In a Washington, DC, Policy Briefing entitled “Why Darwinism Matters” and presented on May 10, 2000, Nancy R. Pearcey reported on the influence of Darwinian thought as it affects life outside of the Science class. Here is a sample of what she said:
Tracing out the implications of Darwinism for just about every area of life has become a cottage industry. If you haven’t kept up with it, take a look at a new book series from Yale University Press called Darwinism Today. The books cover such topics as “an evolutionary view of women at work” and “a Darwinian view of parental love” and even a Darwinian approach to leftist political philosophy. There’s no part of life, it seems, where Darwinism is not being applied today. You might call the subject of my talk Applied Darwinism: not science per se, but its implications for other areas of life.
A few months ago, talk shows were boiling over with a controversial discussion of a new book on the subject of rape. It was titled The Natural History of Rape, and the two authors were university professors who made the rather inflammatory claim that rape is not a pathology, biologically speaking—rather it is an evolutionary adaptation, a strategy for maximizing reproductive success. In other words, if candy and flowers don’t do the trick, some men may resort to coercion to fulfill the reproductive imperative. The book calls rape “a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage,” just like “the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck.”
The authors were genuinely surprised by all the hoopla the book caused, because after all they were expounding a theory that has been debated in academic circles for several years. It’s called “evolutionary psychology,” which a new form of sociobiology, a term that may be more familiar. It’s the theory that if natural selection produced the human body, then it must also have produced human behavior. Any behavior that survives today must have conferred some evolutionary advantage, otherwise it would not have been preserved by natural selection.
One of the authors, Randy Thornhill, appeared on NPR, where he was badgered repeatedly by critics until finally, in exasperation, he insisted that, look, the logic is inescapable: Since evolution is true, it must be true, he said, that “Every feature of every living thing, including human beings, has an underlying evolutionary background. That’s not a debatable matter.” In other words, proponents of evolutionary psychology are doing us the favor of spelling out the logical consequences of the Darwinian premises.
Other proponents of evolutionary psychology have claimed to have discovered an evolutionary advantage in such things as jealousy, depression, and even infanticide. A few years ago (November 1997) in the New York Times, Stephen Pinker of MIT claimed that “The emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved” by natural selection to leave their babies to die in certain circumstances.
What these examples remind us is that Darwinism is not only a scientific theory but also the basis of a worldview—and it has implications for the way we define human nature and morality and a host of other worldview questions. Of course, this is where the rubber hits the road for most of us who are not scientists. What we want to know is, what difference does Darwinism make, and what impact has it had, on questions like morality and the law, the family and education?