Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id SAA22052 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 6 Feb 2002 18:09:11 GMT Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 13:03:12 -0500 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Subject: Fwd: BOOK REVIEW- Man, Beast and Zombie From: Wade Smith <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk, Skeptic List <skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: <C92593E3-1B2B-11D6-9DC1-003065A0F24C@harvard.edu> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.480) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
BOOK REVIEW
http://news.bmn.com/hmsbeagle/119/reviews/review
Man, Beast and Zombie
What Science Can and Cannot Tell about Human Nature
by Kenan Malik
Reviewed by Marcin Szwed
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Posted February 1, 2002 · Issue 119
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Review
Simply asking the question "Is God dead?" once made sales of
Time magazine skyrocket. The issue was even broached in Roman
Polanski's popular, modern film classic Rosemary's Baby. But, in
the end, raising the provocative question hardly changed
anyone's views on the matter. These days, most people who want
to know about human nature do not turn to Time, or the Book of
Genesis or the Ramayana. They tend to satisfy their existential
hunger by reading "Science and Health" columns and by
contemplating descriptions of the skulls of hominid ancestors
toasted in the African sun, topped with assorted genes.
We now try to explain ourselves by announcing the discovery of
new genes, such as one for shyness ("was hard to clone, hid
behind other genes," researcher says), and by developing
respectable but often incomprehensible philosophies of mind. How
do we appear in this picture? Kenan Malik considers the answer
in his book Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot
Tell about Human Nature.
On page 22 of his 600-page book, Malik asks "What data have
scientists produced about human origins, human behavior, the
human mind, and so on? What is . . . being said through
particular interpretations of this data?" He then proceeds to
examine the scientific arguments, their philosophical
background, and how they were influenced by past cultural and
intellectual changes. His effort is both scholarly and well
written. And it's the best of all attempts to see what science
has had to say on this broad subject.
Later, he introduces the Beast and the Zombie. The Beast
embodies the vision of humans proposed by sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology - disciplines that look at man from the
perspective of evolution. Man the animal, not "created in the
likeness of God," but spawned by the Grim Reaper of natural
selection and "Nature, red in tooth and claw." Since Darwin's
Origin of Species, the gap between humanity and animals has
shrunk enormously. With toolmaking chimps and intelligent
shrimps on one side and selfish genes on the other, science made
beasts more humane, and humans more beastly.
How beastly exactly? For a long time after World War II, nobody
dared to ask the question, out of fear of awakening the ghost of
Fascists, who perverted Darwinian ideas and used them to justify
their atrocities. The taboo was strengthened by feelings of
guilt. Social Darwinism, with its racist and chauvinist
overtones, was popular not only in Germany, but all across the
United States and Europe. My own Eastern European country,
Poland, had followers of this heinous abuse of Darwin's work.
When the question of the Beast in humankind was raised again in
1975 by E. O. Wilson in his book Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis, it provoked some of the harshest and most uncivilized
quarrels in academia. Disputes involved branding opponents as
"Nazi reactionaries" (pro-sociobiology) or "Commie ideologists"
(anti-sociobiology). Man, Beast and Zombie, What Science Can and
Cannot Tell about Human Nature provides a colorful description
of these unseemly arguments. We see Wilson assaulted by leftist
students. And we hear about George Price, the scientist who
helped to coin the "selfish gene" equation. Price was horrified
by its implications and he eventually killed himself with a pair
of scissors.
Remarkably though, Malik is not a partisan of any of the warring
factions. Instead, he carefully scrutinizes the three main
approaches used by sociobiologists: making inferences from
pressures imposed on our cave-dwelling ancestors by natural
selection, comparing humans to "other monkeys," and looking for
common denominators across different human cultures, especially
the so-called "primitive" ones.
While applying scientific rigor to a discipline renowned for
making far-fetched claims may provide some progress, upon
scrutiny, it turns out that the evolutionary approach
nevertheless is ridden with difficulties. For example,
contemporary hunter-gatherers such as the !Kung of the Kalahari
Desert are not primordial cavemen. They have been "spoiled" by
past interactions with farmer societies. The whole idea of a
single "primordial human," Malik points out, is, by itself,
dubious. Extrapolation from animal to human behavior, is also a
slippery business, as one has to compare chimpanzee fights with
a baffling range of human behaviors, from playground bullying to
the Holocaust.
Yet the criticism is tempered, and Evolutionary Psychology gets
praise when it is deserved. Let's hope that with time, this
carrot-and-stick approach will make the Beast a respectable
academic subject. The field is still young, and all we need, as
the primatologist Frans de Waal said "is a more enlightened type
of Darwinism that integrates the effects of learning and the
environment. It's not as though natural selection dictates
specific behavior under all circumstances, it rather induces
tendencies."
Because we have minds as well as instincts, cognitive science is
the second major topic of the book. Here we meet the Zombies,
Gimboes and Qualia. These creatures represent a thought
experiment designed to solve the problem of subjective states of
mind. Just try to imagine if, one day, your friend told you she
is not conscious at all. Would you believe her? And please do
not get paranoid that "even your closest ones could be zombies!"
as the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote in a tongue-in-cheek
critique of "zombiologists."
This and other thought experiments are supposed to help us
grapple with problems of consciousness, subjectivity, and
artificial intelligence, and Malik weaves them into a
fascinating story. He also challenges the popular view that the
mind can be fully explained only by what goes on inside the
brain. "The world is made meaningful not just by what goes on in
your head, but also by what goes on outside it. . . . It is
language and culture that turn brain into mind." The mind, Malik
argues, is an "extended mind."
Man, Beast and Zombie is long and not an overnight read. But
readers who choose to skip the stage-setting chapters two to
five, before the Beast and the Zombie are introduced, will miss
some delightful stories. For example, the 19th century physicist
Auguste Comte believed so much in the power of science to
explain everything that he set up a "Positivist" religion with
clergy, catechism, calendar, holidays, and chapels! And the
philosophical and historical perspective is very useful. Science
responds to the spirit of the times, and "theories of human
nature never die. They just go in and out of fashion," as John
Horgan has put it.
Is it possible that old theories come back in new clothes
because none of them are ultimately satisfying? Science is the
very flower of human reason, a clear sign of its strength. Yet
according to some, our reason is weak, and we're just ordinary
animals. There's something paradoxical here that researchers
can't grasp. Science cannot give us the full story. If you want
to know what it can offer, check out this masterfully written
book.
Marcin Szwed is a Ph.D. student in the Department of
Neuroscience of the Weizmann Institute in Israel.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt
An appeal to human nature, like an appeal to God, is to invoke a
seemingly independent arbiter to sort out our affairs. Humans no
longer have to take the responsibility; God or Nature will.
Nature is, in fact, far more effective than God in acting as an
external arbiter. Whereas a religious claim necessarily rests on
faith, summoning up human nature seems to be summoning up the
powers of science.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
===============================This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 06 2002 - 18:23:22 GMT