Gregory R. Peterson, "A Review: Darwin's Legacy: What Evolution Means Today. By John Dupre" (2004)

^[1] In the ever-ongoing Darwin wars, there are two major conflicts. One of these is external, pitting defenders of Darwin against opponents of evolution of any sort, for religious reasons or otherwise. The other is internal, pitting Darwinist against Darwinist over the true nature of his legacy. Darwin’s Legacy, a short introduction into one philosopher’s understanding of evolution, attempts to attack both of these conflicts. Its author, John Dupré, is a professor of philosophy of science and director of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society at the University of Exeter, and as such comes excellently equipped to discuss the issues at hand. The result, however, is mixed, for while the text does provide the occasional insight, its brevity foreshortens many an important argument and leaves many of his key claims insufficiently substantiated. This is most clearly the case in the treatment of religion, where the short and somewhat dismissive approach to all things theological will make the work of limited interest and use for scholars in theology and the philosophy of religion.

^[2] After a short introduction, Dupré introduces the reader to the basic tenets of evolutionary theory and briefly treats some of the important debates about how evolution works. For Dupré, evolution (understood as descent with modification) is an established fact, and Darwin’s theory of natural selection is an important (but not necessarily exclusive) tool in explaining the evolutionary process. In the standard Richard Dawkins-Stephen Jay Gould debate over the unit and locus of selection, Dupré comes down more on the side of Gould’s multi-level selection than on Dawkins gene-centric approach, but suggests that both have underestimated the role of organismal development. The connection between evolution and development (often known as ‘evo-devo’ and referred to by Dupré as ‘development systems theory’) has been an important trend, and the author promotes it as an alternative to other approaches to evolution.

^[3] It is not until the third chapter of Darwin’s Legacy that we come to the heart of Dupré’s argument, which turns out to be surprisingly contrarian. Most advocates of Darwin either maximize the scientific character of evolutionary theory and (often enough) the implications of evolution for everything from economics to male infidelity, or minimize its significance to make room for non-evolutionary concepts of meaning, value, and human dignity. Dupré takes neither of these approaches. While he defends the intellectual credentials of evolutionary theory, he also cautions that expectations should be rather modest on the scientific side. Evolutionary theory does not lead to predictions, does not lead to practical applications, and only provides complete and accurate explanations in rare and exceptional cases. Evolutionary processes are simply too complex and involve too many variables. In most cases, the paleontological record is too poorly preserved to be of much use testing scientific theories. Dupré goes on to argue that the primary value of evolution is not in its predictive power or practical application, but in its metaphysical implications. Evolution, as Richard Dawkins puts it, makes it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist and is the final nail in the coffin of theism. More than this, evolution gives us some direction understanding human nature and our place in the universe.

^[4] Why does evolution sound the death knell for belief in God? On Dupré’s account, the only reason to believe in God is because of teleological argument (also known as the argument from design). As William Paley famously put it, if you see a watch on the beach, you infer that there is a designer of the watch because of its complexity; likewise, for any natural object of similar complexity; a designer must also be inferred, in this case, God. But, says Dupré, Darwin showed that the eye and all other biological features can and should be understood as being evolved through natural selection. This alleviates the need for a designer, and so the teleological argument crumbles.

^[5] It is rather breathtaking that Dupré simply assumes that belief in God rests wholly on the argument from design. To be fair, he does briefly treat the ontological and cosmological arguments (which he quickly consigns to the dustbins of history) and he also provides a clear summary of David Hume’s devastating critique of the design argument. As defenders of theism, Dupré picks two well known agnostics, Stephen Jay Gould and Michael Ruse, who have both famously written on the compatibility of religion and science. Dupré dismisses the arguments of both authors as irrelevant. Simply put, it doesn’t matter if religion and science are compatible, since there is no reason to believe in religious claims in the first place.

^[6] While I concede this to be an important point (too often, religion and science dialogues take it as sufficient to show that religion and science are compatible), Dupré’s inability to even engage the works of well-known religion and science scholars in his own country (John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke come to mind) is troubling, and suggests that his arguments are not nearly well crafted as they need to be.

^[7] Having dismissed religion, one might expect Dupré to trumpet the value of evolution for understanding life and human nature generally from a naturalistic point of view. Dupré, however, takes a very different tack, engaging in a full critique of sociobiology and its latter day child, evolutionary psychology. As with religion, Dupré takes a skeptic’s lens to many of the claims made by advocates of these fields. Many of these arguments are familiar and have been heard before, but Dupré brings some freshness to several of his attacks. While evolution can tell us very general things about human nature (that we are different from other animals, that there are some important differences between the sexes), it cannot give us specifics, and Dupré is especially harsh on the gene-centric approach that sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and related fields take.

^[8] The strength of these chapters (divided into the topics of humans and other animals, human nature, and race and gender), is uneven at best. While several of his criticisms of evolutionary psychology are accurate and penetrating, they are weakened by their general scope and lack of references. Indeed, Dupré comes across as rather overly skeptical, and by the end one is left wondering what evolution is good for. Evolution is good science, but its scientific claims are modest. Evolution is important for metaphysics, but is apparently limited to denying the existence of God and making some very modest claims about human nature. Given that the theory has so little explanatory power, it is in the end not clear why we should take it seriously.

^[9] This is clearly not Dupré’s point. After all, the work is not meant as a criticism of Darwin, but as an exposition of Darwin’s significance. Yet, his conclusions run counter to his initial purpose, leaving the reader unsatisfied. Despite this rather significant reservation, the book may find an appropriate place in the classroom. Its virtue (and vice) is its brevity, and certainly the arguments go sufficiently against the grain to usefully provoke discussion and, perhaps, further dialogue.