Therefore, the authors concluded, rape was — to use a loaded term that has been getting Darwinians in trouble since Darwin — "natural". Understandably, the book was hugely controversial.
But by the time it was published, there was nothing all that radical about the idea that natural selection might be able to illuminate any and every aspect of human behaviour. Evolutionary psychology, in the hands of various practitioners, sought to explain why militarism is so prevalent in human societies, or why men tend to dominate women in so many hierarchical organisations. If the field seems less politically charged these days, that is only because it has permeated our consciousness so deeply that it has become less questioned.
For much of the late Noughties, a week never seemed to pass without one new book or news story attributing some facet of modern-day life to the evolutionary past: men were more prone to sexual jealousy than women because a woman who conceives becomes unavailable for imminent future acts of reproduction; men preferred women with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.
It explained music and art and why we reward senior executives with top-floor corner offices because we evolved to want a clear view of our enemies approaching across the savannah. Leftwing and feminist critics did frequently misinterpret evolutionary psychology, imagining that when scholars described some trait as adaptive, they meant it was morally justifiable.
But that was how many such findings — often better described as speculations — came to be believed. We're not exactly saying it's right for, say, men to sleep around, evolutionary psychologists would observe with a knowing sigh, but. Far more than biologists, evolutionary psychologists bought in to the ultra-simple version of natural selection, and so they stand to lose far more from advances in our understanding of what's really been going on.
They were always prone to telling "just-so stories" — spinning plausible tales about why some trait might be adaptive, instead of demonstrating that it was — and numerous recent studies have begun to chip away at what evidence there was.
That waist-to-hip ratio finding, for example, doesn't seem to hold up in the face of international and historical research. And now, if epigenetics and other developments are coming to suggest that environment can alter heredity, the very terms of the debate — of nature versus nurture — suddenly become shaky. It's not even a matter of settling on a compromise, a "mixture" of nature and nurture. Rather, the concepts of "nature" and "nurture" seem to be growing meaningless.
What does "nature" even mean if you can nurture the nature of your descendants? All our popular notions about talent and "genetic gifts", he points out, start to collapse if the eating habits of Tiger Woods's ancestors, for example, might have played a role in Woods's golfing abilities.
Woods always crops up in discussions on the origins of genius; more recently, he has started cropping up in evolutionary psychology discussions about whether promiscuity is inevitable. The question is how much nuance will carry over into the public sphere. We're stuck with a pretty limited way of viewing all this, and I think part of that comes from the terms" — such as nature and nurture — "that we have. Among the arsenal of studies at Shenk's disposal is one published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience, involving mice bred to possess genetically inherited memory problems.
As small recompense for having been bred to be scatterbrained, they were kept in an environment full of stimulating mouse fun: plenty of toys, exercise and attention. Key aspects of their memory skills were shown to improve, and crucially so did those of their offspring, even though the offspring had never experienced the stimulating environment, even as foetuses. And then there is Jerry Fodor, the American philosopher.
I started reading What Darwin Got Wrong, the new book he has co-authored with the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, one morning, along with that day's first coffee. A few pages later, as the coffee kicked in, I grasped with astonishment what Fodor had done. He hadn't just identified evidence that natural selection was more complicated than previously thought — he'd uncovered a glaring flaw in the whole notion!
Natural selection, he explains, simply "cannot be the primary engine of evolution". I got up and refilled my cup. But by the time I returned, his argument had slipped from my grasp. Suddenly, he seemed obviously wrong, tied up in philosophical knots of his own creation. I alternated between these two convictions. Was Fodor's critique so devastatingly correct that his critics — Dawkins, Dennett, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn, and many others — simply couldn't see it?
Had he actually managed to. I called Fodor and asked him to explain his point in language an infant school pupil could understand. If we're right that Darwin and Darwinists have missed the point we've been making for years, that's not because it's a simple point and Darwin was stupid. It's a really complicated issue. Fodor's objection is a distant cousin of one that rears its head every few years: doesn't "survival of the fittest" just mean "survival of those that survive", since the only criterion of fitness is that a creature does, indeed, survive and reproduce?
The ones who survive! The 'survival of the fittest' would be a joke if it weren't part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community. This argument, perhaps uniquely among all arguments ever made by Coulter, feels persuasive, not least because it is a reasonable criticism of some pop-Darwinism.
In fact, though, it's entirely possible for scientists to measure fitness using criteria other than survival, and thus to avoid circular logic. For example, you might hypothesise that speed is a helpful thing to have if you're an antelope, then hypothesise the kind of leg structure you'd want to have, as an antelope, in order to run fast; then you'd examine antelopes to see if they do indeed have something approximating this kind of leg structure, and you'd examine the fossil record, to see if other kinds of leg died out.
Fodor's point is more complex than this, although it's also possible that it is not really a point at all: several reviews of the book by professional evolutionary theorists and philosophers have concluded that it is, indeed, nonsense. The database contains hundreds of years' worth of work by taxonomists from all over the world.
The current way of "doing" taxonomy goes all the way back to botanist Carl Linnaeus , so the accumulation of knowledge is the combined work of all taxonomists since then.
Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Science News. ScienceDaily, 17 March St John's College, University of Cambridge. One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved. Retrieved November 12, from www. They include almost all the species used by people for food, medicine, and many other purposes.
Now, scientists want to reshape Darwin's In a month-long experiment using a virus harmless to ScienceDaily shares links with sites in the TrendMD network and earns revenue from third-party advertisers, where indicated. Print Email Share. Boy or Girl? Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society. National Geographic Society. For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher.
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In the mids, Charles Darwin famously described variation in the anatomy of finches from the Galapagos Islands. Alfred Russel Wallace noted the similarities and differences between nearby species and those separated by natural boundaries in the Amazon and Indonesia.
Independently they came to the same conclusion: over generations, natural selection of inherited traits could give rise to new species. Use the resources below to teach the theory of evolution in your classroom. When most of us think about natural selection, we attribute that theory to naturalist Charles Darwin. However, what most people do not know is that another scientist, Alfred Wallace, a naturalist, a geographer, and a socialist, also deserves some credit for the theory.
Evolution is the process by which species adapt over time in response to their changing environment. Use these ideas to teach about the water cycle in your classroom. Evolutionary adaptation, or simply adaptation, is the adjustment of organisms to their environment in order to improve their chances at survival in that environment.
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