Darwinian Misadventures in the Humanities

In recent decades the humanities have been in thrall to postmodern skepticism, while Darwinists, brimming with confidence in the genuine progress they have made in the sciences of biology and psychology, have set their sights on rescuing the humanities from the ravages of postmodernism. In this volume, Eugene Goodheart attacks the neo-Darwinist approach to the arts and articulates a powerful defense of humanist criticism. In "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge", E. O. Wilson, the distinguished Harvard biologist, speaks of converting philosophy into science, substituting science for religion and formulating a biological theory of literature and the arts. Goodheart demonstrates that the efforts of Wilson and his colleagues (Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett among others) have resulted in scientism rather than science. In "The Selfish Gene", Dawkins betrays the crude reductionism that characterizes the neo-Darwinian attempt to colonize the humanities: "We no longer have to resort to the superstition when faced with the deep problem: Is there meaning to life? What are we here for? What is man? Goodheart points out that if Dawkins had contented himself with the claim that Darwinism had made worthless other answers to the question of how we have evolved, they would have given offense only to creationists, but questions of meaning and purpose are of another order. Likewise, contemporary Darwinist critiques err in the assumption that art and traditional criticism aspire to truths that can be codified in terms of scientific laws. Following Dawkins, we would have to regard the speculations of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Rousseau as worthless. Goodheart exposes the philistinism of literary Darwinism, the bad faith and inverted fundamentalism of the Darwinian approach to religion, and the dangers of the effort to create a Darwinian ethical system. Taken together, Goodheart's arguments show that in moving beyond their area of competence, the neo-Darwinists commit an ideology, not a science. This volume will be of interest to literary scholars, intellectual historians, cultural studies specialists, and sociologists.