Note 1

You are right: In our phone conversations with you, we never did say that MacDonald wasn't an evolutionary psychologist—but for the same reason we didn't tell you he wasn't a sashweight or a poltergeist. It didn't occur to us that anyone would think he was. This was, I realize now, an act of colossal stupidity on our part. Since the recent explosion in media coverage of our field, everyone with an evolutionary theory of human behavior is now likely to be categorized as an "evolutionary psychologist."

Also, I agree with you that just because we invented the term, we don't own it. The wonderfully democratic thing about language is that everyone ultimately gets a vote—and journalists far more than the academics they describe, because of their larger audiences. The reference-work meaning might easily be lost. Each use of a label (like "evolutionary psychologist" or the word I really want to discuss, "fringe") by any individual is an act of social construction, often motivated. Natalie Angier of the New York Times, for example, has rules of use for "evolutionary psychologist" that run something like the following: If it is a man saying something she doesn't like, she identifies him as an evolutionary psychologist (or an "evo psycho" to use her particularly lovely and neutral sounding neologism). In contrast, she gives women (or a man saying something she does like) a different professional affiliation. So many ideas and positions that originated with evolutionary psychologists show up in her stories and recent book as critiques of "evo psychos," and a very interesting and unsettled debate over human sexuality that completely cross-cuts categories gets reported as a debate between evolutionary psychologists and their critics. Similarly, Angier presents the field as nearly devoid of women—something like Donna Brazile's view of blacks in the Republican Party—despite the central and indispensable role that women have played in its formation and development. I am sure her book will win many awards.

In any case, if this broader use becomes widely adopted over the narrower one, an important and useful distinction will be lost, and we'll have to perpetrate a new act of social construction on an unsuspecting world.

Note 2

Gould invokes many levels of selection but is especially notable for advancing his own, peculiar theory of how large groups function as biological competitors—species-level selection. In Gould's view, most evolutionary change takes place when closely related biological lineages compete, with one surviving and spreading through the others' ranges while the others go extinct. He gets to this by taking Ernst Mayr's widely accepted neo-Darwinian theory of speciation—speciation occurs through a drop in gene flow between populations—and supercharging it with talk about how genetic revolutions and radical re-organizations can happen suddenly rather than gradually in populations or incipient species: the "return of the hopeful monster," as he calls one of his essays. Gould is a relentless critic of gradualist orthodoxy—i.e., that substantial adaptive change usually takes long periods of time, and one might think of him as an advocate of a new, more Hegelian genetics. Of course, there is not much difference between an incipient species and a "race," and in Gould's world of sudden genetic revolutions, there is not necessarily any difference at all: one moment a race, the next a new species. So, in Gould's world, populations commonly undergo sudden and significantly differentiating evolutionary changes, with one eventually emerging victorious as the forebears of a new species destined to inherit the world from those being extinguished (one shrinks from saying "the inferior," but Gould does intimate that competitive ability between sibling species is often the deciding force). One way such an event can be defeated is through too much interbreeding—if the group that has undergone the hopeful evolutionary changes breeds too much with other populations, their distinctiveness is diluted, and they become reabsorbed into the general ruck. Now, while free of all moral content, Gould's theory bears a striking resemblance to Nazi race theory—with its themes of competition between genetically distinct groups, victory or extinction, the threat of losing distinctive identity through the pollution of mixing with other breeds, the replacement of other populations as they expand their territory, etc. It lacks only the specific claim that "Aryans" are superior and have made the revolutionary leap in the evolutionary ladder. That gives it a potential appeal to many ethnicities, not just Germans, and some of Gould's ideas have indeed seeped into Le Pen-like European thinking, if not beyond.

Gould is famous for his anti-racist moral posture, but one lesson from this is that the content of ideas is what matters, not the moral reputation of their champions. Gould's position on race is, as he puts it, that "human equality is a contingent fact of human history." According to Gould, there is no reason the races couldn't have turned out to be unequal. I confess to thinking there are powerful deductive reasons why human "races" must be fundamentally equal—but these are adaptationist reasons, and Gould and Lewontin discount adaptationist thinking.

Of course, what really matters is: Are Gould's ideas true? Do they apply to humans?

Evolutionary biologists overwhelmingly believe that almost all important adaptive change happens by gene substitution occurring within species, not selection among species. As it turns out, there is not enough information density, by many orders of magnitude, in the slow multiplication and selection of species to build or maintain the highly functional machinery that is the most distinctive component of organisms, including humans. So Gould's theory could not be a major explanation for organic design. Nevertheless, most biologists, including me, think that it is barely possible that species selection could have played a role in a few—out of billions—of phenomena.

There is also a great deal of evidence that Mayr's theory of how speciation takes place (allopatric speciation) is by far the most common pattern, but Gould's linkage of speciation events to sudden genetic revolutions is tenuous at best. Basic probability theory makes it unlikely that a group of favorable mutations will occur "suddenly" and then cease appearing for the remainder of the species' history. Favorable mutations are random, and probability theory also makes it highly unlikely that favorable mutations will be disproportionately concentrated in any one population (such as Prussia). To restrict interbreeding is to cut off one's population from the slow influx of spreading, favorable mutations being harvested across the species range. While some weak patterns in the history of life could be interpreted as supporting Gould's view in the case of short-lived, physically isolated, highly fecund life forms such as beetles, Gould's theories are highly unlikely to apply to a long-lived, slow-reproducing species such as humans.

Note 3

The fact that humans reproduce sexually as opposed to asexually (and are slow reproducers with an open population structure) constrains the design of genetic systems in a way that ensures that the genetic basis of any complex adaptation (such as the eye, the heart, or a cognitive mechanism) will be essentially universal and species-typical. A complex adaptation is like any other intricate machine, whose parts must all be present and fit together precisely if it is to work. Each new human being is put together sexually: A randomly selected half of the mother's set of genes is recombined with a randomly selected half of the father's set of genes. If the suite of genes coding for a complex adaptation were in one parent but not the other, the offspring would receive only some of that adaptation's component parts, and it would fail to develop properly. The only way to prevent the destructive scrambling of our complex adaptations every generation is for all of the genes necessary for coding for each complex adaptation to be universal or near-universal, and hence reliably supplied by each parent. In other words, functional aspects of the architecture (e.g., complex adaptations) will tend to be universal at the genetic level, even though their expression may be limited to a particular sex or age, or be contingent on the presence of an eliciting cue in the environment. Humans are free to vary genetically in their superficial, nonfunctional traits, and they do. But they are constrained by natural selection to share a universal genetic design for their complex, evolved functional architecture. The claim that the human cognitive architecture must be universal at the genetic level is not a pious liberal falsehood—it is a profoundly important fact, derivable from adaptationist principles.

For the full argument, see Tooby, J. and Cosmides, L. 1990. On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation. Journal of Personality. 58(1): 17-67.

Note 4

Bill Hamilton of Oxford, originator of the concept of inclusive fitness and other theories fundamental to modern evolutionary biology, winner of the Kyoto and Crafoord Prizes, and first president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, gave a toast at a banquet at an evolutionary biology conference several years ago. From the podium, with dancing eyes, he lifted his glass and announced that he was going to toast Gould—and the audience of hundreds fell dead silent, holding their breath in expectation of a joke to follow. They were not disappointed: Hamilton said that despite the confused and incoherent nature of Gould's publications on evolutionary biology, we should celebrate him anyway, because of the harvest of bright children—future biologists—that his essays would bring into the field. The audience dissolved in laughter and cheers.

Others, such as George Williams, express themselves slightly more obliquely, but any examination of what they write about Gould's ideas quickly communicates the same general evaluation.

Bill Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, Ernst Mayr, and George Williams are all recipients of the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for biology.