Transcript
A (0:01)
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B (0:39)
One way of making a creature that will replicate well is to give it an awful lot of adaptability, an awful lot of flexibility. And so freedom, our freedom evolved. There's not an opposition between our being autonomous free agents and our being the products of evolution. It's because we're the product of evolution that we have this wonderful freedom. That's what it came from. It wasn't a divine gift. It was a hard won product of billions of years of evolution.
C (1:03)
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas.
D (1:09)
It's Zeb here and Daniel. Today's episode is a debate between philosopher of biology Sabrina Smith, philosopher of mind Keith Frankish and clinical psychologist Simon Baron Cohen on the topic of evolutionary psychology. Together, they'll question whether explaining modern human behaviour as a product of evolutionary drives is actually useful or merely an excuse for outdated cultural phenomena like violence and patriarchal structures. Whilst we may be genetically predisposed to certain behaviours, does societal progress show that these behaviours can be overcome for the greater good? Essentially trained out of us by the society we grew up in, with their diverse academic backgrounds, the speakers explore how themes as varied as prisons, parenting and speech disorders can help us to understand this relationship between evolution and culture.
C (1:58)
That sounds fascinating. Well, let's pass over to Ganesh Taylor, the host of today's debate, Overcoming Evolution.
E (2:12)
Thank you so much, everybody. Indeed, we are here today to talk about overcoming evolution. And it is with much sadness, of course, that we must actually start this debate with the acknowledgement of the fact that the great philosopher Daniel Dennett was in fact scheduled to join us on this debate today. And after his sad passing, the panel now also serves to memorialize and celebrate his life and ideas. So, overcoming evolution. As with the animal kingdom, we see human behavior as the product of elemental drives to survive and reproduce Evolutionary psychology has taken this a stage further with claims that killing is fundamentally in our nature and sees violence, social hierarchy, and sexual promiscuity as the product of evolutionary drives. But might this be a misleading and dangerous approach? Murder rates have fallen seventy fold since the Middle Ages, while across the globe birth rates are at a fraction of what they were 100 years ago. Fathers are actively involved in childcare. And we've radically changed our outlook on social issues like gender identity, suggesting ideas and culture drive behavior rather than evolution. So should we conclude that evolutionary psychology is a blind alley with no predictive power? Are we in fact capable of overcoming behavioral traits and therefore wholly responsible for our actions? Or is evolution an inescapable force and behavioral change a result of altered circumstances while our core nature remains identical? To help us dive into these questions, I'm joined by Sabrina Smith, a leading philosopher of biology and associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. She has been a critic of evolutionary explanations for human behavior. We're also joined from not so Sunny Greece, a philosopher influenced by Daniel Dennett's work very substantially. Keith Frankish is a philosopher of mind and an honorary professor at the University of Sheffield. An adjunct professor at the University of Crete, he is noted for his controversial stance on consciousness, and we're very grateful to him for being here today. Last, but by no means least, we're also joined by Simon Byron Cohen, who is a renowned clinical psychologist and leading figure in autism research. He's a professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and the director of Cambridge's Autism Research Center. That's our panel for today. We know what we're here to discuss this idea of can we overcome our evolutionary psychological roots or not? So the pitch is, is evolutionary psychology a misleading account of culture and human behavior? Keith, could I ask you to open with three minutes on that, please?
