Lately I happen to have been reading two books on what Darwin – and his intellectual descendants (like Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene or Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man) – got wrong!

The two books are philosopher David Stove’s Darwinian Fairy Tales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution and novelist Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature.

Neither writer is influenced by “creationism,” which I take to be the view that regards chapter one of the Biblical Book of Genesis as literally true. Stove was a staunch atheist for whom the skeptic David Hume provided the model, and – whatever Leaf’s background views might be – they do not figure in his book.

Stove contends that Darwin’s principle of “survival of the fittest” cannot explain human behavior. The case he builds – visiting intellectual forerunners like Thomas Malthus as well as Darwin’s contemporary allies and his influential sociobiological heirs – is painstaking and meticulous. 

What is more, Stove’s findings actually turn out hilarious. I don’t ever recall laughing out loud when reading a book as carefully constructed and empirically buttressed as Darwinian Fairytales. But that’s what’s happening to me, and happening time after time, as I take in the gradual build of this book’s argument.

Jonathan Leaf’s book concerns itself with the results of more recent technological developments such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), DMA technology and CT scanners. All these now permit detailed comparison between our brains and the brains of great apes and chimpanzees.

Recent research has also given us a more accurate idea of the chronology of our human evolution, as compared with that of great apes. Although “it became common among primatologists to call all great apes hominids … actually [h]umans diverged from a common ancestor we share with orangutans between fourteen million and eighteen million years ago (p. 72).” That’s a very long time to have been on separate tracks.

Another difference: apes copulate with every female they can find and they don’t look back to see if she’s doing it with anyone else. Nor do they bond with their offspring. The simian reproductive strategies contrast sharply with what we find in the prehistoric evidence concerning homo sapiens.

Our remote ancestors lived mostly in small bands and – how can I say this? – they couldn’t afford to sleep around! If you reached for someone else’s mate, he’d kill you. So monogamy seems to have both the safest and the most satisfactory mating strategy for our farthest ancestors. With the result that some features of human psychology evolved to facilitate that outcome. Hey, men and women are possessive and jealous!

So now, what are the real-life implications for actual boys and girls like ourselves? Well, I sure wish I’d known this when I was dating!

Let me recall an anecdote shared with me by a woman friend in the time that stretched all through my youth and hasn’t ended yet. My friend was sitting in a café and minding her own business when a young man drew near her table with this approach: 

     “I know what you need.”

Hey, he knows what she needs. He’s heard about Darwin’s views of the human reproductive strategies as updated by sociobiology. He’s read that individual members of our species have to compete to out-reproduce their conspecific competitors! Isn’t that a good enough reason for young women to get rid of their virginity before they reach the advanced age of twenty? 

Anyway, here’s how my tough young woman friend replied to her neoDarwinian suitor:

     “That’s the last thing I need. And if I needed it, you’re the last person I would turn to, to get it.”

As we know, most girls aren’t quite that tough. 

All the same, there are a host of reasons, founded on the biological differences between the sexes, why natural female pliancy – now abetted by the recent sociobiological updatings of Darwin – is female trouble waiting to happen. 

Take the hymen: obviously a natural barrier to intercourse with a virgin. Can we take a hint from that protective barrier and think about restoring a social etiquette for courtship that might have been discarded prematurely – discarded on the basis of a wrong theory about human origins? As it turns out, we’re very different from apes.

Female apes don’t worry about getting pregnant. Human females do. I taught an evening class in Applied Ethics. My students were mainly middle-aged women of color. Some worked in hospitals. They became familiar with women coming in for their secret abortions. Those women included figures known for their public opposition to abortion.

Hey, sociobiologists, how many of you are in danger of an unwanted pregnancy?

What about men, young men and older men? If Jonathan Leaf is reading the evidence correctly, cooperative, lifelong pair bonding appears to have been very ancient in the evolution of our species. It might even predate the use of fire for cooking. From such findings, what might follow strategically – for men?

Hey, be the first kid on your block to be a gentleman! That doesn’t mean that you need to wallow in guilt over sexism or redesign yourselves as pushovers. 

Just be normally courteous and kind.

That’s very

 avant garde.

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