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has stated that they are more distantly re- lated to humans than the African apes.

There will always be disagreement in sci- ence: that is how knowledge moves forward. My problem with The Red Ape is not its minority opinion but its selective use and gross omissions of evidence. As Schwartz maintains, the prevailing point of view at present is the gorilla-chimpanzee-human connection. From my observations during the

past 25 years, this consensus came only after a hard-won battle based on molecular, ana- tomical, behavioral, and fossil evidence and not from a century-old conspiracy set in mo- tion by Darwin and Huxley.

ADRIENNE L. ZIHLMAN Department of Anthropology University of California Santa Cruz, California

THE BIOLOGY OF MORAL SYSTEMS. By R. Alexander. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. 1987. xx + 301 pp., figures, tables, refer- ences, indices. $34.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper).

TAKING DARWIN SERIOUSLY. By M. Ruse. New York: Basil Blackwell. 1986. xv + 303 pp., figures, references, index. $24.95 (cloth), $15.95 (paper).

Those who study the biology and evolution of humans as a profession have been on the whole reluctant to address the possible phil- osophical implications of their work. Such implications form the foci of the two books reviewed here, which deal with moral deduc- tions derivable from the study of human evo- lution. The new biology of ethics is a world apart from the postwar liberalism of Julian Huxley and Theodosius Dobzhansky, whose influential works can still be found gather- ing dust in the QH section of the library, and are a very tough act for Richard Alexander and Michael Ruse to follow.

Alexander’s is a book of no little presump- tion. It seeks to answer the ultimate ques- tions of our own nature and existence and to present a coherent picture of the world based upon truly scientific foundations. Ruse, by comparison, is satisfied simply to address the problem of whether this can actually be done, arguing in the affirmative. Alexander and Ruse approach the problem from different perspectives (one a biologist dabbling in phi- losophy, the other a philosopher dabbling in biology) and via slightly different intellec- tual influences. Alexander owes his major intellectual debt to Robert Trivers’ concep- tion of reciprocal altruism, while Ruse owes his to E.O. Wilson and has little to say about Trivers. Alexander further draws heavily on Sir Arthur Keith’s late works (identifying him as an archaeologist, rather than as an anatomist), while Ruse relies heavily on

David Hume, indeed stands him on his head, as Hume is usually considered as the pri- mary reference against a biologically based ethical system.

Both Ruse and Alexander are very circum- spect about using the term “sociobiology,” since that term still frequently causes pilo- erection even in naked apes. Ruse, however, substitutes the term “Darwinism”-as in “Marshall Sahlins (19651, no friend of Dar- winism” [p. 2271, though other non-sociobiol- ogists (presumably creationists in Ruse’s lexicon) such as Gould, Lewontin, and Mon- tagu, are spared a tarring by the same brush.

Group selection is treated muddily at best. On p. 37 Alexander damns group selection, on p. 78 he elevates it to the status of a prime mover in human social evolution, and it is not clear what he is thinking about it on p. 169. Ruse sees no role whatsoever for the concept and argues that Darwin was exclu- sively an individual selectionist, while Alex- ander sees Darwin as a group selectionist when it came to human societies. Why Dar- win needs to be recruited in the first place is odd, since it presuposes that the argument for or against group selection is somehow strengthened by the attachment of the mas- ter’s name.

At the root of Alexander’s moral system is the tenet that human behavior is selfish. Alexander sees this as a biological impera- tive but denies the reader any logical argu- ments to sustain it. Genes have evolved to behave selfishly, and any organismal behav- iors directly under their control would be similarly constrained. This is the contribu- tion of the works of Hamilton, Trivers, and Dawkins. But how do we get from the propo- sition that “genes must behave selfishly” to “humans must behave selfishly”? The deduc- tive leap is valid only insofar as genes may translate directly into human behaviors, which all relevant parties deny. Obviously

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genes and humans possess different proper- ties: humans have general bilateral symme- try, genes do not; and genes have major and minor grooves around their entire lengths, which humans do not. If the properties of genes are not the same as the properties of humans, then how does a morality that pur- ports to take account of biology necessarily dictate genetic selfishness as an intrinsic fea- ture of human behavior?

Alexander therefore may be giving us a cynical philosophy suficient to explain hu- man behavior, but he gives us no justifica- tion for believing it to be a necessary explanation. Thus, his view of things may not be obviously wrong-but it has very little basis in biology, evolutionary or otherwise. For example, Alexander is at great pains to identify the roots of all human behavior, no matter how apparently selfless, as ulti- mately selfish. In so speculating, he is obliged to adduce “propositions [which are] virtually untestable, [and] that is simply a problem we must solve if we are to deal in a better way with the unparalleled difficulty of under- standing ourselves’’ [p. 1601. But if this is biology, then biology is not science, for the world of untestable hypotheses is metaphys- ics, not science, and that is where Alex- ander’s work resides.

Alexander’s vast pretensions actually stand in the way of The Biology of Moral Systems. The text itself often rambles around topics and has little in the way of logical structure and development. Terms and phrases are used several pages before being defined and occasionally are not given full treatment at all-for instance, the bizarre distinction made between “ecologically imposed” and (‘so- cially imposed” monogamy. The implication is that, cultural diffusion notwithstanding, it is more biologically natural for some groups to be monogamous than for others. This is about as useful a distinction as that between the “natural” Spanish language of Spain and the “socially imposed” Spanish of Mexico. Alexander’s unnaturally monogamous peo- ples, if left alone, are probably no more likely to revert to polyandry or polygyny than Mex- icans are to adopt Nahuatl as their common tongue.

Much of Alexander’s energy is spent rein- venting the wheel, and often it comes out square. His theory of reciprocity being at the base of human society would be more origi- nal if Marcel Mauss had never written “The Gift”-indeed Mauss’ name pops up in a quo-

tation from another author, but in nothing from Alexander’s hand. He dismisses all the literature on hunter-gatherers as “the cen- tral myth of modern anthropology” for much the same reasons that Boas used in 1896 to decry “the limitations of the comparative method”-namely, that such groups are not reliable as ancestral models for hominids since they possess unique histories. But Alexander then turns around and uses the Yanomano as justification for the broad as- sertion that “throughout most of human his- tory. . . intergroup strife is fueled by sexual competition” [p. 2291. What he appears to be doing is unburdening himself of the need for ethnographic data, then selecting very care- fully for his rare citations.

By p. 185, Alexander is fancifully recon- structing history in terms and unilineal “ev- olutionary” principles very like those all but purged from anthropology 75 years ago:

[Slmaller groups are able to unify in larger and larger coali- tions in the balance-of-power race primarily by allowing or desig- nating single leaders; these lead- ers accept their positions because of special perquisites, which be- come more lavish as despotism continues to be the means of or- ganizing further for defense. Then . . . despotism is replaced by opportunity leveling; leaders of huge nations at least appear to accept far fewer perquisites. As young men become more and more crucial .for defense, older men become less and less able to control the women and prevent access to them by young men. Then, perhaps, polygyny begins to disappear, and monogamy be- comes the rule.

Where? When? For whom? If this repre- sents a historical sequence for any striding bipeds on the planet, that would be surpris- ing enough, but Alexander wants us appar- ently to see it as an inevitable process, like savagery, barbarism, civilization.

Elsewhere, after dwelling on the subject of reciprocity, he chastises previous writers for ignoring the fact that genetic reproduction alone is only a minor determinant of human behavior in a truly biological world-view. He then throws reciprocity right out the window

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and derives a theory of sexual differences based on “an evolutionary process in which securing of pregnancies was favored” and concludes that “men should usually be ex- pected to anticipate the greatest sexual plea- sure with young, healthy, intelligent women who show promise of providing superior pa- rental care” [p. 2181. There is thus a striking concordance between Alexander’s stark view of human sex qua reproduction and that of the Pope. Obviously, if sex in our species is simply an adaptation for procreation, it is an extremely inefficient mechanism. If human sex has other functions as well, he does not seem to be interested in them.

Alexander then goes on to treat rape as a reproductive crime rather than as a crime of violence, as if men become rapists out of hor- niness. This has no business appearing in a modern book on society, much less appearing with the implication that such a view is more “scientific” than others. One is led to the conclusion that Alexander has simply com- promised the science of biology in the service of an idiosyncratic world-view, which, to bor- row a line from Mencken, “no more binds the human race than what tadpoles believe” (Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1926).

The Biology of Moral Systems is thus excel- lent seminar fare-inexpensive and produc- ing contentious, wide-ranging, dubious assertions about human biology, behavior, and evolution at a brisk pace.

Taking Darwin Seriously, by Michael Ruse, editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, converges on themes similar to those ad- dressed by Alexander, but with less pompos- ity. It is a work of somewhat greater coherence and logic, depth of thought, and clarity of style. The book grew out of his experiences during the 1981 Arkansas crea- tionism trial:

In the months after the trial, be- cause of the questions which I had been asked-questions which I had never truly asked myself-I grew to realize that at least my Creationist opponents had a sin- cerely articulated world picture. I had nothing. Even though I had been a professional philosopher for twenty years, I still had no settled thoughts on the founda- tions of knowledge or of morality. When asked about ethical claims by opposing counsel, I had airily

replied, ‘I intuit them as objective realities.’ God only knows what that means. Fortunately, it was sufficiently pompous sounding that no one cared to follow it up, although the attorney general did give me a long, hard, chilly stare [p. xii].

Ruse walks us through the philosophical underpinnings of Darwin’s work and modern evolutionary biology. He then sets up a con- trast between the evolution of animals and the evolution of science, though curiously failing to recognize that the evolution of sci- ence is but a special case of cultural evolu- tion. His goal is no more than to show that there may be a biological basis for an ethical system, rather less than Alexander’s goal. Ruse then argues that if a moral system has evolved, we must seek its roots in the realm of human evolution, and he proceeds to draw heavily on the work of the late Glynn Isaac. Ruse’s treatment of the subject is cursory, but he at least admits the relevance of an- thropology to the question of the moment, something Alexander never does.

Ruse’s bedrock is the concept of “epigenetic rules” invented by Wilson and Lumsden a few years ago. “This is a constraint which obtains on some facet of human develop- ment, having its origin in evolutionary needs, and channeling the way in which the grow- ing or grown human thinks or acts” [p. 1431.

All told, however, Ruse builds a house of cards. He claims that the goals sought by all humans are wealth and security (dubious at best), and further that these translate, when accumulated, into reproductive success. Yet across the panorama of human history and the myriad of human cultures on all the con- tinents (save, of course, Antarctica) over the scores of centuries, the only illustrative ex- ample Ruse can come up with is the Yanomano.

And as for these epigenetic rules, where do they fit in? Here Ruse’s culture-boundedness is his undoing. To the student of human be- havior, the major question is, Why does one group of people have one set of normative values and another group have another set? Are we seeing different epigenetic rules fixed in different populations, or different somatic expressions of the same rule? Ruse brushes aside this question by asserting that we all have fundamentally the same native moral instincts, and that is that. This supposition

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makes the whole endeavor a lot easier, be- cause now the native moral instinct (ours/ his) can be compared to that of chimpanzees, and a case can be made for biological differ- ences between the two. But the inquiring human mind may desire to learn just what obvious moral stands are indeed cross-cul- tural universals. For if we learn that culture X practices female infanticide and culture Y does not, and we accept that this difference reflects facultative variation on a single un- derlying “rule,” then a modern scientific analysis that focuses on the proximate causes of phenomena is obliged to ignore the “rule,” since we cannot explain a variable (norma- tive behavior) by recourse to a constant (“epi- genetic rule”). And, following Darwin’s lead, we generally leave ultimate causes to philos- ophers and theologians. As a philosopher, Ruse is therefore asking questions of ulti- mate causality in human behavior, but so defining himself out of the realm of modern scientific enquiry, which scotches any claim he might have to be basing a moral study upon “biological” principles.

The new moral basis thus appears simply to be a change from “humans have intrinsic mental features” to “humans have evolved intrinsic mental features.” But these fea- tures, the product of our biological heritage, are harder to come by than Ruse supposes, based on his “common-sense” approach to pan-human thought processes. Ruse tells us,

“If anything is common sense, it is that rape is simply, totally wrong” [p. 2691. Certainly it is. But anyone who thinks it always has been would do well to watch the classic ’50s musical “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and listen closely to the uptempo song about the Sabine Women. One will likely be led to the conclusion that although our feelings are rightfully intense about the subject here and now, they have not always been so (the rais- ing of men’s consciousnesses on the subject is a particularly recent phenomenon), they may not be so elsewhere, and it is difficult to infer the existence of obvious epigenetic moral rules from such malleability.

Ruse’s book is a thoughtful, but unsuccess- ful, attempt to derive a biological justifica- tion for a moral system. The main reason is that Ruse has ultimately succumbed to the trap laid by Plato: namely, that by thinking hard enough, we can reason out the basal nature of humans, without recourse to the diverse ways in which real people really think and act. The search for an essential human nature, however, is likely as illusory as the quest for the essential qualities of species, and for the same reason-the empir- ical fact of variation.

JON MARKS Department of Anthropology Yale University New Haven, Connecticut