[Book Reviews] "Why Everyone (Else) Is A Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind"

[thewronghands]

It probably says something about me that I had already read about every study cited in Robert Kurzban's pop science work "Why Everyone (Else) Is A Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind" and all of the philosophers, but 75% of his movie references were lost upon me. I fail at pop. (Pretty funny, since that's what most of the Amazon reviewers

Comments

[rebeccmeister]

Oh man. Gould raises a lot of peoples' hackles for a lot of different reasons. I found it really interesting to learn about his writing method - apparently, he didn't let anybody else ever read his drafts. I can imagine that affected the speed with which he was able to write things, but then again, he's clearly a big "ideas" man who has written voluminously and has thus been highly influential whether he's right or wrong.

It's important to realize that the "ideas" men (and for some reason, they're mostly men, yep, hmm) are wrong as often as they're correct. See: E.O. Wilson.

I tend to trust Steven Pinker's opinions on these topics, so a positive review from him as well as you is also a promising sign. :-)

From your review, though, I don't know how much I would actually learn from Hypocrite, although it sounds WAY more substantive than the current stupid NYTimes bestseller on personality psychology I'm attempting to read. Sigh. I should probably stick with evolutionary psychology, or other topics altogether. And I'd agree with

[thewronghands]

I think Gould was for me what Heinlein was for many of my fellow nerds -- that formative-years influence that shows you a larger world than the one you inhabit, and who wrote many many books. I wasn't allowed to read fantasy novels when I was a kid (that 80's devil worship D&D scare thing) but I was allowed to read books about science, and I found the possibility that one could grow up and think big thoughts about how to understand the universe super attractive. As with many childhood idols, once I got into the weeds I discovered that it wasn't as pretty as Gould painted it, but by that point I was already well on the way to being a biologist

[rebeccmeister]

Yes, my happy place, too! Which is why I majored in bio-psychology and studied psychopharmacology for a good long while until I concluded that humans weren't especially interesting to me.

One of the more recent fascinating books for me was The Dialectical Biologist (by the Richards Levins and Lewontin, two ace evolutionary biologists), which is actually a collection of essays, but which makes a person look more carefully at the social science side of how the biological sciences work.

I got started more on the Jared Diamond side of the equation in high school (kinda drifted away from sci-fi/fantasy before hitting any of the really good stuff). Diamond's earlier works are far better than his more recent work, though.

[duathir]

I would like well to read this book, although I too fail at pop.

[thewronghands]

If you remind me before the next time we get together, I'll bring it along for you!