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  • The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness
  • Barry Allen (bio)
Joan Roughgarden , The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 255 pp.

Darwin had a hypothesis about descent with modification, and a Spencerian view of evolution as selfish conflict. Biology remains marked by the dualism today. Many, inside the discipline and out, suppose that taking an evolutionary perspective just is to seek the secret selfishness that "explains" a successful form of life. Nowhere is this view of evolution more entrenched than in the theory that specialists call "sexual selection," a theory on the evolution of everything that differentiates the sexes. Darwin thought the conspicuous sexual differences among animals are adaptations to female choice. Down to our day the biology of sexual selection confirms his melodramatic clichés: males are passionate, armed, and ornamented; females, coy and drab; conflict, inevitable and ubiquitous.

Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford, dismisses sexual selection as "pure ideology": "A huge body of scientific theory is incorrect." All the parts that overlook the evolution of real cooperation—meaning not the coincidence of selfish interests, but coordinated collaboration—are incorrect. The evidence of such cooperation between the sexes is diverse, cumulative, and underappreciated. Roughgarden also takes friendship and pleasure seriously. Intimate contact keeps animals coordinated, and mutual pleasure makes cooperation self-policing, without the punishing algorithms postulated by evolutionary psychology. Her book is a serious work of science. She argues that "sexual selection can never be demonstrated once studies are sufficiently thorough" and shows that this whole area of evolutionary biology "is not settled science, is in considerable flux, and is not ready for export." If you research any field affected by the claims of sexual selection, evolutionary psychology, or the "selfish gene," you may want to study this book. [End Page 559]

Barry Allen

Barry Allen teaches philosophy at McMaster University and is associate editor of Common Knowledge for philosophy and politics. His publications include Truth in Philosophy; Knowledge and Civilization; and Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience. He recently completed a book on Chinese philosophy of knowledge.

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