Part of the picture

So-called evolutionary psychology is enormously popular. Regular public lectures at the London School of Economics, for example, delve into every aspect of modern human behaviour allegedly caused by mental 'hard-wiring' fixed at the time of our forebears scavenging in the African savannah. So Stephen Pinker, in How the Mind Works, the best-selling popularisation of this theory, can tell us without blushing that people prefer savannah landscapes on their walls because it's the typical vista of our ancestors, a perplexing claim to anyone fond of Swiss mountains.

Figments of Reality is an antidote to such nonsense. Written by a mathematician and a biologist (both well-known science writers; Stewart is the author of the bestselling Does God Play Dice?), it adopts an entirely different evolutionary approach, and holds 'evolutionary psychology' in healthy scorn. 'In an organism,' they tell us, 'nothing is truly hard-wired.' They are equally dismissive of the related 'genes for' school, which sees alcoholism, aggression, sexuality, etc., as the result of certain genes.

It's a wide-ranging discussion, whirligigging breathlessly from human history to quantum physics, rich in ideas. Its main theme is that human behaviour, while based on biological origins, is cultural - what they call 'contextual'', and 'complicit' (interactive, both simple and complex).

One example. Language, Pinker argues (in his first, much better book), following Chomsky, is an innate 'instinct' in human beings. Stewart and Cohen reject this view, proposing instead that while we need the mental apparatus to develop it, language itself is a learned, cultural product (proven by the inability of children who have reached, say, the age of 12, without speaking, then to do so with any facility). Our conscious, self-aware intelligence is reproduced culturally, becoming what the writers cutely call 'extelligence', the interaction of individuals with the knowledge and behavioural patterns of the surrounding society. They usefully point out that the human mind is therefore not much like a computer, another popular metaphor (for example with Pinker).

Where certain philosophers see the world as a figment of the imagination, Stewart and Cohen regard the mind - the result of a physical thing, if not reducible to it - as a processor for 'figments of reality'. The mind doesn't simply mirror the outside world, but interprets it, looking for 'features' which are important to our senses. Which features we consider important are shaped by evolution, biological and cultural.

In describing this development, they are anxious to avoid the 'reductionist nightmare', in which everything is ultimately understood by its simplest physical component. The trouble with reductionism, they argue, is that it can't negotiate 'ant country'. 'Ant country' is a typical phrase of theirs, wittily expressing a complex idea simply; there's a reason it's about ants, but the gist concerns that space between the simple and the real which is impossible to describe because it is too vast an area. In other words, they insist on the complexity of the mediation between physics or biology and culture, a complexity entirely ignored by 'evolutionary psychology'.

Evolution moves through what they call 'phase space', shaped by possibility. This is not the same as quantum indeterminacy (about which they are tantalisingly sceptical), because the possibilities in phase space are not infinite. They compare it to a snooker game, in which a 'break' must be maintained for the species to survive, but the break does not have only one possible course.

The book has its problems. The chapter 'We wanted to have a chapter on free will, but we decided not to, so here it is' approaches the question of genetic determinism entirely through a discussion of the individual's choice in his or her destiny. But the objection to such determinism is not only that it lets people who do bad things off the hook. It is also that it fails to look for other, social, explanations for why people do 'bad things'. Stewart and Cohen seem uninterested in this side of the question.

Their quasi-fictional account of the history of human civilisation is irritatingly ahistorical, apparently proposing a feudal village as the starting point for the emergence of towns and cities (barons, castles and all), which turns real history on its head. And they seem to think their imaginary alien visitors ('Zarathustrans') are a lot more insightful and entertaining than they are (and the joke, the Zarathustran Theory of Everything - E=8 - is a rip-off of Douglas Adams).

The writers touch on the ideas they are criticising, but on the whole the critique remains implicit. Given the prevalence of 'ultra-Darwinist' psychology, it would have been useful to have a more direct, explicit account of them (Pinker's book has been out for ages, but not a word is said about it). As a result, for this reader at least, the book seems oddly unfocused. Perhaps my tastes are just too polemical.

And, most disappointingly, there is little attempt, except speculatively and through semi-fictional 'narratives', to describe how the human mind historically did evolve. Other books have attempted to do this, most notably Steven Mithen's excellent The Prehistory of the Mind, which is not referred to.

Still, a readable, thought-provoking book which deserves to be read as widely as the biological determinist literature that is so disturbingly vogue.

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Figments of Reality, by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen