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A review of: "Alas Poor Darwin - Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology." edited by Steven Rose and Hilary Rose.Alas the Misty Mountain by Peter FisherI had been looking forward - with some trepidation - to reading this book.With such eminent contributors as Mary Midgeley, Stephen Rose, and the late Stephen J. Gould, I was expecting a devastating and effective rebuttal of the views of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet and the evolutionary psychologists. So have the most capable and lucid thinkers in the field managed to create a great unclimbable misty mountain to challenge Dawkins' famously climbable "Mount Improbable"?Except for Mary Midgely and

PeterDFQuote:One of the writers seemed to think that, because his daughter was not afraid of spiders - and therefore not everyone is - there could not be a universal human behavioural trait for fear of spiders.There is a rather famous series of experiments which should have laid this nonsense to rest; in fact it did, for most educated people. It was found that monkeys are not innately fearful of snakes. However, it is easy to teach a monkey to fear snakes, and difficult to teach it to fear flowers. Here is a more recent update, from the researcher who did the original work in 1992 (Mineka (1992) Evolutionary Memories, emotional processing, and the emotional disorders. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 28 161-206) The Malicious Serpent: Snakes as a prototypical stimulus for an evolved module of fearThanks for the review. BTW: I slogged through Lewontin, Rose, Kamin Not In Our Genes on much the same principle: Someone of Lewontin's stature has to have a substantial defense of his position, doesn't he? No. Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived. E.O.Wilson

And Rose attacks Pinker and co for politically motivated science.The best case of pot calling I've heard for a long time