ABSTRACT
In Ian McEwan’s best-selling novel Enduring Love (1998) one of the main characters, Joe, gives a glowing description of the ‘intellectual revolution’ brought on by Darwinian-influenced forms of thought such as evolutionary psychology. He goes on to suggest that this revolution shattered the post-war consensus of a malleable human nature. Instead, humans have a ‘nature’, part of which is fixed and part of which is developmental. The fact that a novel such as Enduring Love can deal with, and to a considerable degree, sympathize with evolutionary psychology demonstrates the impact of what Steven Jay Gould has called ‘Ultra-Darwinism’. There have been many battles as to the intellectual respectability and coherence of UltraDarwinism and its earlier incarnation of sociobiology, and it is clear that they will continue for the reasons McEwan’s protagonist suggests. Our task in this chapter is to comment on evolutionary psychology as the most recent form of Ultra-Darwinist argument presented to the social sciences and to show how it seeks to change the relationship between biology and social science. Using examples from the sociology of health we demonstrate that evolutionary psychology ultimately reduces the social to the biological in ways that generally preclude further analysis of the complexity of social relations.
