Sense and Nonsense by Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown, Oxford University Press, £16.95, ISBN 0198508840
IN 1975 a book changed the landscape of the social and biological sciences. Edward O. Wilson’s mammoth 697-page Sociobiology: A new synthesis lumbered off the press at Harvard University and caused a sensation. Wilson’s audacious final chapter proposed that natural selection for survival and reproductive success could lie behind human kinship practices, cooperation, mate preferences, our thoughts and our culture.
Was he right? Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown evaluate the flood of Darwinian scholarship applied to human culture that followed Wilson’s revolution. How much of…
