why Blacks have narrower hips, however, is because they give birth to smaller brained babies. During evolution, increasing cranial size meant women had to have a wider pelvis.

Why did Ehrlich neglect to mention all these data if he's interested in the truth about human natures (in the plural)? Wouldn't we expect the evolutionary process to have different effects in different environments? In the wake of the success of The Bell Curve and other recent books about race by Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, and me (Race, Evolution, and Behavior) that provide race-realist answers to the question of differential group achievement, there has been an intense effort to get the 'race genie' back in the bottle. Its sad when a scientist with so many accomplishments and so Herculean a reputation as Ehrlich takes it upon himself to assume so Sisyphean a task.

Once more into the breach . . ........2004-09-27

Paul Ehrlich enters the lists of "nature vs nurture" by fulminating against the straw-man of "genetic determinism". One would have thought this joust would have been called for "time" by now. In his attempt to triumph over this rather ephemeral opponent, Ehrlich has performed a prodigious task. This well-written and comprehensive view of human evolution is a valuable resource. A massive footnotes and references collection grants this book value far above the narrative itself. Ehrlich, a practiced writer and researcher, brings many years of work and observations of the human condition to this massive overview. He strives to explain who we are and how we arrived at our current stature. He further warns that our lack of understanding of our backgrounds may threaten our future.

"Human nature" is often cited as a foundation for many behavioural traits. The fallacy of that moral expression is revealed in the variety of our habits. Ehrlich recognises that variation in his title and goes on to explain it in this book. While the genetic foundation of our behaviour is being solidly established by much field research, he ultimately concludes much of that basis is overriden by our cultural influences. Much of our confusion about "nature versus nurture", he contends, lies in the rapid pace of humanity. Compared to most other species, our mental development raced past the other animals - with language as the accelerator pedal. Since the genetic base for most traits is so slow and nearly muted, our development agriculture, religion and urban society virtually overwhelmed our "animal instincts". The prime example, of course, is the massive impact we have on our environment.

Ehrlich's key in assessing genetic versus cultural input lies [logically!] in the structure of the brain. When he wrote this book, the human genome was thought to be comprised of 100 000 genes. With that figure halved, he concludes the genome hasn't the power to command the billions of neurons with their trillions of connections that comprise the human brain. This "gene" shortage, he avers, suggests the genome hasn't the capacity to drive human behaviour to any significant degree. This rather simplisitic enumeration ignores the fact that the entire genome, whatever the number of genes, must be highly interactive in many areas of the body - the brain is simply another part of the mechanism. He is apparently unaware of the brain research showing how similar interactions have been mapped within the brain. Genes merely kickstart the process, they don't need to "control" our behaviour.

Ehrlich takes the usual swipes at Richard Dawkins as he builds his narrative. Like so many others, Ehrlich's reading of "The Selfish Gene" appears to have ceased at the title. To him, the "Great Leap Forward" of some fifty thousand years ago emancipated us from the shackles of our genetic heritage. With the development of language [which wouldn't have happened without a biologically endowed "voice box"], human cognition, hence behaviour, launched on a new course. Ehrlich asserts we've never looked back, but also warns our capabilities should be adapted to now look forward. Our abilities threaten the biosphere with an intensity and scope no other species possessed.

In his conclusion, the author nearly reverses all his prior narrative. He urges humanity to develop a better understanding of its place within nature. That, of course, means a full programme of understanding animal behaviour and the mechanisms animals and plants use to stay alive and reproduce. Our evolution, particularly the cultural input, has led us to believe we are distinct from Nature. Ehrlich recognises the dangers of such an attitude and urges us to overcome it. Although an excellent synthesis and supremely comprehensive, it's unfortunate that Ehrlich's prejudices blinded him to create a problem that doesn't exist. Nobody argues for "biological determinism" in an absolute sense - certainly not Dawkins. Where Ehrlich is correct is that we must increase our knowledge of how nature works and undertake the tasks needed to stop and reverse the spoilage under way.
[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

A weak intro and polemic.......2002-10-21

Paul Erlich is usually introduced as the author of "The Population Bomb", so it's not unreasonable to look back for a moment at that book- and Erlich's intellectual history- in considering this new book. Back in the 1960s Erlich was a mainstay of the popular media- sort of a Carl Sagan of population- and a regular guest on the Tonight Show, where he spelled out his apocalyptic vision.

"The Population Bomb" was a polemic that dictated a series of prescriptions for society, without which we were racing headlong to all sorts of disasters, notable shrtages of all strategic resources, massive starvation involving millions of people, food riots that destroyed governments and the downfall of western society as we knew it. This was prophisized to happen in the 1970s, and as most of us recall, none of it happened. He went on to predict that *billions* would die of starvation in the 1980s. Erlich also made a famous bet with economist Julian Simon,in which Simon challanged Erlich to pick 5 commodities that he felt would go up in price because of shortages. Erlich took the bet, and all five fell drastically in price.

In fact, nothing that Erlich prophasized ever happened. Erlich's predictions had little to do with science and much do do with ad-hoc justifications for his political prescriptions. Now Erlich has jumped onto the nature/nurture bandwagon, which has generated a lot of renewed interest in recent years owing to some major breakthroughs in the understanding of, and potential control over, the genetic makeup of humans. And once again, Erlich sees a lot of reasons we should follow his particular social agenda.

There's nothing particularly new or original in the discussion of nature and nurture in this book, which isn't surprising as Erlich has never done any research in this area. Most of the book is a fairly elementary rehash of the last twenty years of genetic research. Unfortunately it's not a terribly good one. His understanding of issues like human language is elementary at best. Even as science continues to discover just how much of our nature and our biology is, in fact, genetically determined, Erlich's position is that the contribution of genes to behavior is all but trivial, and that leads into the real intent of this book, which is to say his prescription for how society should be run. And not surprisingly, it's the same prescription he was making in the 1960s.

Erlich's problem is that he wants to be a social philosopher. He longs to dictate his notion of an ideal society- but he doesn't have any good social arguments. Instead he gives us specious arguments rooted in questionable scientific interpretations. The result is a poor introduction to either the nature-nurture debate or social philosophy.

Excellent reading for both the scientist and lay person.......2002-06-15

Ehrlich has added to a number of good inter-disciplinary books that have been published in the last few years that all bring together the social and hard sciences. This is a well written and brilliantly engaging work. Few readers will fail to come away after reading this without some sort of intellectual reward.

Culture as a model of human evolution is emphasised, not to overtake genetics, but to add another dimension. The implications of this effect many fields, including biology, genetics, psychology, history and anthropology. Ehrlichs intelligent and clear writing, persuasive analysis and excellent footnotes make reading "Human Natures" a worthwhile effort. A joy to read.

A "must read".......2001-05-24

"Human Natures" is far and away the clearest, most comprehensive, and most compelling synthesis of what is known about the co-evolution of humans, their cultures, and the rest of nature currently available. The title subtly reflects the important distinction between human "nature" and human "natures" - the plural implying that our species has many and varied natures - not a single unitary nature. This pluralism is in stark contrast to the stilted and unrealistic assumptions about a singular human nature embodied in both the reductionist biological model and the conventional economic model. The biological reductionist idea that all human behavior can be reduced to a genetic basis is clearly insufficient in light of the massive importance of cultural evolution in shaping human behavior. Likewise, the all-knowing, perfectly rational economic utility or profit maximizer of the conventional economic model may be convenient for mathematical tractability, but it is so far from the reality of human natures that it is laughable. The only mystery is why, given what we know about human natures, more economists are not laughing. The case of Phineas Gage, described by Ehrlich in the book, serves to illustrate the size of the chasm between the conventional economic model and reality. Gage was a railroad worker who had a large portion of his frontal lobe removed when a 1.25 inch-thick tamping rod shot through his head in a freak railroad accident in 1848. Amazingly, Gage survived and was not even knocked unconscious by the accident. But he was a changed man. He had lost the part of the brain that we now know is dedicated to emotional responses. A surprising result was that while he could think, talk, and calculate perfectly well - he was completely "rational" - he simply could not make a decision. It turns out that rationality without emotions leads to swamping with details and the inability to make any decisions at all, even ones so trivial as what to eat for dinner. That emotions are necessary for decision making is an interesting part of real human natures, but is in direct contradiction to the conventional economic assumptions about decision-making, which considers emotions to be a hinderence to "rational" decision-making. But as Ehrlich points out: "Human emotional capacities evolved along with our cognitive capacities. Without the ability to respond to stimuli with appropriate emotions, critical decision making becomes impossible" (pp. 121-122). The challenge is to build economic models that incorporate the realities of human natures, rather than to assume them away. The weakest aspect of the book is the imbalance between its treatment of genetic and cultural evolution. While Ehrlich takes pains to acknowledge the large and growing importance of cultural evolution in shaping human natures, he gives very little space in the book to the details of how cultural evolution works and does not attempt to synthesize the research in this area in anything like the completeness with which he treats human genetic evolution. For example, he notes that cultural evolution has several unique characteristics relative to genetic evolution. Most importantly, learned behavior can be passed on through the culture to genetically unrelated individuals and changes in culture can occur with light speed relative to genetic evolution. But how does this work and what does this mean for human natures and for the future of our society? This and several other key questions about the details of the relationship between genetic and cultural evolution are hinted at in passing, but left largely unaddressed in the current volume. For example, conventional biological evolution theory is largely circular and descriptive, not predictive. It is one thing to describe how alligators evolved, but quite another to be able to predict the emergence of alligators. To do this one would need to know the underlying criteria for success in evolution that can be specified before the fact. From a predictive point of view, it doesn't help much to say that those individuals that reproduce best will survive, unless one can say why particular individuals will be able to reproduce better than others in particular situations. Most human evolutionary ecologists work on time scales that make this question moot, but it is essential for understanding cultural evolution, the results of which are observable in units of years rather than thousands of years. To use the evolutionary paradigm in predictive modeling, we require a quantitative measure of fitness (or more generally performance) that can be specified before the fact, in order to drive the selection process. Another important question has to do with the "reflexive" nature of cultural evolution - because we are capable of at least some degree of conceptualization and foresight, we can exert at least partial control over our own selection environment. The process then becomes one of conscious design and tinkering with the cultural evolutionary process rather than passive response to externally determined criteria. How does this process work and what are it's limits? Devising policy instruments and identifying incentives that can translate foresight into effective modifications of the short-run cultural evolutionary dynamics is the key research challenge. In cultural evolution, we have the unique potential to first envision our goals and then modify the selection criteria in order to achieve them. Ehrlich's book provides a solid basis for addressing these and countless other questions that are critical to understanding our human natures and how we can actively participate in changing them. Adequately understanding and controlling our complex human natures is essential to the continued survival of our so far exceptionally successful species.

The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution Of Human Nature

Average customer rating:

Good, although a little dated...
An encyclopedia about the human body
Modern classic missing pertinent content, yet, a must read!
Who is the subject of evolution?
Interesting Book

The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution Of Human Nature
Michael Murphy
Manufacturer: Tarcher
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Good, although a little dated..........2006-12-20

It is indeed a weighty volume that as the other reviewer said must have been a labour of love. It contains all kinds of topics, from hypnosis and meditation to rolfing and biofeedback and many, many others. I ended up giving my copy away though. I bought it for use as I was studying psychology/counseling and wanted something that had a good overview of the healing modalities available, along with some objective comment. It certainly had that and is well researched, yet in the end I felt that if I wanted to learn about many of the topics in this book, I'd just do my own research, probably beginning on the web and then picking a few good books on that topic and I think I'd have gotten a much better outline than a few pages on each area can really give. That said, it must have been a monumental effort to combine such a volume and the author is to be commended for that.

An encyclopedia about the human body.......2006-09-12

This book is a must ready for anyone interested in increasing their human potential. Murphy cites countless studies done on the human body, ranging from the normal to the paranormal. In my case, as a writer and long time yoga teacher this book has been invaluable for quoting to my students. I recommend it to people who want to open their minds to ever expanding human potentials.

Modern classic missing pertinent content, yet, a must read!.......2006-01-27

The Future of the Body is what I would consider a "modern classic."
It is one of the truly comprehensive texts published on modern consciousness and transformative studies. I can't recommend it enough as mandatory reading for any student in the field of consciousness, transpersonal, and transformative psychology (or any field directly related to human potentials). However, my only reservation is that there is virtually no mention of psychoactives, those taboos of human culture, within the text as a whole. This fact alone keeps it from being truly comprehensive in terms of transformative capacities and forms of transcendence as defined by leaders in the field such as Susanne Cook-Greuter and even Ken Wilber (though I recognize his lack of attendance to this issue). Despite this omission, this text is, in my opinion, required reading for all students of consciousness-related studies.

-Ph.D student at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology

Who is the subject of evolution?.......2004-02-23

With some reservations I found this compendium of disparate information a useful survey and a flying question mark about the meaning of the term 'evolution', a term long since fallen into a ditch whence it stumbles forth into still more confusion, with a black eye from the brain-dead Darwin debate. The number of wild pitches (the phantom index in most such books being high)is not out of hand. The New Age attempts to define the term 'evolution' are at their best as an indirect comment on Darwinian versions, but fail as soon as they attempt to remap its meaning in 'spiritual' terms. Nevertheless this text indicates the only avenue of approach, which is to map out just what creature it is that we are supposed to be explaining. And the answer is that we don't know. The temporary ongoing 'conclusion' is that we can't produce a theory of evolution because we haven't the foggiest what man's 'evolutionary psychology' really is. But one thing is clear, Darwinism is very far off the mark, and the current ostrich style of pontificating the subtle side of man out of existence in the name of Darwin's phoney theory can't go on forever. Or maybe it can. Scientists simply don't respond to suggestions that they don't have a grip on man, and who man is.
The standard problem with books like this (and this one is much better than most)is the 'passing of bad pennies', sudden passages of garbage in, garbage out. That is, metaphysical versions of occult or other 'spiritual' phenomena. The road is long and hard here, but, taken with reserve, we have grounds for protest at the amputation of man being enforced in an age of Big Science dogma.
One problem is that New Age thinking has spawned a category of 'self-evolution' and this has become the favorite of many gurus, and others. This attempt to appropriate the word 'evolution' adds still more confusion. The problem is that 'evolution' is confused with 'self-realization', the evolution of that self being unknown, a mystery of the descent of humans in the Paleolithic. Sometimes evolution and involution are confused or braided together. It is not true that realized men have a better understanding of evolution. Indeed, the legacy of gurus show they can't reckon their own history,let alone the large scale development of the species man. It is worth noting the legacy of German classical philosophy, as this suggests, prior to such figures as Hegel, the 'noumenal' aspect of the conscious subject. That insight might be helpful in putting the labyrinth in perspective, for the New Age field is littered with metaphysical zoo items mixed with the genuine insights into the sheer complexity of human nature that make the 'sociobiology crammed down our throats' an episode of primitive hi-tech cavemen. The implications of the Axial Age concept and data give one hint of the scale of 'macro evolution' that transcends even the insights of the Enlightened, for there we see the 'generated' aspect of world religion, acting beyond the realm of the oblivious yogi, what to say of the mechanized monotheist.
Usefully provoking book, taken with considerable caution.

Interesting Book.......2003-05-01

I gave this book 5 stars because it is very extensive in its scope - it is not, however, the final word on this topic, there is more - I guess there is always more and there are always even more amazing stories. The book explores different phenomena, some rather rare and unusual, as in the following excerpt:

"Thurston quoted a sister Margherita Cortonesi:

"On one occasion, among others, when [Sister Veronica] being in a trance state was reciting her Office alternately with some invisible being, she was observed gradually to stretch out until the length of her throat seemed to be out of all proportion in such a way that she was altogether much taller than usual. We, noticing this strange occurrence, looked to see if she was raised from the ground, but this, so far as our eyes could tell, was not the case. So, to make sure, we took a yard-measure and measured her height, and afterwards when she had come to herself we measured her again, and she was at least a span (ten inches or more) shorter. This we have seen with our own eyes, all of us nuns who were in the chapel."

In 1629, a Donna Hortenzia Ghini stated under oath that:

"Sister Lisabetta Pancrazi, formerly a nun in the same convent, told me that on one occasion, seeing that the said Sister Veronica when in ecstasy seemed taller than in her normal state, took a yard-measure and measured her height, and that after the said Sister Veronica came to herself she measured her again with the said yard-measure, and she found that she was half an arm's length shorter."

Among other religious who allegedly exhibited elongation, the Capuchiness Abbess Costante Maria Castreca was said to have grown a considerable height from the ground during a religious ecstasy; the Venerable Domenica dal Paradiso grew taller in trance, according to her spiritual director and confidants. Because such phenomena were not thought to be marks of holiness, they were noted simply because they were unusual.

I include such phenomena in this discussion because they indicate the body's responsiveness to altered states of mind. When consciousness is released from some of its ordinary constraints, whether in ecstasies or dissociated states, ligaments and muscles are sometimes liberated too.:

The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Rethinking Theory)
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Theoretical Rescue!

Insightful and Enjoyable

The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Rethinking Theory)

Manufacturer: Northwestern University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature

Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative)

Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives

Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes)

ASIN: 0810122871

Book Description

In recent years, articles in major periodicals from the New York Times Magazine to the Times Literary Supplement have heralded the arrival of a new school of literary studies that promises-or threatens-to profoundly shift the current paradigm. This revolutionary approach, known as Darwinian literary studies, is based on a few simple premises: evolution has produced a universal landscape of the human mind that can be scientifically mapped; these universal tendencies are reflected in the composition, reception, and interpretation of literary works; and an understanding of the evolutionary foundations of human behavior, psychology, and culture will enable literary scholars to gain powerful new perspectives on the elements, form, and nature of storytelling.

The goal of this book is to overcome some of the widespread misunderstandings about the meaning of a Darwinian approach to the human mind generally, and literature specifically. The volume brings together scholars from the forefront of the new field of evolutionary literary analysis-both literary analysts who have made evolution their explanatory framework and evolutionist scientists who have taken a serious interest in literature-to show how the human propensity for literature and art can be properly framed as a true evolutionary problem. Their work is an important step toward the long-prophesied synthesis of the humanities and what Steven Pinker calls "the new sciences of human nature."

Customer Reviews:

Theoretical Rescue!.......2007-01-06

Literary Animal is a relief to those of us who find that traditional literary theory just doesn't fit the empirical world. Insightful, fair, and balanced, the text is stimulating on a variety of levels, with measured critiques of existing theoretical approaches, and applications of evolutionary theory to a variety of literary tales. A gate-way text for students and teachers of this new theoretical paradigm.

Insightful and Enjoyable.......2006-09-20

As an evolutionary biologist with a strong interest in literary theory, finding this book was extremely exciting for me, and it definitely lived up to my expectations. The book consists of a collection of thought provoking, well written essays that emphasize the need to incorporate evolutionary theory into the analysis of literature (and a few other art forms) and provide strong examples of the benefits of using this technique. The contributing authors come from a wide range of disciplines and bring a variety of views to the text. Some of my favorite essays included an analysis of Pride and Prejudice using evolutionary themes, an investigation of male-male bonds in narratives, and a discussion of the possible benefits we receive from watching/reading drama. I strongly recommend this for anyone who is interested in evolution, literature, or human nature.

Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Suny Series in Philosophy and Biology)

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Deeply Dissatisfied
Thought provoking, but there are a few annoying problems
A Fine Contribution to a Perilous Subject
A new look at morality and ethics
Aristotelian View of Ethics Based on Human Biology

Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Suny Series in Philosophy and Biology)
Larry Arnhart
Manufacturer: State University of New York Press
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ASIN: 0791436942

Book Description

This book shows how Darwinian biology supports an Aristotelian view of ethics as rooted in human nature. Defending a conception of "Darwinian natural right" based on the claim that the good is the desirable, the author argues that there are at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies because they are based in human biology. The satisfaction of these natural desires constitutes a universal standard for judging social practice as either fulfilling or frustrating human nature, although prudence is required in judging what is best for particular circumstances.

The author studies the familial bonding of parents and children and the conjugal bonding of men and women as illustrating social behavior that conforms to Darwinian natural right. He also studies slavery and psychopathy as illustrating social behavior that contradicts Darwinian natural right. He argues as well that the natural moral sense does not require religious belief, although such belief can sometimes reinforce the dictates of nature.

Customer Reviews:

Deeply Dissatisfied.......2007-08-20

I enjoyed reading this book but I was ultimately left deeply dissatisfied. I do not disagree with the basic idea that morality, in the sense of our motivations to be successful social animals, has evolved and is part of our nature and natural desire. Empathy, guilt, shame etc are natural emotions we experience which naturally shape our sociality. Where the argument weakens is around the premise that what we desire must be good. There is a big difference between saying 'the good is desirable' and 'the desirable is good' but Arnhart does not deal with this difference sufficiently. Sometimes he is saying that if something is desired it is desired because it is good, other times he is saying that we often are mistaken or ignorant about our true desires and make mistakes we regret so we have to think in terms of a whole life well lived and simple desire does not show us what is good after all.

Arnhart also aknowledges how there is a natural desire in us to exploit others but he believes this is simply countered by the natural desires of others not to be exploited. It all sounds as if this is the end of the problem, as if no one ends up exploited, as if there can be no need to concern ourselves any further. He takes the examples of female genital mutilation and slavery to show the workings of his argument and how it proves that these two practices are against natural right. Fair enough, but he has chosen two topics about which even ardent misogynists and racists would not bother arguing in favor. There is a noticeable lack of any attempt to show how his argument works with the moral issues over which his readers would actually argue.

We are told that war is natural so there is no need to concern ourselves with morality here either. We are naturally social with respect to our own group and naturally against and in competition with other groups. This conflict turns out to be good, according to Arnhart, because it helps humans as a species to flourish. (Perhaps the losers might disagree if they were able.) Human flourishing is good and for Arnhart that is what we all desire. Arnhart believes there can be no naturalistic fallacy where anything natural is bad and no mismatch between our ('true'?) desires and our human good. Perhaps this is where Arnhart's basic error is situated - in a belief that behavior evolves for the good of the species. This is not how evolution works. It works for the survival of genes in bodies through time and this can work through misery and pain too. And extinction - genes have no magical foresight. Even Arnhart's view that we must think about our desires over a complete life, work out what is right to do, think about consequences etc means we do not just do what our bodies push us to do - we have to recognize the pain our desires can cause to ourselves as well as others and we have to control our own natures.

It generally all sounds so simple. Each individual acts in accordance with their life-time self-interest as a social animal and is naturally bounded by the self-interested behavior of all the other social animals s/he bounces into. But surely, this is what we have always been doing anyway? Yet we've been forever arguing about morality. We've had individuals and groups unable to avoid exploitation. If it is our human good that each human not be exploited then we, as a species, are universally failing in this human end. Has reproductive success really depended on happiness and morality? On happy and moral progenitors?

On the one hand I accept Arnhart's point that what we consider moral behavior has evolved because of our evolved sociality. On the other hand, knowing this does not really change anything. I would be very much interested in the author showing how this view can actually be applied to everyday morality arguments and how it can improve the lives of those humans who are far from flourishing.

Thought provoking, but there are a few annoying problems.......2005-12-24

Darwinian Natural Right, by Larry Arnhart, argues for a moral system in which we should seek to fulfill our natural desires, which exist due to Darwinian natural selection and evolution.

I think it's important to note that in this book Arnhart holds no distinction between statements of nature-what is-and statements of ethic-what ought to be. As such, his arguments tend to ignore this dualism. However, being a person who generally holds this dualism to be true, I found it easier to understand his argument by understanding his claims within such a distinction; the best way for me to describe his arguments is in such a way. His argument acts as a statement of nature in that it says that human beings, as part of their existence, seek to fulfill natural desires. Furthermore, these desires are, at their most basic level, determined by Darwinist evolution. What we typically see as morality, society, and moral sense is in fact the act of human beings seeking to fulfill these natural desires. Arnhart's claim also takes on tones of a statement of ethic, in that he further claims that not all desires are truly desirable; only those that lead to our flourishing are actually desires. He says that we ought to use reason to assess the best ways to fulfill our desires within environmental constraints, and then seek to fulfill them. Finally, he claims that an Aristotelian prudence is required in dealing with conflicting desires and finding the proper balance of desires that produces the greatest good.

Arnhart goes on to elaborate on these claims in ten different chapters. The first chapter deals with the origins of his ideas, a series of claims that he feels best describes his argument, and a series of seven main objections that he discusses at various points later in the book. In Chapter Two he defends the idea that the good is desirable, defends the use of reason to determine the best way to achieve the good, and sets out what he sees as the basic natural desires of human beings. In Chapter Three he defends Aristotle's interpretation that human beings are by nature political animals (political in this case is synonymous with what we now consider social to mean). In doing so, he argues against two of the seven objections: the possible gap between biological instinct and learned behavior, and the objection that biological principles are fixed, and allow for no variability. In the fourth chapter he asserts the existence of natural morality and the Darwinian support for it, arguing against the Is-Ought objection; he also argues against the objection that Darwinism fails to allow for free will. In Chapter Five and Six he asserts the existence and significance of the parent-child bond and the male-female conjugal bond; the parent-child bond acts as the evolutionary origin of morality, and serves to aid reproduction, and the male-female bond satisfies needs of social dominance and stratification. He also claims that any society that lacks both will fail because they cannot handle the emotional frustration that results. In chapter Seven and Eight Arnhart deals with what he sees as the most potentially damaging flaws in his model: slavery and psychopathy. In seven, he claims that slavery is a moral wrong-it is the denial of the desire to be free of exploitation. In eight, he argues that psychopaths must be considered moral strangers, and removed from society. In the ninth chapter he deals with two more of the seven objections: the objection on the grounds that Darwinian evolution requires change, while Aristotelian philosophy seeks stability; and the objection that Darwinism is directionless, which conflicts with the essential teleological nature of Aristotelian philosophy. And in the tenth chapter he tackles the last of the objections: that Darwinian Natural Right denies the presence or need for God.

There are a few problems with the organization and structure of the book. First, Arnhart fails to adequately explain his argument in the beginning of the book. He lists ten premises that form the basis of his argument, but some of the premises don't follow from the ones before them. Furthermore, some of them seem entirely pointless to his argument (I'm specifically thinking of 7 and 8). Later in the book, you discover the reason behind the confusing premises; in fact, they are key to Arnhart's argument. Unfortunately, he doesn't actually make that very clear until chapters 5-7.

The second major problem with the book's structure is that Arnhart habitually changes the context some of his terminology, which in turn changes their definition, and this makes understanding his arguments VERY confusing. For example, at some points he seems to use the word "moral" in a solely traditional context: morality concerns actions that are more than mundane, such as lying, cheating, stealing, etc. However, in other contexts, he uses his working definition of morality, which is defined as whatever the good is (in this case, fulfillment of desire). As such, things others and I might not consider moral, such as eating habits, suddenly are discussed in a moral context. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with this definition. The problem comes from Arnhart's habit of changing the definition of "moral." (among other terms)

The final major problem I had with the book is that Arnhart spends quite a bit of time trying to connect his theory to the works of past philosophers. In essence, he tries to show how past philosophers would have supported his theory. There is nothing wrong with this, when the theory is adequately supported. However, Arnhart has a habit of focussing so much on connections to past philosophers that his support for his theory suffers. The section of his book in which he deals with the Is-Ought problem (the Naturalistic Fallacy) is a good example of this problem.

There are two main non-structural objections I have to the book. First is Arnhart's failure to deal with the problem of the falsifiability of natural selection. In DNR, Arnhart lists seven major objections to his book. Pretty much all of these are relevant, and he uses them to bring out evidence in favor of his theory (by the way, he does this very well). However, he never addresses the potential for natural selection to be disproven. Ideally, any scientific theory has the capacity to be shown to be in error--in essence, there is always the possibility that new evidence will show up that will render the scientific theory in question false. Furthermore, to paraphrase Karl Popper, error is manifest. Truth is not. In other words, error is something that can be instantly recognized by human beings. Truth, however, is not (this concept is the underlying premise behind falsifiability).

What does this mean for Arnhart's argument? Well, it means that he's supporting his moral theory from a non-absolute position. That is, he support for the existence of Natural RIghts--Darwinian evolution and natural selection--is not set in stone, or in any way known *for certainty*. Insomuch as Darwinism has the capacity to be falsified, Arnhart's argument has the capacity to be falsified. This seems to be a rather serious problem that I hoped Arnhart would address. He didn't.

The second "non-structural" problem is that Arnhart never really addresses the concept of human rights, and how it plays into his theory. His book, in my opinion, seems to imply that when we determine what the right thing to do is (the best way to fulfill a particular natural desire), we ought to do it. Can we force others to do it? To what extent can we force others to do it? In other words, to what extent can we use governmental and social power to promote this moral theory? Arnhart never touches on this.

Now, don't let my seemingly negative reaction to this book fool you. I did enjoy Arnhart's work. As an athiest and a humanist, I always enjoy reading works that put forth an essentially nonreligious foundation for ethics, and among those available, Arnhart's is one of the best. He provides excellent support and examples for the arguments he covers, and I found his argument against the Is-Ought dichotomy to be the best I have read. While I do hold to that dichotomy, I can't stand it's stranglehold on modern ethics, and Arnhart's willingness to argue against it--and his generally impressive argument--is refreshing. His chapter on parent child bonding is equally impressive and informative.

Overall, the book deserves four stars. I wouldn't go so far as to give it five, because there are some rather annoying issues in the book's format and the structure of Arnhart's *style* of argument. However, the book succeeds, for the most part, in defending Arnhart's theory, and it's VERY thought-provoking.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in nonreligious support for ethical systems, or in interactions of biology and ethics. It's not an easy read, but it's a good one.

A Fine Contribution to a Perilous Subject.......2000-07-03

Arnhart holds that the good is desirable, and since we are a natural species, the good can be discerned from our individual environments and our universal constitution as a species. Arnhart's contribution is Aristotelian, in that this philosopher started from the natural position of humanity (e.g., we are a zoon politican--a social animal) rather than from Plato's Ideal World. Arnhart is a Darwinian, in that our constitution as a specied derives from our evolutionary history.

This book can be read with profit by professional philosophers as well as beginners interested in understanding evolutionary ethics. It is clear and systematic, avoids jargon, and amply discusses alternative views.

I take issue with one part of Arnhart's analysis. I learned that "the good is the desirable" in my graduate student days in economics. I have always thought this quite incorrect (I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the topic!). For instance, I may desire potato chips (or heroin) but not consider it good, and may indeed wish that I did not desire these things. In place of Arnhart's principle, I would suggest "The good is what allows us to flourish and to use our natural capacities to the fullest." The idea of flourishing as a criterion is associated with Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen and others, and the idea of developing one's capacities to the fullest is associated with the young Karl Marx, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

At any rate, virtually all of Arnhart's arguments go through with this minor change.

People like me, behavioral scientists, tend to ignore ethical philosophy and have contempt for its practitioners because it tries to find ethical truths independent from the natural position of human beings in the world. Arnhart is a wonderful antidote to this tendency, maintaining a high level of both philosophical and scientific reasoning.

A new look at morality and ethics.......2000-04-18

This book looks at morality or ethics and tries to tie together an Aristotelian with what we now know is a moral system that was part of our primate past. Part evolutionary psychology and part philosophy, it is well written, cogent and easy to read. Its message is simply that humans are social and political animals that have innate desires, but need not act on them. Humans can choose to act contrary to their evolutionary past in ethical terms. But also, political systems must not IGNORE our human nature either, or they will fail.

From page 259 of the book: To justify his laws, Moses repeatedly insisted that if the Jews obeyed, his laws, they and their children would survive and prosper in their new land. He made no claims about immortality of the soul or about rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Instead, like Darwin, he argued that the purpose of morality was to secure the earthly survival and prosperity of oneself and one's progeny. The first commandment of God in the Bible is "Be fruitful and multiply" (Gen. 1:28). For Moses, promoting the survival and reproduction of the Jews required social norms that led individuals to cooperate within their group to compete with other groups (Deut. 4:40, 6:1-3, 11:8-9, 20, 23:9-14,25:11-16, 30:15-20). Moses taught that "whoever obeys the law will find life in it" (Lev. 18:5). Saint Paul cited this as the fundamental aim of the Mosaic Law (Rom. 10:5). It should not be surprising, therefore, that Darwinian theorists can explain the Mosaic law as promoting the reproductive interests of the Jews (Hartung 1995; MacDonald 1994, 35-55). As a product of natural human experience, not only Judaism but all religious beliefs and practices serve the natural desires of human beings in diverse social and physical environments, and consequently we would explain religion as an adaptation of human ecology (Burkert 1996; Reynolds and Tanner 1995).

So even one of the first moral successful systems, the Mosaic Law, recognized the purpose of morality in an evolutionary form, survival of the group. This book tries to go beyond group interests and argues (not always persuasively in my opinion) that a Darwinian morality can subsume the current value system that we all want to see.

The book covers the essence of an evolutionary morality. That is, humans evolved with social ranking, justice as reciprocity, political rule, war when group interests collide, religion to explain the fear of the unknown and eventual death, etc. Morality then became part of the pleasure of serving the tribe or belonging. Kin selection, inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity; these evolutionary processes required that humans have fear and guilt if they act against the tribe's rules. Morality included honor, fearlessness, willingness to die for the group -- that is what the communal sense was all about. Adherence to the tribes moral codes meant the group could fight of predators and other human groups when necessary. Those tribes that could not unify against a common enemy -- what we now call patriotism -- more than likely died out in favor of the more fearless tribes.

And how does this morality come about? Well contrary to what folk psychology tells us, from Dr. Laura to President Clinton, both conservatives and liberals, infants are born with a moral nature and seek the rules naturally. That is, even when playing with other children, a child will develop proper behavior by observing others and learning what works and what doesn't, similar to chimpanzees. So the moral do not have to be taught so much as just observed by children. We are naturally moral animals, but the morals change over time and are different for different cultures. However this book argues that we can now change those moral rules that should be abandoned: slavery, clitoridectomy, circumcision, cannibalism, genocide, etc. Perhaps.

Aristotelian View of Ethics Based on Human Biology.......1999-12-28

Arnhart argues that certain desires are universal in human societies because they are based in human biology. He sees this as grounding an Aristotelian view in which virtues are to be pursued because they promote eudaimonia--human flourishing. Humans can only flourish when biologically-based needs are satisfied. These needs include not only the appetitive ones like food and sex, but "higher" needs of meaningful social interaction and the pursuit of understanding. These universal needs provide the needed telos for judging the rightness or wrongness of actions: How well does the proposed action promote these biologically-based teloi? This view also provides a neutral standard whereby the ethical practices of diverse cultures may be judged, so complete ethichal relativism can be avoided. However, Arnhart recognizes that there may be multifarious, culturally-relative means of achieving the universal ends.

Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction

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An excellent introduction
extremely disappointed in Janet Radcliffe Richards
Socrates on evolutionary ethics
Overlooked

Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction
Janet Richards
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 0415212448

Book Description

Human Nature After Darwin is an original investigation of the implications of Darwinism for our understanding of ourselves and our situation. It casts new light on current Darwinian controversies, and in doing so provides an introduction to philosophical reasoning and a range of philosophical problems. Janet Radcliffe Richards claims that many current battles about Darwinism, in particular about evolutionary psychology and religion, are based on mistaken assumptions about the implications of the rival views. Her analysis of these implications provides a much-needed guide to the fundamentals of Darwinism and the so-called Darwin-wars, as well as providing a set of philosophical techniques relevant to wide areas of moral and political debate. It also raises philosophical problems of knowledge and certainly, free will and responsibility, altruism, the status of ethics, and the relevance of Darwinism to questions of ethics, politics and religion. The lucid presentation makes the book an ideal introduction to both philosophy and Darwinism, as well as a substantive contribution to topics of intense current controversy. It will be of interest to students of philosophy, science and the social sciences, and critical thinking.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent introduction.......2005-08-02

This book is an excellent introduction to current Darwinian thinking about human nature. As the book discusses the implications of accepting Darwinism it does not put forward an awovedly materialist view backed by arguments, but the author's stance on this issue is nevertheless unequivocal.
The style is admirably clear, and the general claim that in most cases, the often supposed differences between non-Darwinian and Darwinian lines of thinking are only apparent ones is convincing.
However, there are some passages which I disagree with.

1. The distinction between the formal validity of conditionals and the existence of a causal or explanatory relation between the antecedent and the consequent is blurred. Radcliffe writes:

"finding out the truth of the conditional is not a matter of finding out whether the antecedent is true... or whether the the consequent is true. Even if you proved conclusively that either of those was true or false, you would still have no evidence at all for the truth of the conditional... In fact, even if you proved both antecedent and consequent true, or both false, or the consequent true and the antecedent false, that would still have no bearing on the truth of the conditional. In all these cases, the conditional could be either true or false...
This is because a conditional is a statement which is not about the truth of any individual proposition, but a particular connection between the two."(p. 92)

For someone trained in formal logic this should seem puzzling. Formally, the truth table of the conditional does determine when it is false, namely when the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. It may be debated whether this extensional truth table really captures the meaning of natural language conditional statements (many say it gives absurd results in some important cases), but it cannot be denied that it goes some way to achieve that. To consider conditionals as expressing a connection between the two contained propositions is to treat them intensionally, i. e. in a way in which their truth does not depend on their constituent propositions. This distinction is an important one, and it should have been indicated clearly in the text.

2. The discussion of the Divine Command view of ethics is simplistic in one respect. Radcliffe says if you think that the problem of Evil needs to be answered, you cannot consistently accept the Divine Command View, as it considers goodness as dependent on the will of God, moreover, it says that whatever God willed must be good. Thus if God willed that suffering be present in the world, this must be a good thing, too.
I think this line of argument would reduce the DC view to absurdity, and Radcliffe unjustly mocks it by saying "[if the DCV were true]we could just say 'War is a good thing after all'."
Of course, one could obviously point out in defence of the DCV that you need not forego it in order to see a real problem in the existence of Evil. One could deny that God willed the suffering (maybe other people did, or Satan in the case of natural disasters) and hold on to the DCV, and/or work out a theodicy in which all sufferings are eventually justified by some greater good, so one can keep the DCV consistently again.

3. There is another argument in the chapter that I disagree with and which I consider the weakest one of the book. It is about the inconsistency of moral relativism. R. says that relativism in its familiar formulations is incoherent, because "it specifies that no principle should be given precedence over others, but in doing so it gives itself precedence; it says that you should not impose your principles on others, but in doing so attempts to impose itself on the holders of other views, and displace theirs."

I have two objections:

a) relativism as a practical guide may be incoherent, but people often act incoherently, as witnessed by the problem of the weakness of will. In itself, there is nothing problematic with that: if all values are subjective, then perhaps there is no other possible way for us to think and act.

b) In addition to the pratical level, there is the meta-level of justification where moral relativism may well win the day. This issue is independent of whether relativism as a practical view is incoherent or not. Furthermore, I find R.'s claim that we can conduct a 'secular moral enquiry' to discover moral truth by using our reason entirely unconvincing. The proposed means, intuitive reasoning, can only work provided there is something objective to be ascertained. However, R. does not in the least argue that there must be objective moral truths: it is one thing to claim that the existence of objective moral standards does not presuppose the existence of God (I agree on this point), and another to substantiate the claim that there are objective moral standards in the first place. Of course, we could see this argument as one working out an implication of Darwinism (i. e. as arguing for the possibilty of a Darwinist ethics) and not as one for such a substantive claim. But in the light of everthing else R. says about morality, especially in the last chapter where she claims that there ARE some real differences between accepting the Darwininan and the non-Darwinian view (plus materialism), (notably concerning survival of death and the prearranged moral order of the universe), what she had said about objective moral truth beforehand does seem very curious. She concludes the first-mentioned chapter by saying 'there is no reason to think that if materialism is true we must be unable to reason morally'. Well, that may be so, but provided that moral reasoning is done by reflective persons, it may easily lead to its own demise, too, or at least we cannot exclude this possibility a priori.
In my view, if you accept the Darwininan view, the only available choice is moral nihilism, or perhaps a version of an "error theory" of morality.

Despite the above critical remarks, in my overall assessment this is a superb book which everyone interested in evolutionary thinking should read. I hope I have not misrepresented the author's arguments in my criticism of them. I would appreciate if you shared your comments with me.

extremely disappointed in Janet Radcliffe Richards.......2004-05-14

I am a huge fan of Radcliffe Richards book "The Skeptical Feminist" which is an excellent presentation of logical arguments for feminism.

So I was extremely disappointed that Radcliffe Richards has joined the forces of Darwinian reductionism and evolutionary psychology. She claims she is simply presenting non-partisan logical arguments for Darwinian theories for our sober consideration, but her own biases come through fairly often - and she thanks a leading proponent of evolutionary psychology, Helena Cronin, in the front of the book.

Cronin wrote a paper "The Evolved Family" (available online) and in this paper she argues (based not on empirical evidence but rather on 'Darwinian logic') that since women as a group have evolved to value men almost exclusively for their income; and to prefer to spend time with their children to spending time at work, there should be a two-tiered system of employment - one for men and one for women - an official mommy track:

"Rather than taking male standards as the universal measure, or expecting both sexes to adopt androgynous working 'roles', the government should design family-friendly employment practices that reflect the different preferences of women and men."

She does not differentiate between mothers and childless women when discussing feminine preferences, so you can't tell if the Cronin plan calls for all women to be pushed into the mommy track, or just all fertile women or just women with children. And she doesn't bother to suggest a system in which a woman might plead for a special dispensation to join the male work force - perhaps the Queen could grant titles of 'honorary male.'

And it's striking how Radcliffe Richards chides those opposed to Darwinian reductionism for emotion-ridden criticisms of her side, when Cronin never mentions feminists without expressing biting contempt.

I can't believe Radcliffe Richards would countenance this radical right-wing social philosopher. Perhaps she became more conservative over the years. Feminism has lost a valuable friend.

Socrates on evolutionary ethics.......2002-05-25

If you have any interest in the ethical or political implications of evolutionary theory, read this book.

If you ever wished you could spend a week with Socrates, discussing a topic of contemporary interest, read this book.

If you have ever, are now, or intend in the future to write or talk about about evolutionary ethics, and you have not read this book, please quit wasting my time!

Overlooked.......2002-01-15

The publishers seem to have misunderstood (or at any rate, underrated) this superb book, which would profit from exposure to a wider audience. It's as if someone in a suit smelled a whiff of the lamp around here and exiled it to the ghetto of academic writing. This is a pity, but it is perhaps in part understandable. The nominal topic is "evolution," but the real subject is the activity of clear thinking. More directly -- no one excels Janet Radcliffe Richards in demonstrating how to use the tools of philosophy in the analysis or understanding of every day problems. There is an audience for this sort of thing. The publisher seems not to have found it and both auther and audience (saying nothing of the publisher) are the losers.

Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature

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Canonical Text
Category Mistake
A new paradigm
A Potentially Revolutionary Contribution

Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature
Joseph Carroll
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Rethinking Theory)
Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature
Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts
Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why
Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative)

ASIN: 0415970148

Book Description

In Literary Darwinism, Carroll presents a comprehensive survey of this new movement with a collection of his most important previously published work, along with three new essays. The essays and reviews give commentary on all the major contributors to the field, situate the field as a whole in relation to historical trends and contemporary schools, provide Darwinist readings of major literary texts such as Pride and Prejudice and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and analyze literary Darwinism in relation to the affiliated fields of evolutionary metaphysics, cognitive rhetoric, and ecocriticism. Collecting the essays in a single volume will provide a central point of reference for scholars interested in consulting what the "foremost practitioner" (New York Times) of Darwinian literary criticism has to say about his field.

Customer Reviews:

Canonical Text.......2007-03-11

Incredibly inciteful, perceptive, and well-thought out; this book should be required reading in all college English departments. Mr. Carroll approaches literature with the rationality of science, but with none of its often jargon-filled dryness. Fascinating analyses of the evolutionary motives that not only make us tick, but some of our best-loved literary characters as well. A guide to reality, via fiction.

Category Mistake.......2006-10-22

The human imagination is the fount of extraordinary creativity. "Flights of fancy" take us to places and ideas that only the mind can conceive, places where we create our own reality, if only for a time, a place where only "credibility" is a gauge, and often not even that. We've created more deities in our image than any single god can hold. We've traversed Aquinas's labyrinth of angelic worlds were no human has ever gone, and probably never will. Milton took us to Paradise, and explains how we lost it. Dante takes us through hell, purgatory, and back to Paradise. Marx's Utopia is a wonderlust of wishful aspirations and neurotic tensions. Freud's landscape of the psyche is unparalleled in its imagination, however false empirically. Borges takes us into places we can't get out, and we love the dead-ends. Science fiction takes us to worlds we want to explore without the constraints of our present limitations. It's all wonderful, delightful, provocative, and truly human. It's also fiction. We sometimes forget that.

The imaginative arts allow us "freedom" that the sciences, for example, limit. But that "freedom" is our window into ourselves, a projection of every possible nuance one can imagine. It allows us to create and fabricate all sorts of "alternative realities," explore different possibilities, stretch our limits, and go in directions that physics won't allow. Even those "worlds" that bear close resemblance to our own, such as Shakespeare's or Byron's, are still distant lands. We take a journey into realms only our imaginations understand. We must never lose this precious inheritance. But we also must not "confuse" it for the real. Nor try to "codify" it with overarching theories of interpretative hegemony. It remains a frontier that should not be reduced to ideology or the scientific method. That is both perversion and a "category mistake." It boxes-in that vestige of energy that must not be contained.

At first blush, literary Darwinism seems eminently sensible, using sociobiological insights of "life" itself to better understand our "creative lives." After all, we are humans first, and understanding our biological natures surely aids our understanding of each other, not the least of which is our own creative projects. With this level of approach, I have no cavil. It is clearly superior to the dogmatic Ivory Tower Drivel that has infected the Humanities over the past half century. Having "a foot on the ground" cannot but help bring our Humanities folk back to reality. But I cannot endorse a new "empirical" literary theory to replace the old ideological paradigm, however more sensible, because it just adds another template through which to force us through a sieve.

Being empirically-oriented myself, I cannot fault an English-literature professor suggesting we "re-impose" some reality in our literary theory. It's long been absent. Moreover, he's working in an environment hostile to such "realities," but his treatment is worse than the disease. He's advocating placing readers under imaging devices (e.g., fMRIs) to measure their responses to the literary experience, to tabulate the data, and show how it comports with all the other evolutionary work done in anthropology, biology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, etc. This is positively garrish, a project Darwin himself would find repugnant!

Let's situate Carroll in his predicament, and try to understand why he would make such an outlandish proposal. As a former Arnoldean, steeped in the Liberal Humanistic Tradition, he's convinced that only an appeal to "empiricism" will lift off the shackles of the Postmodernist Hegemon that dominates the Humanities. He's convinced that the "entrenched interests" will not budge otherwise, because it's their "bread and butter" to be contrarian, subversive, and radically irrational. He may be right. Certainly the English Departments in Anglo-American academies are a species of their own. And their ideological spue is toxic as well as dissonant. Asking why it persists, despite the onslaught of criticism from all other disciplines, only validates Carroll's point. It's entrenched.

But there is more. Carroll claims that the nexus of Marxism, Freudianism, and Deconstructionism creates a "whole" theory of the "world," arguably false, but complete. This claim needs to be taken seriously, even if I find it preposterous. Do these ideological flights of fancy really make a composite whole? Carroll insists the "nail" was sealed with Deconstructionism, which denies everything but "rhetoric," and then makes rhetoric so indeterminate, that all that is left is the assertion of the "will to power." Marxism and Freudianism just fill-in on the margins when anxieties get too tough. It's an interesting claim. And, if the claim is true, why? Why are English Departments exempt from substantiating their dogmas? No other academic discipline is "allowed" this latitude.

These questions need answers before we start forcing the "arts" through the "scientific" paradigm. Gilbert Ryle's famous phrase "category mistake" just screams at this indiscretion. And the "cure" is just as unsettling as the "sickness." Again, don't misunderstand me. Biological insights certainly enhance our understanding of imaginative works, because they both herald from "life" itself. Here we're on common ground. But "empiricizing" the imaginative arts should seem terribly dissonant, and "measuring" the aesthetic experience is fundamentally incoherent. Even if it could be done, why would we? To save the Humanities from itself? The prescription is worse than the problem.

Notwithstanding this broader reservation, Carroll's articulate, incisive, and well-crafted Humanistic scholarship blends with sociobiological facts and theory to produce one of the most sustained indictments of the impoverished Humanities and a compelling raison d'etre to look to proven sociobiological theory, coupled with Wilson's advocacy of "consilience" (unity of knowledge), to move Humanistic Study forward to a far more promising frontier. There's no looking back.

A new paradigm.......2005-02-04

The greatest mind of the 19th Century, perhaps of any century, was that of Charles Darwin. If any mind of the 20th Century might be said to equal Darwin's it would be that of Edward Osborne Wilson. An entomologist, it was Wilson who demonstrated the implications of insect societies for human cultures. His ideas were first promulgated in his 1975 book "Sociobiology" and bore full fruit with "Consilience" in 1998. In "Consilience", Wilson proposed that, as humans were as much a part of Nature as any other creature, our behaviour traits, including the arts and literature, should be viewed in the light of evolution. Wilson demonstrated how the human spirit would be expanded, not diminished, by such a framework. The research ensuing since "Sociobiology" has affirmed Wilson's insight. How would such scenario apply to literature?

Joseph Carroll, a literary critic, incorporates Wilson's insights throughout this collection. Carroll argues that our outlook on the world would be expanded, not confined, by consciously applying Darwin's principles to our literature. Many authors, he notes, have done this through an intuitive sense. Jane Austen, hardly a Darwinian, still presented her characters fully integrated within their natural environment. Austen distinguished between which environments suited a character and which left the individual feeling displaced. For Carroll, this is an encouraging sign. Observant and astute writers can apply what he calls the "Darwinian paradigm", imparting a more natural and plausible foundation to fiction. He wants new writers to understand how to employ those principles from the outset. In this, Carroll is following where Wilson is pointing. The result, Carroll feels, will be an improved basis for literature's production and analysis.

Narrative itself, not only common to the human condition, but apparently necessary to it, reflects our ancestral past. As Wilson pointed out, human beings are a social, not a solitary, animal. Carroll's thesis furthers this idea by noting that narrative accounts are a means of identification within a community. Depicted human interactions must reflect that situation and be based on firm knowledge of Darwinian principles, not on assumptions nor sketchy awareness. He criticises authors who pay lip service to the "Darwinian paradigm" without truly understanding its tenets.

Carroll's thesis is based on what is known as "the Adapted Mind". Our mental states, whether in writing or reading, are derived from the long evolutionary path we've traversed. We aren't separated or "elevated" from it. Much of his attention is given to revealing the false notion of "poststructuralism" - that there are no "truths" [whether absolute or relative] and that authors have no intent in their writings, simply expression formed by local "culture". Darwin's idea, for example, could only have occured in Victorian Britain. Obviously, in such a framework, evolutionary roots have no role in composition, reading or criticism. It seems trite when Carroll writes "the subject matter of literature is human experience", but he feels we need to be reminded of that truth. Writing, he contends, must reflect that truism more forcefully than is often the case. Steps have already been taken, he notes. Such works as "Biopoetics" and "Homo Aestheticus" are indicators of a more realistic approach in fiction.

Carroll's three part collection - a view of the "literary landscape", theory and practical criticism, and assessments of Darwian biographers and critics, is a splendid example of how consilience works. He is opening a new frontier of both writing and reading, and is optimistic for its success. He stresses that a merger of the humanities and sciences, is not only desireable, but necessary. A better knowledge of ourselves must involve a better knowledge of our world. That can only be beneficial to all humanity and its habitat, using literature as a means. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

A Potentially Revolutionary Contribution.......2004-11-29

The various essays, articles and book reviews comprising Joseph Carroll's Literary Darwinism are rooted in two principles: first, humans share a common nature that can be revealed through the scientific method; second, this universal nature is the product of relentless Darwinian selection over eons. While this is obviously orthodox stuff in the world of behavioral biology, these notions remain quite heretical among the social constructivists who continue to dominate the world of literary studies. From Carroll's simple principles flow corollaries with large implications for literary studies and behavioral biology. The most important corollary for literary scholars is that a large proportion of all that has been said, written, or merely thought in the realm of literary theory and criticism over the last several decades is obviously and often breathtakingly wrong. This is because all of the dominant "poststructuralist" approaches--Lacanian, Foucauldian, Marxist, radical feminist, deconstructionist, and others--are organized around an adamantine core of social constructivist theory that is profoundly at odds both with Darwinian theory and with practical research in what Steven Pinker calls "the new sciences of human nature."

Carroll's argument is really quite simple. All literary criticism and theory is ultimately based on theories of human nature (even the theory that there is no such thing as human nature is a theory of human nature). Literary scholarship constructed on unsound theoretical foundations--on essentially faulty premises about human tendencies and potential--must itself be unsound, no matter how internally self-consistent. The chapters of Literary Darwinism articulate Carroll's vision of a foundation-up reorganization of literary studies along Darwinian lines. Carroll describes a Darwinian Literary Study where judgments about literary plots, characters, and themes are rooted in the bedrock of evolutionary theory, are disciplined by the findings of scientific research, and, when possible, are tested using scientific methods.

Literary scholars and evolutionists who are interested in the concept of consilience will also be interested in Literary Darwinism, which represents one of the most serious and sustained attempts to establish consilience between the humanities and behavioral biology-and to plumb its implications.

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