I HAVE WATCHED WITH HOPEFUL FASCINATION the growing interest of social scientists and a larger public in applying evolutionary thinking to human behavior. Our need to understand the roots of human choices and social patterns has never been more pressing. Climate science, ecology, and the other sciences that examine human impacts on the Earth—and on its capacity to sustain us—have demonstrated that the course that the human species is now traveling is a disastrous one. Indeed, I believe that they show that human survival, especially peaceful survival with a good quality of life, requires some fundamental changes in our patterns of behavior starting as soon as possible. But just what changes are the best ones to pursue, and what are the most effective means for bringing them about? These are ancient and difficult questions, but new tools might help to resolve them. The evolutionary approach has been impressively successful in expanding our grasp in many areas of the life sciences, including medicine and the behavior of other animals, and I have dared to anticipate that evolutionary thinking would open a new avenue to a clearer understanding of how we might begin to make the needed changes. I have been encouraged in this hopeful thought by the energetic entry of first-class evolutionary thinkers like Steven Pinker, David Buss, and Robert Wright into the task of pulling the quite complex and detailed relevant research and analysis together into an overall interpretation of the main implications of human evolutionary history.
I delved into the resulting works of synthesis with increasing dismay. Though they are rich with illuminating insights and intriguing empirical results, the overall interpretations that they offer seemed to converge on all-too-familiar motifs of gender differences and tendencies toward aggression, intolerance, and social competition—conclusions that do not square with my own reading of the basic research and my own reasoning about it. The picture that they present is pessimistic, suggesting that human nature is inflexible enough that substantial change to our social arrangements and patterns of behavior may be out of the question, whereas I see grounds for optimism in many of the same sources. Additional research from related areas of biology, psychology, and philosophy, including some that has been published since the major works of synthesis were written, reinforce my sense that the picture these works present is misleading.
The evolutionary approach to understanding human behavior has been controversial from its inception, and many critical studies of human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have been published. But these focus for the most part on challenging the approach as a whole. My concern is different—I believe that the evolutionary study of human behavior and society has a vital contribution to make, but its leading thinkers have overlooked some of its key lessons. The missing elements are needed not for what Pinker has called “dubious moral uplift”—a feel-good story about human nature—but to guide us in making effective political and practical choices as we confront the stiff challenges of the twenty-first century. I decided that I needed to investigate carefully how the leading synthesizers supported their claims and re-examine their picture of human nature and human social possibilities, developing a new synthesis that takes account of the most recent research and thinking. The result of my efforts is contained in the pages that follow.
This work was undertaken at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, a unique center for research at the intersection of philosophy and the sciences. I am deeply grateful for the Rotman Institute’s support for this research, and for the stimulating discussions and thoughtful feed-back provided by many of my colleagues and students at Western and elsewhere. I especially thank Philip Kitcher, Nicholas Thompson, Bruce Glymour, Stephen Crowley, O’Neal Buchanan, Boyana Peric, and Graham Bracken, as well as three anonymous reviewers, for insightful comments. Patrick Fitzgerald of Columbia University Press has been the most helpful and enthusiastic editor an author could hope for, and Jonathan Barker’s wise advice has improved every page. Any errors that remain are mine alone. Thanks finally, and always, to Dave Pearson for unflagging support and for persistent good humor and good sense.