Dawkin's and Domestic Bliss

Just been reading Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism: Selected Essays (1995). A few random jottings:

An interesting way of looking at Gould vs Dawkins/Pinker

To talk in terms of metaphor, one set of evolutionists (the Darwinians, the synthetic theorists) regards the organic world in terms of adaptation, which is to say as though it is functioning or designed. The other set of evolutionists, of which Gould is a prime representative, does not. They think of the organic world in terms of form, which means that there are certain basic structures or blueprints according to which organisms are constructed.

Dawkins / Maynard Smith

It is just not the case that the anti-adaptationist movement epitomized by punctuated equilibria has come up with stunning new findings (as in the physics case of super-conductivity) or new models (as with Hamilton)-findings and models which simply compel discussion and agreement. Much of the discussion has been rhetorical and/or philosophical in some broad sense. I ask it also since some people-English adaptationists, in particular - seem not merely to be unreceptive to the attack on adaptation, but incapable of seeing even that there is the slightest force to the attack. (If you do not know what I mean, look at Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker.) For them-intelligent, hard-working, good-quality evolutionists-punctuated equilibria and all that it represents is not so much false but simply time-wasting gobbledegook (see also Maynard Smith 1981).

Dawkins Hidden Prejudices

Evolutionary biology has been used to carry horrible beliefs, and these have been promoted in the name of Darwinism as well as alternative evolutionary theories. Moreover, I would agree that this is a legacy which persists. If we jump to the present, or at least to the immediately past present, we find similar sorts of values alive and well there also. I am certainly not saying that people today are open racists in quite the way that someone like Darwin would be if he were writing today. At least, I am certainly not saying that the bulk of respected evolutionists wear their prejudices in quite the open way that one finds among the Victorians, although around the fringes one can certainly find such thinkers.

Yet I would say that even among the respected and respectable, the sentiments are often unchanged. Consider, for example, Richard Dawkins' well-known book, The Selfish Gene (1976). In talking about the sexual strategies open to females in the course of reproduction, he distinguishes the 'he man' strategy from the 'domestic bliss' strategy. Without commenting on the full extent to which Dawkins is pointing to real aspects of the living world, it surely requires little argument to see that his use of these terms is insulting to women. I for one would not like to be a member of the sex whose options apparently are either attracting Tarzan or staying home with the kids.