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Darwin’s Legacy: What evolution means today by John Dupré, Oxford University Press, £11.99/$19.95, ISBN 0192803379 Reviewed by Michael Cross

JOHN DUPRE’S dangerous idea is that Darwin’s theory is good for almost everything except the phenomena it is popularly called upon to explain. Things like elephants’ trunks and rich old men falling for hourglass-shaped women.

In the trenches of the science wars, this position seems to establish the philosopher halfway between creationists and neo-Darwinist gene-centrics. No god, no selfish gene.

Good post-modern stuff, perhaps, but no man’s land is a perilous place. Dupré had better dig in against serious shelling, especially over his warning that we should not assume every feature of an organism that happens to catch our attention is an appropriate subject for evolutionary explanation.

His target is evolutionary psychology. But his example to illustrate the “fallacy” of evolutionary explanation, the giraffe’s neck, is a silly one. It seems to rely on a nursery image of the beast as some sort of donkey with a street lamp grafted on top, rather than a whole animal honed by evolution for an ecological niche.

Dupré is on firmer ground when directly attacking evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. His suggestion that ambitious sociobiologists may be inspired by mental images of dominant male elephant seals will cause chuckles in certain quadrangles.

But already, I smell burning.