John Dupré

This is not really a book in the sense that it has a beginning a middle and and end. It's really a series of essays or papers that the author has published previously. Yes, there is a bit of a consistent theme running through the essays but it's a bit repetitive and, in a way, I found it slightly naive. I guess it was in about 2nd year university (where I was studying agricultural science, with a healthy dose of a range of biological subjects ...from microbiology, to zoology, entomology and botany) that I realised that "species" was a rather arbitrary cut-off point and the very concept of evolution required it to be so. Whenever you tried to draw a line you would find examples of life forms that were rather fuzzy: were they x or were they Y because they had characteristics of both. The ideas about species have a long history ...dating back to, at least, Aristotle about the essence of a being or body.
Anyway, this is the thrust of Dupré's book. More or less that there are no firm cuts-off points and hence the idea of a natural kind (like "fish") breaks down. He says:
Traditionally natural kinds were generally assumed to satisfy all or most of the following conditions:
1. Membership of the kind was determined by possession of an essential property or properties.
2. Members of a natural kind were the appropriate subjects of scientific laws, or laws of nature.
3. By virtue of condition 2, the properties or behaviour of the members of a natural kind were to be explained by identifying the kind to which a thing belonged, and referring to the laws governing things of that kind.
4. The conformity of members of a natural kind to laws of nature was ultimately to be explained by appeal to their essential property or properties.
5. If a thing belongs to more than one natural kind, it must be the case that the kinds to which it belongs are part of a hierarchy in which lower-level members are wholly included in higher-level members.
Dupré suggests that "species do not form a natural kind, and there is no such thing to be discovered. 'Clade' perhaps names an important natural kind (in my weak sense) for phylogenetic analysis but that is the most that it does".
Regarding the difference between humans and animals: Dupré's view expounded in Chapter 10, is that there are good reasons for applying most of our mental language to some animals, though no doubt the kinds of beliefs, desires, and suchlike that any non-humans are capable of entertaining are very different from our own.
He suggests that the trend to postulate evolutionary pressures on early man thus leading to current behaviour is flawed: "Evolutionary psychology, then, I take to be deeply flowed both epistemologically and conceptually. If this is indeed is the best attempt that can be made at connecting human nature with evolution, it proves to be a very disappointing project".
Regarding gender descriptions he suggests that the differentiation between man and woman is more or less harmless but: "there is a very powerful tendency to extend the relevance of explanatory calegories beyond their empirically determined limits..... a tendency, I am suggesting, that derives philosophical nourishment from the idea that when one has distinguished a kind, one has discovered an essence. If, in fact, the empirical significance of the kinds man and woman does not go beyond some systematic, if quite variable, physiological differences and the observation that men appear to have achieved a dominant position in all or most societies, the kinds distinguished seem of very modest significance".
Dupré seems to come down on the idea that we can go a level higher than the "individual" in terms of grouping animals but it's only in some fuzzy sense. He makes the very good point that some definitions are good for some purposes and some for other purposes. For example if you call creatures with backbones that live in the sea "Fish" then a whale is a fish....and that's the way most people saw them until it was discovered that they shared characteristics with land based mammals.
Overall, a bit hard-going in reading. Lots of the philosophical overtones about refuting "essences" but some interesting distinctions and points made. I give it 3.5 stars.… (plus d'informations)

Philosopher John Dupré is yet another of the long list of philosophers weighing in on evolution. He’s not as extreme as David Stove, allowing that there is such a thing as evolution - in fact, he does some service by noting that the phrase “the Theory of Evolution” is better replaced by “evolution theory” – but takes the same line as Stove on sociobiology/evolutionary psychology. The whole book comes across as being written by what Michael Shermer called a “cognitive creationist” – a person of basically leftist political tendencies who is full of praise for evolution when it is used as a counter to religion, but suddenly turns fundamentalist when evolutionary psychology comes up.


In that regard, Dupré devotes an entire chapter to “the decline of theism” as effected by Charles Darwin, stating that this is “the greatest significance” of Darwin’s work. Not our understanding of biology, but the destruction of any credibility for any religious belief. Then the remainder of the book takes on sociobiology/evolutionary psychology, which Dupré has the temerity to call “pseudoscience”. Dupré’s dismissal of evolutionary psychology ironically depends on the same type of rhetoric used by “creation scientists” – he sets up and knock over a series of straw men, deliberatly mischaracterizes evolutionary psychology’s arguments, and smugly implies that the field is in disrepute. My counter is simple – a book which argues that genetics has no effect on human behavior but never mentions twin studies cannot be taken seriously.
… (plus d'informations)

I was expecting a disinterested exploration of the modern applications of evolutionary theory and it's social ramifications; what I found was a polemic against evolutionary psychology and a dismissal of Richard Dawkins's gene-centred model, set amongst a convoluted mass of fragmentary pieces. To say I was disappointed with Darwin's Legacy would be putting it mildly.

To be fair, Dupré does make some valid and necessary points with which I cannot but agree. For example, he takes a stand in claiming that science and religion are totally incompatible (and very much overlapping) 'magisteria', and that Darwin's formulation of his theory effectively removed Christianity's last remaining prop. He deserves credit for his forthrightness. His comments about the concept of race are also sensible. But his wholesale dismissal of evolutionary psychology is totally unwarranted: the subject undoubtedly has it's faults and there are of course examples of over-zealous application (although I found Dupré's portrayal of the subject essentially caricatural), but it's use as a theoretical model surely cannot be dismissed so easily.

The blurb on the book's back cover claims that it "clears a path through the confusion and controversy surrounding evolution". It doesn't. If you are ignorant of the theory of evolution and are looking for a clearer understanding of the subject, there are plenty of other much clearer introductions than this one. Conversely, if you are already familiar with the subject you are unlikely to find anything of great value here.… (plus d'informations)