Call it the timing. I can’t resist comparing David Sloan Wilson’s book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives to 2006’s blockbuster The God Delusion, by another atheist evolutionist writing for the pop market, Richard Dawkins. Wilson argues for his ideas with far more substance and candor. However, he also does it in such inferior prose that it seems unlikely he’ll reach the same huge audience.
Dawkins used an emotionally appealing rant against religion as a tool to promote his own challenged ideas of the primacy of genes and memes in evolutionary and social change. In the same vein, Wilson uses Evolution for Everyone, whose aim is to point out the importance of evolution across a range of academic and practical studies, as a vehicle for his own challenged ideas about evolution.
Generally, Wilson’s method of putting his theories forward is far superior to Dawkins’, who relied largely on emotional, unscientific anecdote to convince us some social phenomena are nasty infectious diseases with a ‘life’ beyond the groups who promote them. As well as anecdotes, Wilson refers to published, peer-reviewed studies that support his notions of sociobiology and group evolution. Both anecdote and evidence help him demonstrate Evolution for Everyone’s central thrust: that everyone needs to understand evolution, if only to better understand their own groups.
Along the way, Wilson keeps well on the safe side of the line between sociobiology and stupidities like social Darwinism or the ‘boys-like-blue’ school of evolutionary psychology. He argues that people across all disciplines should understand evolution so that they can work through situations that trigger or are triggered by the instinctual, evolved responses of your typical human being or human group - not so that they can judge or categorize each other.
So Wilson’s ideas are interesting, and the bulk of the material he uses to explain them is sound. His respect for the humanities and his more cool-headed exploration of religion and ethics make Evolution for Everyone both more accessible and less unintentionally humorous than The God Delusion, which suffers from historical semi-illiteracy and a theoretical single-mindedness bordering on the unhinged.
Therefore the book can leave you convinced that the author is correct: non-scientists should see evolution as more than an abstract, emotional issue in the Culture Wars, because it’s an important frame for looking at ourselves and our society whether you’re in the sciences or not. But that’s assuming you don’t leave the book first. There is one way, and one only, in which The God Delusion leaves Evolution for Everyone trailing far behind: Evolution for Everyone is really annoying to read.
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