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The Darwin Wars: The Scientific Battle for the Soul of Man
Evolutionary theory is now one of the main myths of our time. It has to bear the weight of most of our hopes and fears about what being human really means. And for over twenty years it has been riven by a holy war, conducted with an extraordinary fury that reverberates far outside the walls of academe. The two scientific camps are currently divided between 'Dawkinsians' on the one hand who may not agree with Richard Dawkins about very much but are convinced Stephen Jay Gould is dangerously wrong, and the 'Gouldians' on the other hand who take the opposite views. But who is right, or wrong, and what does it all mean? The Darwin Wars is an entertaining and lucid account of the evolution of today's neo-Darwinist theories, including the hugely influential Selfish Gene theory, and the misunderstandings and even deep hatreds that they provoke. With wit and insight, Andrew Brown puts in context the wide-reaching debate and explains its real significance for us all. For just as Darwinism now provides the main explanatory framework of our times, so disputes about Darwinism are really disputes about our very nature and place in the world
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Andrew Brown
4 booksAndrew Brown is a journalist and writer; editor of the Belief section of the Guardian's Comment is Free as well as a weekly web column and other work. He is author of "Fishing in Utopia", The Darwin Wars: The Scientific Battle for the Soul of Man, and In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite. He has also been Religious Affairs correspondent for the Independent.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 21, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in February 2000.
Brown's book attempts to chronicle from an impartial position what will probably be seen as the bitterest scientific dispute of our times. It is a fascinating book, revealing much about the personalities of those involved and clearly explaining the science needed to understand what is going on. The personalities are important, as much of the argument in the debate is (regrettably) ad hominem; science often takes second place to point scoring rhetoric.
The subject at the heart of the controversy is frequently called neo-Darwinism, and it basically stems from the derivation of a mathematical description of how altruistic behaviour can arise from the assumption of survival of the fittest. In other words, this is the discovery that a creature can sometimes help others to make the transmission of its own genes more likely. (Social insects are the classic example of this: complicated kinship patterns mean that the workers "do better" by enabling the queen to pass on her genes.) As soon as this result was proved, its discoverer killed himself. A committed Christian (who spent his last years making enormous sacrifices to help the homeless), George Price felt that the application of the rule to human beings implied that his own altruism had selfishness at its root.
This feeling is where the controversy stems from, for it is the application of evolutionary ideas to human beings which has always offended since Darwin's The Descent of Man. It hasn't helped the quality of the discussion that much of the debate has been carried on in popular science books, like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, rather than in more restrained technical publications. There at least arguments could have been presented with mathematics rather than metaphor; there at least what was to be said would have been criticised by colleagues before publication.
The important question, then, is how genetics shapes human lives, not just in the physical sense but in the social. It is the modern form of the nature/nurture debate, and is today perhaps made more serious by the way in which Nazi Germany made eugenics a dirty word (and thus provided many handy insults for just this type of debate). There are those who would claim that the genetic discoveries have made moral philosophy an empty subject; we are what we are because of the environment that shaped our ancestors. The problem is that specific arguments can be made too easily; almost anything we do can be explained by reference to some supposed evolutionary pressure. (The silliest example Brown quotes is an argument that millionaires build penthouse suites to live in because for our ancestors on the African plains a preference for high places gave a better chance for survival by making them able to see further. As Brown points out, to crouch in a hollow hides you from predators, so almost the same argument should imply that millionaires prefer basement flats.) Much that has been written on the subject amounts to a series of illustrations of the futility of arguing from effects to causes. By explaining everything, sociobiology explains nothing (at least as it is often portrayed by its popularisers).
The two most prominent participants in the debate are Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Brown may be slightly harder on Dawkins, but generally seems to make an effort to be impartial; Dawkins is a more tempting target, with a passion for lively debate which leads him to overstate his case and an unwillingness to admit that he could have been wrong. His utter contempt for religion, especially Christian fundamentalism, is a case in point, and gets a lengthy criticism from Brown. (The sociogenetic position can easily be turned into an attack on religion, by portraying spirituality as a construct of evolutionary utility.) Brown is himself an atheist, though by spending some years as a religious affairs journalist he has more understanding and sympathy for those who have a religious belief. Dawkins and his followers (Nicholas Humphrey in particular) have let their contempt lead them into saying some really stupid things. An example of this is a lecture to an Amnesty International conference given by Humphrey in which he says both that religion is so dangerous that it should be a crime to teach it to children and that it is so poorly thought out that teaching scientific truth causes it to wither and die. On the other hand, their statements about science, neatly demolished by Brown, lay them open to the accusation that they are making science a religion, with themselves as evolutionary fundamentalists.
I enjoyed this book, feeling that it was balanced and critical. It didn't make me want to read the books it talks about, which many science books do, but then I've never really liked Dawkins or Gould as writers anyway.
Brown's book attempts to chronicle from an impartial position what will probably be seen as the bitterest scientific dispute of our times. It is a fascinating book, revealing much about the personalities of those involved and clearly explaining the science needed to understand what is going on. The personalities are important, as much of the argument in the debate is (regrettably) ad hominem; science often takes second place to point scoring rhetoric.
The subject at the heart of the controversy is frequently called neo-Darwinism, and it basically stems from the derivation of a mathematical description of how altruistic behaviour can arise from the assumption of survival of the fittest. In other words, this is the discovery that a creature can sometimes help others to make the transmission of its own genes more likely. (Social insects are the classic example of this: complicated kinship patterns mean that the workers "do better" by enabling the queen to pass on her genes.) As soon as this result was proved, its discoverer killed himself. A committed Christian (who spent his last years making enormous sacrifices to help the homeless), George Price felt that the application of the rule to human beings implied that his own altruism had selfishness at its root.
This feeling is where the controversy stems from, for it is the application of evolutionary ideas to human beings which has always offended since Darwin's The Descent of Man. It hasn't helped the quality of the discussion that much of the debate has been carried on in popular science books, like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, rather than in more restrained technical publications. There at least arguments could have been presented with mathematics rather than metaphor; there at least what was to be said would have been criticised by colleagues before publication.
The important question, then, is how genetics shapes human lives, not just in the physical sense but in the social. It is the modern form of the nature/nurture debate, and is today perhaps made more serious by the way in which Nazi Germany made eugenics a dirty word (and thus provided many handy insults for just this type of debate). There are those who would claim that the genetic discoveries have made moral philosophy an empty subject; we are what we are because of the environment that shaped our ancestors. The problem is that specific arguments can be made too easily; almost anything we do can be explained by reference to some supposed evolutionary pressure. (The silliest example Brown quotes is an argument that millionaires build penthouse suites to live in because for our ancestors on the African plains a preference for high places gave a better chance for survival by making them able to see further. As Brown points out, to crouch in a hollow hides you from predators, so almost the same argument should imply that millionaires prefer basement flats.) Much that has been written on the subject amounts to a series of illustrations of the futility of arguing from effects to causes. By explaining everything, sociobiology explains nothing (at least as it is often portrayed by its popularisers).
The two most prominent participants in the debate are Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Brown may be slightly harder on Dawkins, but generally seems to make an effort to be impartial; Dawkins is a more tempting target, with a passion for lively debate which leads him to overstate his case and an unwillingness to admit that he could have been wrong. His utter contempt for religion, especially Christian fundamentalism, is a case in point, and gets a lengthy criticism from Brown. (The sociogenetic position can easily be turned into an attack on religion, by portraying spirituality as a construct of evolutionary utility.) Brown is himself an atheist, though by spending some years as a religious affairs journalist he has more understanding and sympathy for those who have a religious belief. Dawkins and his followers (Nicholas Humphrey in particular) have let their contempt lead them into saying some really stupid things. An example of this is a lecture to an Amnesty International conference given by Humphrey in which he says both that religion is so dangerous that it should be a crime to teach it to children and that it is so poorly thought out that teaching scientific truth causes it to wither and die. On the other hand, their statements about science, neatly demolished by Brown, lay them open to the accusation that they are making science a religion, with themselves as evolutionary fundamentalists.
I enjoyed this book, feeling that it was balanced and critical. It didn't make me want to read the books it talks about, which many science books do, but then I've never really liked Dawkins or Gould as writers anyway.
May 8, 2015
I purchased this book since it was the primary reference detailing the death of George Price. I was terribly excited to read that section, but I could barely make it through. First off, the writing is drenched with religious undertones that cause significant conflict when reading. Brown routinely describes a scientific idea vaguely and then goes into detail about how it compares to Jesus and other Christian ideas. I thought the point of this chapter was on altruism and George Price... not about how Price's theorem destroys parables. Second, his writing is just atrocious.
Example 1: "But out emotional constitution does more than direct us. It orients us." What does this even mean? DIRECT and ORIENT are practically synonyms.
Example 2: "The behaviours and dispositions produced by natural selection are always in some circumstances inadequate..." ALWAYS in SOME CIRCUMSTANCES? Which is it? How can something ALWAYS work but in SOME circumstances. It reminds me of Anchorman with sex panther working 60% of the time, all the time. Brown is just rambling about natural selection when the author clearly has no idea what he's talking about.
This book is just a waste of time. No wonder it was difficult to get my hands on it. What a waste of money.
Example 1: "But out emotional constitution does more than direct us. It orients us." What does this even mean? DIRECT and ORIENT are practically synonyms.
Example 2: "The behaviours and dispositions produced by natural selection are always in some circumstances inadequate..." ALWAYS in SOME CIRCUMSTANCES? Which is it? How can something ALWAYS work but in SOME circumstances. It reminds me of Anchorman with sex panther working 60% of the time, all the time. Brown is just rambling about natural selection when the author clearly has no idea what he's talking about.
This book is just a waste of time. No wonder it was difficult to get my hands on it. What a waste of money.
December 26, 2012
Hailed by the author himself ‘as a history if ideas with all the messy bits left in’, The Darwin Wars is a book about evolutionary theory and the different positions that have developed ever since Darwin’s initial mutterings on the subject. Within ten – rather brief – chapters, Brown attempts to include the main viewpoints and theoretical standpoints, whilst looking at the human motive behind such scientific work.
Writer and journalist, Andrew Brown has written a career’s work of books on many differing eclectic subjects, from the intriguing book title In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite to the London police (Watching the Detectives). Throughout The Darwin Wars he shows his journalist’s touch, making the words on the page relevant, and removing any superfluous material; resulting in a modest and manageable 220 pages. Furthermore, his schooling in the topic is vast, having served as Religious Affairs Correspondent for The Independent for a decade.
The central dialogue and debate during the book is between two groups; labelled by Brown as the ‘Gouldians’ and the ‘Dawkinsians’. Led by their anointed leaders (Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins), Brown pits them against one another in a fight, in the words of the book’s subtitle, for ‘the scientific battle for the soul of man’.
Numerous characters pop up during the book, with Brown always interested in not simply the theory but the human story that led to the theory. This is the strength of the book, in hooking the reader with that keen journalistic eye. Such people include not only Gould and Dawkins, but also William Hamilton, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and even obligatory space for the likes of Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. The most interesting of all is the story surrounding the torn soul that was George Price, who serves as the main focus for the book’s opening chapter, ‘The Deathbed of an Altruist’.
A decade after The Darwin Wars first went into print, Brown won the 2009 Orwell Prize for the book Fishing in Utopia. The Darwin Wars never threatens to obtain such a lofty position, with Brown himself labelling such work as ‘pop science books’: pages for the general public and not simply the specialists. As a short and compact book that attempts to explain the different positions of the various thinkers on the theories of evolution, it is a welcome book to the collection. It is not Brown’s intention to supersede the meatier and involving works of Dawkins & co, but rather to serve as a window for these works to the uninitiated.
Read my blog: http://4eyedbookworm.blogspot.co.uk/2...
Writer and journalist, Andrew Brown has written a career’s work of books on many differing eclectic subjects, from the intriguing book title In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite to the London police (Watching the Detectives). Throughout The Darwin Wars he shows his journalist’s touch, making the words on the page relevant, and removing any superfluous material; resulting in a modest and manageable 220 pages. Furthermore, his schooling in the topic is vast, having served as Religious Affairs Correspondent for The Independent for a decade.
The central dialogue and debate during the book is between two groups; labelled by Brown as the ‘Gouldians’ and the ‘Dawkinsians’. Led by their anointed leaders (Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins), Brown pits them against one another in a fight, in the words of the book’s subtitle, for ‘the scientific battle for the soul of man’.
Numerous characters pop up during the book, with Brown always interested in not simply the theory but the human story that led to the theory. This is the strength of the book, in hooking the reader with that keen journalistic eye. Such people include not only Gould and Dawkins, but also William Hamilton, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and even obligatory space for the likes of Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. The most interesting of all is the story surrounding the torn soul that was George Price, who serves as the main focus for the book’s opening chapter, ‘The Deathbed of an Altruist’.
A decade after The Darwin Wars first went into print, Brown won the 2009 Orwell Prize for the book Fishing in Utopia. The Darwin Wars never threatens to obtain such a lofty position, with Brown himself labelling such work as ‘pop science books’: pages for the general public and not simply the specialists. As a short and compact book that attempts to explain the different positions of the various thinkers on the theories of evolution, it is a welcome book to the collection. It is not Brown’s intention to supersede the meatier and involving works of Dawkins & co, but rather to serve as a window for these works to the uninitiated.
Read my blog: http://4eyedbookworm.blogspot.co.uk/2...
September 26, 2009
Though it has been a matter of much comment at Amazon, I think, first off, we ought to put away the idea that it is somehow wrong or remarkable that Brown is a journalist writing a book about science.[return][return]The extent to which a good journalist (and Brown is one) cannot sufficently grasp the issues in modern Darwinism is precisely the extent to which no popular books ought to be written about it at all, by anyone.[return][return]If an intelligent journalist working full time on the issue can't correctly understand it, what hope does the casual reader have?[return][return]The fact is that most of the issues really aren't all that tough, and where things do get complicated, the issues are often philosophical and interpretive. Areas where scientists have not shown themselves to be particularly adroit (as Brown notes). There is plenty of writing out there by scientists whose credentials in the lab are impeccable and whose command of the facts I wouldn't dare to question.[return][return]But when some of these folks quit the job of fact gathering and start interpreting and sketching out implications . . . well, let's just say that words & phases like naive, wishful thinking, overly ambitious and even stupid start coming to mind.[return][return]Brown (though he briefly forgets which sex is XY) generally seems to have his facts straight, he digs up little-told portions of the history of the Darwin Wars, and has an interesting take on the personalities involved.[return][return]Brown's philosophical sympathies lie with the Gould camp (emphasizing the limits on what science can really say with confidence about things like society and culture), but he presents a pretty balanced view nonetheless, very solid on the sometimes rather half-baked philosphical underpinnings of scientific interpretation at its most exalted (and perhaps most dangerous) level.[return][return]A valuable book.
March 13, 2015
Brown does try to keep an unbiased view on the whole debate between the reductionist neo Darwinians and the more holistic classical Darwinians but every now and then his prejudices slip in (sometimes on completely unrelated topics). I'm not entirely convinced that Brown has understood the issues completely himself a conviction that is only strengthened by the lack of detail in a number of aspects (don't look to this book for a clear insight into how kin selection works or just what punctuated equilibrium is) and the poor editing job (spelling mistakes and repetitions crop up far too often). Somewhere there is an unbiased, clear account of the rise of neo Darwinian thinking and the opposition it has engendered, an account which clearer explains how a powerful simple reductionist model has come to be applied to evolution, what gains the model offers and what the shortfalls are. This is not that book.
May 8, 2015
Very well written, scientifically sound, and for me personally (hence the 5 stars) haunting. Here I'll just explain why I say "haunting". The first chapter is "The Deathbed of an Altruist" and it is about the decline and fall of a theoretical evolutionary biologist. George Price had been a "dogmatic and optimistic atheist", but went mad when he discovered an evolutionary explanation for altruism and became a fundamentalist Christian, giving away everything and eventually committing suicide. As Brown says "What is tormenting is not just the idea that our acts are fundamentally selfish, it is the thought that our ideals are selfish too." The final line of the book is the equation Price discovered, almost as if tempting the reader to go mad too.
May 22, 2016
This book begins with detailing the suicide of a creationist turned christian. You can easily feel the beautiful yet bleak transformation that Price went through. For, through creationism he lost all faith, and after crossing to the alturistic path of Jesus- the truth and pain was all too clear from which to hide. The book a series of connected essays that build in complexity of subject- the subject being the historical debate of Darwinism. The author states his views, but is pointedly focused on evidence and reason, and through this the book is entertaining and enlightening
April 13, 2014
An entertaining, journalistic account of the recent history of the advocates and critics of neo Darwinian theories of human nature. With an axe to grind and an eye for the exaggerations and foibles of the personalities, he ruthlessly aims at his targets, whilst telling the story. Enjoy, but take with a pinch of salt.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews