L. J. KaminCritiques

I needed these authors at that stage of my intellectual life when I was caught in the toils of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology – dismal years of spiritual depression or oppression. But I didn’t have Goodreads then, to locate alternate ideas, and I’m not of scientific background, to find my way around. So I bought this secondhand a decade or two too late.

I find it unreadable now. It’s far too politicised, from the calm waters I am since in. Biology is, of course, ideology (their slogan and title of another book). One way to see that – which made an impression on me – is to follow how evolutionary science went quite differently in a different culture: case study: Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought. But it’s work on animals that gave me my alternative: Frans de Waal and others. In retrospect, for my spiritual salvation (I don't mean religious, which I've never been), I only needed to go back to Dostoyevsky, who was in a fight against an old determinism, whereas I had met a new.