The Battlegrounds of Bio-Science

Part I: The Evolutionary Psychology Debates asks whether there is an underlying human nature, produced by Darwinian evolution and encapsulated in modules in the human brain, or whether evolutionary explanations are at best naive and at worst a smoke screen for political oppression?

Part I begins with "The Quick and Dirty Guide to Evolutionary Psychology and the Nature of Human Nature." It provides a brief, and at times humorous introduction to the emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology, which sets the stage for the interviews that follow. Chapter 2 is an interview of Darwin's Dangerous Disciple -- Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene. He describes a mechanistic universe of selfish genes driven by natural selection, devoid of design, purpose, good or evil. Dawkins cautions against the Naturalistic Fallacy of mistaking "Is" for "Ought," and argues that religion is a mind virus. Chapter 3 is an interview of anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, who look back on how the social sciences have changed since 1971 when they wrote their ground-breaking book, The Imperial Animal. Tiger then criticizes the real danger of evolutionists, such as Richard Dawkins in the preceding interview, "looking at religion in a mocking sense and concentrating on its negative features." Fox also argues, contra Dawkins, that philosopher David Hume did not say that one couldn't logically go from Is to Ought, but rather made such jumps all the time, and so did Darwin.

The fourth chapter in Part I is an interview of Edward O. Wilson, the father of sociobiology. He discusses his book, Consilience, where he argues that because of the recent explosion of knowledge from the Human Genome Project and the Decade of the Brain we stand on the verge of reaching consilience – the age-old goal of unifying knowledge from the sciences and the humanities into one grand philosophy. I ask Wilson to respond to the criticisms of philosopher Richard Rorty and of the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould that science, art, and religion are (to use Gould's Neologism) Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) that can never be united. "Can we unify knowledge through the consilient approach or should we compartmentalize it and lead our lives as if we were split-brained?" Wilson's retorts that "These strong, even emotional objections ... are what I call the secular intellectuals' white flag,... politically correct in an almost all-encompassing sense."

Part II: The Origins and Diversity Debates explores human evolution and human differences. The first chapter, Chapter 6, sets the stage by using the figure of Caliban in Shakespeare's play, The Tempest ("A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick;"), to trace the tempestuous history of anthropology ... especially the contentious issues of race and cultural and evolutionary progress. Chapter 7 then asks whether evolution is just another origin myth, as religious fundamentalist and literary deconstructionists (a rather strange set of bedfellows) argue. It reviews the origin and function of origin myths from those of hunter gatherers to those contained in literary epics from The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Exodus to novels/movies like Exodus, The Godfather, and The Winning of the West.

Chapter 7 is an interview of paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, discoverer of the famous Lucy fossil. He tells how a front page news photo of a biology teacher in a fundamentalist school holding up a bumper sticker reading, "Darwin is dead and he ain't coming back!" got his juices flowing. So much so that he wrote a letter to the editor declaring, "Isn't it a shame that ... we're still teaching ignorance to our children. Sir Isaac Newton is dead, but gravity ain't going away! Maybe we should have that as a bumper sticker!"

Turning to the ever controversial topic of race and brain size, I ask Johanson, "do the anatomical differences in living humans ... mean something behaviorally, or [if not] how do you know those differences meant something ... in the evolutionary record? If someone suddenly cloned a Neanderthal, or a Homo erectus, or an Australopithecus afarensis, how do we know that they would be behaviorally different from people alive today?" "You've really sent up a balloon here," Johanson replies. ... "There are clearly populational differences... [B]ut ... whether you are a native Australian or a native Laplander, what's going on inside the braincase is essentially the same. They're capable of all the same sorts of behaviors as any living member of Homo sapiens."

Part III begins with an interview of Charles Murray, co-author of the most controversial best-selling book, The Bell Curve. Murray and his co-author, (Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, who died shortly before the book's publication) argued that IQ is real; it is a good predictor not only of academic grades but of job performance, income, crime, and illegitimacy; it is between 40 and 80% the result of genetic, not socioeconomic factors; it will become increasingly important as society becomes more technological; and that at least some part of the Black-White average IQ difference is genetic.

Asked to defend the thesis of his book against the harsh criticism in received in the media as being a work of "pseudoscience," Murray cites the results of a 1991 survey of expert opinion among behavior geneticists and psychometricians (i.e., IQ experts) who agreed that IQ was real, highly predictive, had a significant genetic basis, and at least some of the black-white IQ difference probably had a genetic cause. Murray declares "The science in The Bell Curve, Murray declares, "is very much in the middle of the mainstream." and then adds, "[T]here has been a collective intellectual cowardice about understanding the role of intelligence in understanding social problems."

In the following chapter, Robert Sternberg, editor of The Encyclopedia of Intelligence, accuses Herrnstein and Murray of erroneously "inviting their readers to believe" that if intelligence is highly heritable it cannot be changed by environmental intervention. Sternberg states that there is always an interaction between heredity and environment, that we just don't know what causes the Black-White difference in average IQ, and concludes that the cognitive stratification "revealed" by The Bell Curve is actually "an invention of our society."

Part IV: The Population, Environment, and Cloning Debates explores takes a planetary focus. The "Quick and Dirty Guide to Population and Environment" sets the stage for the debate between ecologists, who claim human overpopulation is destroying the Earth's environment and we are quickly using up the supply of raw materials, and economists, who say, "Show me the money!" ... commodities are getting cheaper, and life is getting better for more and more people. Text and diagrams trace the growth of population over the course of human evolution, the effect of industrialization on population growth, varying estimates of how many people the earth can support (and how wrong some of these estimates have been), and the changes in temperature and carbon dioxide levels.