DARWINISM
TODAY
Darwinism Today is a series of short books by leading
figures in the field of evolutionary theory. Each title
is an authoritative pocket introduction to the Darwinian
ideas that are setting today's intellectual agenda.
The series developed out of The Darwin Seminars
at the London School of Economics. The seminars have provided
a platform for distinguished evolutionists to present the
latest Darwinian thinking and to explore its application
to humans.
The programme has had an enormous impact,
both in helping to popularise evolutionary theory and in
fostering cross-disciplinary approaches to shared problems.
With the publication of Darwinism Today we hope
that the best of the new Darwinian ideas will reach an even
wider audience. Books from the series have been translated
into Danish, Dutch, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese,
Portuguese and Spanish. The entire series is published in
the US by Yale
University Press.
Darwinism Today is published by Weidenfeld
and Nicolson (London); the series is edited by Helena Cronin
and Oliver Curry.
Please direct any queries about the series
to Oliver Curry at o.s.curry@lse.ac.uk
Praise for Darwinism Today
'Buy
these books by the dozen, and send them to all your relations
instead of Christmas cards.'
Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene
'Bulletins from the barricades of an intellectual revolution
- these radicals know how to write.'
Matt Ridley, author of The Origins of Virtue
'These fascinating and provocative pieces explore new implications
of "the most important idea that anyone ever had".'
Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works
Current titles
John Maynard Smith FRS
Shaping Life: Genes, embryos
and evolution
1998
John Maynard Smith argues that the currently polarised debate
in biology between evolutionary thory's concern with adaptation
and embryology's concern with development is marked less
by science than by ideology - reductionism to the right
and holism to the left. But, thanks to advances in the science
underpinning both viewpoints, a rapprochement is near.
Amazon
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US
Kingsley Browne
Law, Wayne State, Michigan
Divided Labours: An evolutionary view of women at work
1998
Kingsley Browne - American lawyer and evolutionary thinker
- takes a fresh look at the notorious differences in earnings
and status between men and women in the workplace. He proposes
the thought-provoking and controversial view that sex discrimination
alone cannot account for these disparities and that the
burden of responsibility lies instead with evolved differences
between the sexes.
Amazon
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US
Colin Tudge
Author of The Engineer in the
Garden, The Day Before Yesterday and The
Variety of Life.
Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How agriculture really
began
1998
Colin Tudge overturns the traditional view that agriculture
began in the Middle East 10,000 years ago. He argues instead
that agriculture in some form has always been in the repertoire
of our ancestors - a versatility that made them all the
more effective hunters and gatherers. Unearthing the truth
about what could well be the most important period in our
history, Tudge offers new insights into the origins and
future of farming.
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US
Martin Daly FRS and Margo Wilson FRS
Psychology, McMaster
The Truth about Cinderella: ADarwinian view of parental
love
1998
A child is one hundred times more likely to be abused or
killed by a step-parent than by a genetic parent. In a classic
application of evolutionary theory, Daly and Wilson argue
that the official orthodoxy, which ignores family ties,
obscures the increased dangers to children living in stepfamilies.
This threat, although a recurring theme of folk-tales worldwide,
has nevertheless been scandalously neglected by policy makers
and opinion formers.
Amazon
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US
Peter Singer
Bioethics, Princeton. Author of
Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics.
A Darwinian Left: Politics, evolution and cooperation
1999
Humans are natural born co-operators. So why is left-wing
politics so contemptuous of biological theories of behaviour,
leaving the right wing to claim Darwinism as its own?
In this ground-breaking book, Peter Singer
traces the history of this intellectual divide and concludes
that it is high time that the left radically revised its
outdated view of human nature. He shows how the insights
of modern evolutionary theory can help to set realistic
and realisable goals, re-invigorating left-wing thinking.
This is a new vision of the political left
from one of the leading moral philosophers of our time.
Amazon
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US
Richard Wilkinson
Public Health Sciences, Nottingham
Mind the Gap: Hierarchies, health and human evolution
2000
Inequality kills. Deaths from stress-related diseases, accidents,
murders and drug and alcohol abuse are all markedly higher
in countries with pronounced income inequality. Even within
a single corporation, death rates from heart disease among
those at the bottom can be three times higher than among
those at the top.
In Mind the Gap, Richard Wilkinson
asks why inequality should have such effects. Why are humans
so sensitive to relative poverty? The answer to this question
- which draws on modern evolutionary theory, evolutionary
psychology, studies of hunter-gatherer societies, primatology,
the biochemistry of stress and the social psychology of
cooperation - is that, during the course of human evolution,
the social environment has been at least as important as
the physical environment.
Unequal societies are marked by greater competitive
interaction between their members and fewer opportunities
for cooperative interaction. The biological consequences
of more competitive social environments are those associated
with 'stress': prolonged exposure to the body's 'fight or
flight' response.
This highly original work has relevance for
many of the most pressing social and political issues of
our time, not least in Britain, which has seen Europe's
most drastic increase in income inequality over the past
decade.
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US
Catherine Salmon and Don Symons
Psychology, Redlands; Psychology,
Santa Barbara
Warrior Lovers: Erotic fiction, evolution and female
sexuality
2001
Romance novels and pornography are multi-billion-dollar
global industries. In Warrior Lovers, Catherine
Salmon and Donald Symons show how the stark contrasts between
these erotic genres reflect the very different selection
pressures that forged women's and men's sexual psychologies
during human evolutionary history. In particular, the authors
analyse a new subgenre, written by and for women: 'slash
fiction'.
'Slash' depicts romantic and sexual relationships
between heterosexual males, fictional characters from television
and film, such as Star Trek's K/S (Captain Kirk and Mr Spock)
- the term 'slash' denoting the punctuation mark that unites
the pair.
The heroes of romance novels and slash fiction
alike are 'warrior lovers' who embody the qualities that
our female ancestors valued in a mate. But, whereas romance-novel
readers fantasise about being 'Mrs Warrior', slash fans
prefer to fantasise about being a 'co-warrior'.
By separating the essential features of female
erotic fantasy from the variable, the authors get to the
heart of what women really want.
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US
Forthcoming titles
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
Psychology and Anthropology, Santa
Barbara
Universal Minds: Human nature and the science of evolutionary
psychology
The mind is a collection of tools designed by natural selection
to solve the problems faced by our ancestors. From recognizing
faces to falling in love, from acquiring a language to reciprocating
favours, evolutionary psychology is at last unravelling
the mystery of what it means to be human. Here two pioneers
of the field, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, explain the
science behind the headlines.
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