DARWIN'S LEGACY

Dupré's questions in this book are, as he rightly says, large ones. He asks, `What does evolution tell us about ourselves? About our place in the universe? About God?' He has, however, a reassuringly simple answer to all these queries, namely that accepting Darwin's view on evolution eliminates belief in God. The mechanism of natural selection removes the need for a creator to explain design, which he sees as the only rational basis for theism. He is not interested in its other possible sources, nor in the various meanings that are given to the idea of divinity, nor in the possible ways in which this change might affect the rest of our concepts. As he puts it -

I want to insist on a view that once seemed obvious but may now seem naïve. This is the view that a great part of Darwin's contribution was to take a major step down the road leading away from primitive animism through the great scientific heroes of the Renaissance – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and others – to a naturalistic world-view that was able finally and fully to dispense with the ghosts, spirits and gods that served to explain natural phenomena for an earlier age…. We should no longer be satisfied with mythologies that are made up from sheer ignorance. Copernicus, Galileo and Newton themselves might, of course, all have been rather cross at being implicated in such a move, but probably Dupré, like others who conscript them for this purpose today, thinks that this is just because they were too naïve to understand the enterprise that they were engaged in. Accordingly, he considers this piece of metaphysical hygiene - `removing the last hiding-place for a god or gods' – to be the only substantial change that the knowledge of evolution should make in our world-view. He is particularly sceptical about the suggestion that it might also tell us something important about our own nature. `The details of the human mind,' he says, `are the parameters of a feature largely unique to a particular species', so comparison with other species can throw little or no light on them. To demonstrate this, he devotes much of his book – I think the best part of it – to demolishing current theories of evolutionary psychology and their sociobiological sources, explaining how their proponents have systematically misused the notion of genes and marketed a mass of a priori speculations as principles of science. This is surely true, and anyone who hasn't already penetrated the murky details of that scene may well find this part of the book useful. But it is old news. Dupré himself has said it before and many other writers (such as Steven Rose) have already exposed the inadequacy of these studies. They have moved on past them to much more realistic thoughts about what follows from our close relationship with the other animals. The most obvious thing that does follow from it – which I am surprised that Dupré does not mention – is a point that Darwin himself repeatedly made. We can no longer think of ourselves as privileged beings, observing and manipulating the natural world from outside. Any meaningful naturalism that takes account of our evolutionary history must surely involve demoting ourselves from the quasi-supernatural position which we have continued to claim for our species since the Enlightenment, regardless of how ill this favouritism fits with our official materialist orthodoxy. That conviction of our own secure and independent status is surely what now blocks our perception of the damage we are doing to the biosphere on which we depend. The worship of Homo Sapiens, closely linked to the worship of money, is a much more central cause of our present troubles than any that may flow from the worship of other gods. In his earlier writings, Dupré has extended his campaign against evolutionary psychology into a more general attack on simplistic narrowness. He has pointed out well that something as complex as human nature is bound to need many kinds of explanation because it raises many kinds of question. I have to say that this welcome sense of complexity seems disappointingly absent from the present book. Its message is simple and negative. It seems to be a contribution to a debate rather than a further dig into the problems.