Dylan Evans
ALMOST LIKE A WHALE: THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES UPDATED by Steve Jones (Doubleday)
Steve Jones, the lovable professor of genetics at University College, London, has re-written On the Origin of Species. His new book, Almost Like a Whale, has the same format as Darwin’s great work, right down to the chapter titles and even the occasional sentence lifted word for word from the earlier book. But this is no slavish imitation; it is a completely fresh account of evolution, and his examples are almost all drawn from 20th- century biology.
There is no reference to genetics in the Origin – Darwin lacked a fundamental part of the jigsaw puzzle. It was not until this century that genetics fused with Darwinism and gave rise to the modern science of evolutionary biology. Now they are inseparable, and Jones is right to celebrate this marriage.
Darwin did not discuss human evolution in the Origin, because, as he explained, the subject was too surrounded by prejudice, but added that it was also “the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist”, and in The Descent of Man, published 12 years after the Origin, he discussed evolution in great detail.
The subject is still surrounded by prejudices. At a time when 100-million Americans say they believe in the literal truth of Genesis, Jones says that it is time for evolutionists to stand up for their own theories.
These are fine, bold words but Jones himself turns out to be more cowardly. His final “interlude” is a damp squib. A few cursory remarks about our hominid ancestors are sandwiched between pages of vacuous but politically correct declarations about the “limits of biology”. When it comes to the human body, evolutionary theory is very useful, Jones tells us, but to speculate about the origin of the mind is, he claims, “largely futile”.
How Jones can possibly uphold such Cartesian dualism, after having declared several chapters earlier that “genes make brains, and brains make behaviour”, is a mystery. The contradiction between the honest materialism of his earlier chapters, and the closet creationism of his chapter on humans, is all too evident in the following telling sentence: “The birth of Adam, whether real or metaphorical, marked the insertion into an animal body of a post-biological soul that leaves no fossils and needs no genes.” This is almost identical to a line in the recent encyclical about evolution written by the pope.
Unlike Darwin, Jones is scared to entertain the idea that our minds are the product of evolution just as much as our bodies. In the past decade evolutionary psychology has revealed fascinating details about the evolution of the mind. Jones completely neglects to mention such work. He tells us nothing, for example, about the theory of “Machiavellian intelligence” – the idea that the increase in human brain- size over the past few million years was due to the greater demands of the social environment rather than the physical environment.
The absence of any serious discussion of evolutionary psychology is not a minor flaw; it is like Hamlet without the prince.