The best part about reading evolutionary psychology journals is finding rationalizations for every bad habit and horrible quality one has.
I was really sad when that "blondes are aggressive warrior princesses" thing turned out to be misspoken.
I was really sad when that "blondes are aggressive warrior princesses" thing turned out to be misspoken.
VIEW 22 of 22 COMMENTS
The book was called "Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature" by Steven Rose, Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin.
Rose (a Biochemist and Professor of Neurobiology), Kamin (a Psychologist) and Lewontin (an Evolutionary Biologist) argue against biologically reductivist explanations of human behavioural / psychological traits. They also spend a brief part of the book arguing against culturally reductivist explanations. For them, any form of reductivism whether biological or cultural is misguided.
They specifically attack the Sociobiology of EO Wilson and the biological reductivism of Richard Dawkins.
The book also spends a bit of time attacking the notion that IQ is hereditary and criticising Cyril Burt (arguing that Burt's classic research on IQ heritability in twins was based on data that he had made up) and a couple of his followers Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck (both of whom have claimed that there are genetically determined IQ differences between black and white people). Kamin was among the first to demonstrate that Burt had faked his IQ research data.
It has been a fair few years since I read this book (I first read it back in the early 1990s when I was at university studying for a joint honours degree in Biochemistry and Philosophy) so my memory of the book may not be 100% accurate.
Personally, I don't find it credible that a full explanation of human behavioural / psychological traits can be put together without including the role of both genetic and environmental factors. Even if Rose, Kamin and Lewontin aren't completely correct they make a very important point. Claims by scientists to have found biological explanations for human behavioural / psychological traits are often treated as firm fact by the media and are not subject to sufficent scrutiny, when the actual research data may only support conclusions of a more equivocal nature.