Human nature and the limits of science

I certainly have no intention of attacking Science. For a start, I don't think there is any such thing to attack. Science, as I see it, is a very diverse set of strategies for investigating diverse aspects of the world. This is what I argued at length in my earlier book, The Disorder of Things. Some of these strategies have been astonishingly successful, while some are wholly misconceived. Certainly I attack some of the latter in the present book. A consequence of this perspective is that there can be no assumption that any arbitrarily chosen question about the world has a simple ‘scientific' answer - as if, ‘What is human nature?' were a question much like ‘What is electricity?, or ‘How do the planets move?, though perhaps a bit more difficult.

Naïve conceptions of science have helped to motivate hopelessly simplistic accounts of human nature. Thus, for instance, evolutionary psychologists have announced that human nature is a set of information-processing mechanisms that served the reproductive needs of our Stone Age ancestors. Human Nature and the Limits of Science dismantles the various errors and simplifications involved in this claim.

What ‘errors and simplifications' do you have in mind? I will pick out two. Firstly, evolutionary psychologists generally conceive of evolution as storing information about the environment in a genetic programme. And since it is also supposed that genetic change happens very slowly, it follows that our genomes contain information about the environment of the distant past, specifically the Stone Age. Our brains, seen as built by our genetic programmes, are thus atavistically adapted to Stone Age life. But in fact human brains develop through a cascade of enormously intricate interactions between our biological heritage and our environments. They are not programmed, and there is no reason why they should not develop in ways reasonably well adapted to the various very different situations in which modern humans (including the few modern humans sometimes referred to as living in the Stone Age) encounter.

Secondly, evolutionary psychologists suggest that human cultural diversity is largely an illusion. Human Nature and the Limits of Science argues that a proper appreciation of the interaction between biological and environmental factors in human development makes it unsurprising that there are real and deep differences between cultures.

Why do you feel it is important to argue against evolutionary psychology? This dismantling is of some importance for its own sake, as evolutionary psychology has become a remarkably popular contemporary origin myth for explaining a whole range of features of contemporary human life. And as an explanation, it has dangers that go beyond mere falsehood and intellectual confusion: if we believe that all patterns of behaviour in contemporary societies, good and bad, are the inescapable products of genetic law, we engender unwarranted pessimism. There can be little hope of changing what is bad.

But the attack on evolutionary psychology also has a positive goal. Evolutionary psychologists commonly suggest that their critics wish to replace ,their insights by a theory of the human mind as a blank slate, infinitely malleable by culture. But it is certainly not my aim to replace the bankrupt monism of fundamentalist evolutionists with an equally unpromising and reductionist culturalism. This dichotomy itself derives from the increasingly discredited notion that there is only one properly scientific approach to any particular phenomenon.

The constructive thesis of the book is rather that only a radically pluralistic approach to the topic has any chance of generating real understanding. The kinds of regimented conceptual structures necessary for scientific modelling are capable of providing only quite narrow and partial perspectives on a phenomenon as complex as human nature. And the range of perspectives needed to begin to get to grips with this phenomenon will very probably include traditionally humanistic insights as well as scientific ones.

What aspects of human nature are trampled on by evolutionary psychology?
As I've suggested, one crucial aspect of human nature is its diversity. Evolutionary psychologists respond by attempting to discover more and more universals underlying this diversity – thereby hoping to abstract out the underlying biological essence; but if, as I argue, human nature is inherently a product of interaction between biology and environment, their efforts are wholly misguided. And of course the present diversity of human nature is also indicative of an indefinite range of forms human nature may come to take in the future.

Another perspective is that of the human as an autonomous agent, an agent with some control over his or her own destiny. This is notoriously omitted by narrow scientific accounts of the human. In the final chapter of the book, I argue that this perspective is not only necessary for an adequate view of the human condition, but entirely compatible with the metaphysics that best incorporates the properly pluralistic approach to the subject.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology
3. The Evolutionary Psychology of Sex and Gender
4. The Charms and Consequences of Evolutionary Psychology
5. Kinds of People
6. Rational Choice Theory
7. Freedom of the Will

Index