Monkeying with evolution
Both the right and the left try to twist its principles to their own ends.
'My dear, let us hope that it isn't true!" the wife of the bishop of Worcester is reputed to have exclaimed 150 years ago, on hearing that human beings might be descended from apes. "But if it is true, let us hope that it doesn't become widely known!" When it comes to sociobiology -- better known these days as "evolutionary psychology" -- the bishop's wife has modern counterparts: The religious right and the secular and supposedly scientific left are remarkably on the same page, both sides inclined to dispute or misrepresent the relevance of evolution to human beings. The former, of course, deny the underlying science. But what about the latter? They're secular, they're rational, they're tolerant, aren't they?
And there's the rub. For more than 30 years, left-leaning academics -- notably residing in the humanities and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences -- have been strongly opposed to using evolutionary theory to help make sense of human behavior, in part because their professional training emphasizes the role of social learning and cultural traditions, and -- perhaps even more -- because they fear the possible findings. Do racial differences imply genetic distinctions that might argue against social equality? Are women fated for kitchen work and childbearing, not high-level physics? And even if the science is more nuanced than that (which it certainly is), will the simpler message drown out the details and provide ammunition for social regression?
In fact, there are some good reasons for leftists' caution: We've already seen the gross misuse of evolution -- under the guise of Social Darwinism and the "survival of the fittest" -- to justify class oppression, monopolies and imperialism. We've also seen the even grosser abuse of biology by eugenicists and Nazis; a history of employing biology (and the supposed "natural inferiority of women") as a misogynist club with which to beat half the human race; the disgraceful pseudoscience of "The Bell Curve" and its ilk, promoting the false claim that, if any trait or tendency is "in the genes," there's nothing that society can do.
But the fact that something has been misused in the past does not make it bad, or even untrue. Moreover, applying evolution to understanding ourselves offers, for example, a potentially powerful antidote to some of the things that the left fears the most: ethnocentrism or racism. That's because evolution emphasizes the underlying biological commonality shared by all members of the species Homo sapiens, regardless of superficial differences. As for sexism, doesn't that reside in differential valuing of the sexes, not in the struggle to understand them?
