Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour Review

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(More customer reviews)Sense and Nonsense is a clear, lucid explication of the current landscape of the research on how evolutionary theories are applied to the social sciences.By their own admission often oversimplifying for clarity's sake, they break down the different ways in which evolutionary ideas are used in the social sciences into four categories--human behaiourial ecology, evolutionary psychology, memetics and gene-culture coevolution--and show how these descended, with modification, from sociobiology, and from Darwinian evolution itself.

The book clearly and succinctly describes the methodologies and underlying assumptions that define each approach, and no less clearly do they identify their perceptions of the relevant strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches.Although, as another reviewer states, it might be more interesting in a dramatic sense to see them take a more polemical position, it is difficult to argue with them that each of the approaches has its merits and defects, and that, in a new religion, as it were, no one is served by internecine warfare.

I have two reservations, however.My first is something between a quibble and a small problem: Laland uses primarily gene-culture coevolution models himself, and although he is generally balanced in his assessments, one cannot but come out of the book feeling that gene-culture coevolution is first among equals in the authors' minds.They don't hide their sympathies, exactly, but if you don't know of them up front, you have to be paying pretty close attention to find them out.

My second concern has to do with audience.Whom is supposed to read this?If it is directed toward people in the field (that is, people who apply evolutionary models to the social sciences), another commenter is spot on in saying that it is written at too simple a level.If it is directed toward hostile social scientists who think the whole idea of evolutionary study of the social sciences to be debased, or worse, it isn't going to reach them; the book does not duck the fact that social scientists in general despise evolutionary models, but it makes no real effort to respond to those criticisms directly.As an introduction to the subject to someone outside the field entirely, it suits reasonably well.The authors say in the preface that they are going after all these audiences, but I don't think the same book can do all those things well; they would have been better to narrow down whom they were really speaking to.

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Product Description:
Can evolutionary theory really help us to understand human behaviour? 'Sense and nonsense' provides an exciting, readable introduction to the science behind the works of Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson and Pinker. Including profiles of the major protagonists, the book provides the first balanced account of evolutionary theory, and all its faults.

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