Unlike reviewers of mystery novels, commentators on this book need not hesitate to reveal the ending. The author thinks evolution teaches us 'human nature' is a superstition, and that generalizations in human psychology do not attain the status of "laws of nature".
In fact, pace those who consider themselves familiar with "duck nature," Buller thinks that there are NO biological species that have the logical status we ordinarily accord to those mathematical (or physical, or chemical) kinds which can be understood as classes each of whose members are definitionally required to exhibit a set of separately necessary and jointly sufficient properties. Ducks are not typed in the way that equilateral triangles are typed.
This will not surprise a careful reader of the magisterial work of the late great zoologist Ernst Mayr, who repeatedly reminded us that species are polymorphic, related not by class membership but by lineage or descent. To put it more simply and from a different perspective, a fundamental requirement of Darwin's theory is the occurrence of significant individual variability within species. We know that not all natural selection is "canalizing selection" funnelling all variation toward an optimal type. "Frequency dependent" selection is alive and well, and the world is full of hawks and doves, to say nothing of the bourgeoisie.
To put it colloquially, not all of us search "for a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad." When my old dog had pups, some of them were good hunters, some were suitable for nothing but footstool warmers; when raising hens, farmers' wives cook the poor layers for dinner.
It is important to emphasize that Buller seeks to defend evolutionary psychology by criticizing the excesses of Evolutionary Psychology, rightly considered as a the product of a collective, or tribe, of investigators (Cosmides & Tooby, David Buss, Steven Pinker) and journalists (Nicholas Wade, Robert Wright, Matt Ridley) sharing a common set of presumptions about evolution (adaptationist), about cognitive science (massive modularity), and about the nature of culture (reducible to individual psychology).
Robin Dunbar makes a similar point in noting the guerilla warfare waged by proponents of Evolutionary Psychology against dissidents who might be considered behavioral ecologists, because they don't subscribe 100% to the major tenets of Evo Psycho: e.g., because they study the contributions made by behaviors currently observable to the biological fitness of organisms currently alive.
It won't do to label Buller a philosopher and not a working scientist. Perhaps philosophers are a dying breed, but they have time to read a great many books, and erudition matters when the issue is the comparative evaluation of diverse and competing scientific research programs. Historians and philosophers of science are like the prairie dogs who understand that sometime it's a good idea to quit eating and survey the neighborhood.
One final metaphor: this book is polymorphic in that some of its chapters are spell-binding and some are tedious and too long. Buller tries so hard to be fair to Evo Psycho that he strings out indefinitely large sequences of hypotheticals testing the various interpretations under which the paradigm might be favorably construed. This makes the chapters on mating, marriage and parenthood a little mind numbing. I suggest judicious skimming as a tactic for getting through those bits.
Some time ago Robert Wright ("The Moral Animal") after following the Evo Psycho paradigm to the letter for most of the book, was puzzled to note that, from that perspective, we are living in the "worst of all possible worlds." Then he had to conduct a rather fruitless search for an ethic that might save the world. Buller's book blazes a path around Wright's weltschmerz.
This book makes a strong case that there are problems with claims put forth by leading Evolutionary Psychologists, but the problems are somewhat less important than the book tries to imply.
This is the most serious and careful attack on Evolutionary Psychologists so far. But it is often hard to tell to what extent the theoretical claims he attacks are reflect bad theories or whether some of them are just careless misstatements by people who are too focused on attacking the tabula rasa worldview to worry about criticisms from other viewpoints. For instance, it's hard to believe that the Evolutionary Psychologists mean the word "universal" in the phrase universal human nature as literally as Buller takes it.
He presents strong arguments that Evolutionary Psychologists have overstated the extent to which dna encodes specialized mental modules, and presents detailed arguments that their empirical results have been sloppy and at least slightly biased against the idea of a general-purpose mind. But if Evolutionary Psychologists are willing to modify their theory to refer to somewhat less specialized modules whose features are influenced by dna in less direct and more subtle ways, then the features of their theories that they seem to consider most important will survive.
His analogy with the immune system illustrates how a system that looks at first glance like it requires some fairly detailed genetic blueprints can actually be caused by a general purpose system that learns most of its specializations by reacting to the environment.
This is not in any way an attack on the idea of using evolutionary theory to understand the mind. In fact, he even points out that Evolutionary Psychologists have been overly interested in questions asked by creationists rather than those that evolutionary theory suggests are important.
Ironically for a philosophy professor, his weakest arguments are the most philosophical ones. He correctly points out the problems with using an essentialist notion of species that is based on universal phenotypic characteristics, but then proposes a definition of species based on continuity and spatiotemporal localization that seems as essentialist and as far from what people actually mean by the word as the definition he criticizes. If I understand his definition correctly, it implies that recreating a Dodo from dna would produce a new species. He should study the philosophy of concepts a bit more (e.g. Lakoff or the neural net literature) and decide that the concept of species doesn't need either type of essence, but can instead be a more probabilistic combination of several kinds of attributes.
