THE DARWIN WARS:
how stupid genes became selfish gods
By Andrew Brown. Simon and Schuster. xiv + 241 pages. £12.99
ISBN 0 684 85144 X
'Just as Darwinism now provides the main explanatory framework of our times, so disputes about Darwinism are really disputes about our very nature and place in the world,' (from the dust-jacket). Andrew Brown, a Templeton Prize-winning freelance journalist, surveys these deep-seated and often polemical and acrimonious disputes, 'conducted like musketry battles' (p.30), which are 'struggling for the soul of every reader' (p. xi).
'The Darwin wars are not between believers and disbelievers in evolution, or in Darwinism. They are about the scope and proper limits of Darwinian explanations. All sides in these arguments take for granted that where there is design in nature, it has been produced by Darwinian processes operating for a long time in reasonably stable environments,' (p.18). 'Darwinian explanations' include 'selfish gene' theory, adaptation, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with variable but significant doses of behaviourism or reductionism.
