Product Description

Can evolutionary theory really help us to understand human behaviour? 'Sense and nonsense' provides an exciting, readable introduction to the science behind the works of Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson and Pinker. Including profiles of the major protagonists, the book provides the first balanced account of evolutionary theory, and all its faults.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #380859 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Review
A 'must read' for my undergraduate courses for the foreseeable future. -- Henry Plotkin

A lucid, sane and very intelligent alternative to the embattled rhetoric of recent debates. It is an altogether excellent book. -- Patrick Bateson

Lucid and balanced, Sense and Nonsense will hopefully reach a broad audience. -- Sarah Hrdy, author of Mother Nature and The Woman that Never Evolved

Review

"Lucid and balanced, Sense and Nonsense will hopefully reach a broad audience. May it become assigned reading for journalists reporting on this area." --Sarah Hrdy
"Laland and Brown are superb pilots for these treacherous waters. It is an altogether excellent book." --Patrick Bateson
"A must read for my undergraduate courses for the forseeable future."--Henry Plotkin
"What makes this book stand out from others trying to cover similar subject is that in each case there's a survey of the most interesting hard research done in each field. Laland and Brown's apolitical approach to the subject matter helps to distinguish between groundbreaking research and beguiling pseudo science lumped together in popular debate, and gives the book a refreshingly balanced refreshingly balanced perspective."--Focus
"[A]n informative, thoroughly documented book examining ways that evolutionary theory can help explain human social behavior. ... The authors are gene-culture coevolutionists, but they give a well-balanced account of each of the approaches and illustrate ways they can be integrated."--Choice

About the Author

Kevin Laland is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge. His research
encompasses a range of topics related to animal behaviour and evolution,
particularly social learning, cultural evolution, and niche construction. Gillian R. Brown is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of
Zoology, University of Cambridge. Her research covers various aspects of
primate behaviour, including parental investment, infant development and
sex differences, and she lectures on zoology and anatomy courses.

Customer Reviews

A breath of fresh air
This book is both a great read, and an informative one, for anyone interested in human behavior, evolutionary theory, and the links between the two. The area of potential evolutionary bases to human behavior has traditionally been filled with much controversy, some fighting, scattered irresponsible speculations and pronouncements that at times have produced tragic effects, and quite often, more heat than light. Laland and Brown have produced a book that is truly a breath of fresh air. One of the things I liked most about Sense and Nonsense is that Laland and Brown had actually sat down to talk with--and listen to--many of the leading proponents of different "schools" of thought. They work hard in Sense and Nonsense to give a fair presentation of each different approach, before moving on in each chapter to provide their own analysis of the approach presented from their own perspective as working scientists. In the midst of an area in which some researchers have been prone to simply shout louder--often literally--at those they disagree with, Laland and Brown have truly taken the time to listen, reflect, and form considered and thoughtful judgements. This is a service to all of us: After reading their book, I know that I will always look reflect differently on researchers' claims of evolutionary bases of human behavior, whether that's hearing them at a conference, or reading a journal article, or the latest best-selling book or TV interview. If you want to improve your understanding of evolution and human behavior, get a guided tour through the area and its controversies by two thoughtful experts, and come out with a changed perspective that will likely always stay with you, then read Sense and Nonsense. Great book.

Clear and lucid, but who's it for?
Sense and Nonsense is a clear, lucid explication of the current landscape of the research on how evolutionary theories are applied to the social sciences. By their own admission often oversimplifying for clarity's sake, they break down the different ways in which evolutionary ideas are used in the social sciences into four categories--human behaiourial ecology, evolutionary psychology, memetics and gene-culture coevolution--and show how these descended, with modification, from sociobiology, and from Darwinian evolution itself.

The book clearly and succinctly describes the methodologies and underlying assumptions that define each approach, and no less clearly do they identify their perceptions of the relevant strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches. Although, as another reviewer states, it might be more interesting in a dramatic sense to see them take a more polemical position, it is difficult to argue with them that each of the approaches has its merits and defects, and that, in a new religion, as it were, no one is served by internecine warfare.

I have two reservations, however. My first is something between a quibble and a small problem: Laland uses primarily gene-culture coevolution models himself, and although he is generally balanced in his assessments, one cannot but come out of the book feeling that gene-culture coevolution is first among equals in the authors' minds. They don't hide their sympathies, exactly, but if you don't know of them up front, you have to be paying pretty close attention to find them out.

My second concern has to do with audience. Whom is supposed to read this? If it is directed toward people in the field (that is, people who apply evolutionary models to the social sciences), another commenter is spot on in saying that it is written at too simple a level. If it is directed toward hostile social scientists who think the whole idea of evolutionary study of the social sciences to be debased, or worse, it isn't going to reach them; the book does not duck the fact that social scientists in general despise evolutionary models, but it makes no real effort to respond to those criticisms directly. As an introduction to the subject to someone outside the field entirely, it suits reasonably well. The authors say in the preface that they are going after all these audiences, but I don't think the same book can do all those things well; they would have been better to narrow down whom they were really speaking to.

God sense, not nonsense
The final chapter of E O Wilson's Sociobiology was a bombshell whose shockwaves reverberate today. Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown set out to sift through the morass of evolutionary approaches to human nature that is has spawned.

This is a useful review of the various schools of research, although I would have liked a firmer conclusion than 'a pluralistic approach is best'. Sometimes the authors could be a little less polite and have a little more bite.

Good stuff overall though, probably most helpful for those new to the area, or for students looking for an introduction. The book is a little light in content, concentrating on methodology, but the emphasis on cultural processes, absent from many evolutionary discussions, is most refreshing.

Do Laland and Brown successfully separate the sense from the nonsense? No. But they do equip the reader with some of the tools to do it for herself.