HEROES AND VILLAINS

This is my first blog, so its main purpose is to introduce myself. I have taken
part in some previous discussions, and Razib has now given me the opportunity to blog in my own right.

I am English, and I live near London. I am not an academic, but my university studies included the history of science, and for the last ten years I have been writing occasional papers on the subject. My main interest is in evolutionary
biology, including population genetics, speciation, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology. I also have some interest in anthropology and human evolution.

It occurred to me that one way to give readers a general idea of my approach would be to list some of the thinkers I most admire. So here are twenty of my
‘heroes’ (in historical order) – and a few villains:

THOMAS HOBBES: still fresh and daring after 350 years.
DAVID HUME: the boldest of all sceptics. For present purposes, his most important contribution is his insistence that ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is’- values cannot be derived from facts.
THOMAS REID: another 18th century Scot. Reid is generally known as a critic of Hume, but he had interesting views of his own on human nature. For more on Reid and other C18 thinkers, see my paper ‘Instinct and Enlightenment: philosophy, theology and the theory of animal behaviour in the 18th century’ in SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), 2002:06, pp.243-303.
ADAM SMITH: a boring choice, I suppose, but unavoidable.
WILLIAM PALEY: an underrated thinker. Above all, his ‘Natural Theology’, which was much admired by Charles Darwin, provides overwhelming evidence of ‘adaptation’ in the organic world. For more on Paley, see my paper ‘William Paley confronts Erasmus Darwin: natural theology and evolutionism in the eighteenth century’ in Science and Christian Belief, 10 (1998), pp.49-71.
THOMAS MALTHUS: much maligned by people who have never read him. It is desirable to read both the original short version of his ‘Principle of Population’, and one of the later, expanded editions.
CHARLES DARWIN: obviously.
ALFRED RUSSEL [sic] WALLACE: nice guy, shame about the spiritualism. See the sympathetic recent biography by Michael Shermer.
FRANCIS GALTON: explorer, inventor, meteorologist, biologist, statistician, anthropologist, psychologist, and pioneer of fingerprint analysis. They don’t make them like that any more! For more on Galton, see my papers ‘Galton’s 100: an exploration of Francis Galton’s imagery studies’ in British Journal for the History of Science, 27 (1994), pp.443-63, and ‘Francis Galton on twins, heredity and social class’ in British Journal for the History of Science, 34 (2001), pp.323-340. See also Gavan Tredoux’s Galton website at http://www.mugu.com/galton/index.html
AUGUST WEISMANN: not immune to the German vices of dogmatism and system-building, but he did defend and advance the theory of natural selection at a time when it was under threat.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: crazy name, crazy guy. Another thinker much maligned by people who have not read him.
WILLIAM JAMES: his ‘Principles of Psychology’ is still the best single book to read on the human mind.
KARL PEARSON: not a very nice man, it seems, and his penchant for collectivism was unfortunate, but his prodigious intellectual energy and range
of achievement are inspiring.
EDWARD WESTERMARCK: a Finnish anthropologist (1862-1939). His
books on ‘The History of Human Marriage’ (3 vols.) and ‘The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas’ (2 vols.) are a treasure-house of politically incorrect information about ‘primitive’ peoples.
LEONARD DARWIN: the fourth son of Charles Darwin, Leonard was considered the dunce of the family. After a career in the British Army, he dabbled in politics and economics before at the age of 60 he was invited to become President of the Eugenics Education Society. The Society probably just wanted a respectable figurehead, but Leonard turned out to be an effective chairman and writer on eugenics. His book ‘The Need for Eugenic Reform’ (1925), though inevitably dated, is still worth reading, and his article on ‘Heredity and Environment’ (Eugenics Review, 8 (1916-17), pp.93-122) is one of the best things ever written on that thorny subject. Behind the scenes, Leonard also provided advice, encouragement, and financial assistance to the young R. A. Fisher. Their published correspondence (‘Natural Selection, Heredity, and Eugenics’, ed. J. H. Bennett (1983)) shows that Leonard was himself an astute evolutionary theorist, and some of the ideas usually associated with Fisher may have started with Leonard: for an example, see my note in ‘Nature’, 355 (1992), p.118.
R. A. FISHER: a great statistician as well as a great biologist – it just isn’t fair!
EDWARD EVANS-PRITCHARD: to my mind the outstanding anthropologist of the 20th century. His books on the Nuer and the Azande are about as close as we can get to understanding the life and thought of non-Western peoples.
FRIEDRICH HAYEK: for defending liberty and individualism against prevailing fashions. Not so sure about some of his later work, which drifted towards ‘organicist’ conservatism.
W. D. HAMILTON: for his originality and intellectual courage, best seen in his prefaces to the essays in ‘Narrow Roads of Gene Land’ (vols. 1 and 2).
JOHN MAYNARD SMITH: the most distinguished living evolutionary theorist. Notable for his clarity and objectivity. He has contributed to nearly every branch of the subject, and I believe his book (with Eors Szathmary) ‘The Major Transitions in Evolution’ (1995) may prove to be the most important book on evolution in the last 50 years.

Now for the villains:

KANT: the rot started here. The problem is not that most of Kant’s doctrines are false (though they are), but that he presented them in such appalling style. Before Kant, philosophers aimed at clarity, even if they did not always achieve it; after Kant, it was acceptable, even fashionable, to equate
obscurity with profundity.
HEGEL: I once spent a lot of time trying to understand Hegel, and I still resent the waste of time and effort. Gilbert Ryle got it right when he said, ‘Hegel is not worth studying, even as error’.
MARX: the worst thing about Marxism (well, apart from the millions of deaths
it caused) is the way it immunises itself against criticism by labelling the critics as ‘bourgeois ideologists’. By the way, Marx was also a shit in his private life: a braggart and a bully, who sponged off his friends and knocked
up the house-maid.
FREUD: barking mad.
J. B. WATSON: Watson’s ‘Behaviorism’ is a deeply stupid book. It is astonishing how little evidence Watson had for his views. One may paraphrase his argument in three steps:
Step 1: there is no conclusive evidence for innate dispositions in man
Step 2: therefore there are no innate dispositions in man
Step 3: therefore my theory of conditioning is correct.
The starting point was not unreasonable in Watson’s time, but Step 2 does not follow from Step 1, and Step 3 does not follow from Step 2. It is one of the mysteries of the 20th century how charlatans like Freud and Watson
became so influential.

Well, that’s enough heroes and villains. Hopefully, everyone will find something to annoy or offend them!

DAVID BURBRIDGE