Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for an Evolving World, by Gillian Barker
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Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for an Evolving World, by Gillian Barker
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Beyond Biofatalism is a lively and penetrating response to the idea that evolutionary psychology reveals human beings to be incapable of building a more inclusive, cooperative, and egalitarian society. Considering the pressures of climate change, unsustainable population growth, increasing income inequality, and religious extremism, this attitude promises to stifle the creative action we require before we even try to meet these threats.
Beyond Biofatalism provides the perspective we need to understand that better societies are not only possible but actively enabled by human nature. Gillian Barker appreciates the methods and findings of evolutionary psychologists, but she considers their work against a broader background to show human nature is surprisingly open to social change. Like other organisms, we possess an active plasticity that allows us to respond dramatically to certain kinds of environmental variation, and we engage in niche construction, modifying our environment to affect others and ourselves. Barker uses related research in social psychology, developmental biology, ecology, and economics to reinforce this view of evolved human nature, and philosophical exploration to reveal its broader implications. The result is an encouraging foundation on which to build better approaches to social, political, and other institutional changes that could enhance our well-being and chances for survival.
Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for an Evolving World, by Gillian Barker- Amazon Sales Rank: #1392796 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .90" w x 5.40" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 176 pages
Review
Barker's focus on the conjunction of plasticity and stability, on viewing adaptations as a space of alternatively realizable equilibria between phenotypic distributions and environmental states, is as unique as it is insightful.
(Bruce Glymour, Kansas State University)Beyond Biofatalism is an indispensable antidote to dangerous complaisance about contemporary social institutions and unwarranted resignation about our powers to improve them, both fostered by a superficial Darwinism. All who are committed to employing Darwin's insights about adaptation to understanding and ameliorating social life need to read this book.
(Alex Rosenberg, Duke University)Deeply informed, cogently argued, and lucidly written, Beyond Biofatalism offers the most constructive discussion of evolutionary psychology currently available. If the evolutionary understanding of human thought and action is ever to fulfill its promise, it will be through absorbing Gillian Barker's wise counsel.
(Philip Kitcher, Columbia University)Had you read only popularizers of evolutionary psychology, you might be forgiven for thinking that the message about human potential from evolutionary theory is grim. Gillian Barker, in this succinct and well-written book, shows that specific empirical findings in evolution, social psychology, and behavioral ecology―evolutionary psychology writ large―suggest that human biology, as biology more generally, is open to more varied social futures than is commonly thought
(Helen Longino, Stanford University)Fascinating philosophical examination of the roots of human behavior.
(Library Journal)This well-crafted study clearly and concisely reinterprets the nature/nurture and facts/value debates.
(Choice)About the Author
Gillian Barker is assistant professor in the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. She has also taught at Indiana University, Simon Fraser University, and Bucknell University. She is the author, with Philip Kitcher, of Philosophy of Science: A New Introduction, and editor, with Eric Desjardins and Trevor Pearce, of Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. This is socially emancipatory philosophy at its finest. By Graham C Bracken Dr. Barker follows through on her titular promise to get beyond a looming fatalism and does so by prying open two sets of possibilities: one of interpretation; one of action.The opening of interpretive possibilities is the most obvious success of the book. Most armchair understanding of human nature, or of the relationship between an organism and its environment, tends to invoke one of two views: either an ‘internalist’ view where the features of an organism are an internal affair – locked in despite its environment – or an ‘externalist’ view where the opposite is true; where the environment shapes the organism. This could apply to an animal in its physical habitat, an individual in her social context, or any number of analogues. The chief virtue of this book is that it gives the reader a handy vocabulary for identifying and understanding this range of positions while highlighting an intermediate range of interpretations – ‘interactionist’ ones – which hold that some kind of organism-environment entanglement is the most appropriate story we can tell. This possibility is introduced with a few high-powered examples – ‘niche-construction’ being one of the stickiest – but quickly goes subliminal so that many (if not most) examples start looking interactive and entangled quite naturally.(I’m sure much of this gestalt switch is a consequence of Barker’s keen eye for metaphor. She often draws the reader’s attention to common but loaded language and how it betrays an allegiance to one of the traditional positions. [Warning: this makes it nigh impossible to read a newspaper without having them jump out at you.] I’m quite sure her careful use of metaphor also eases the interpretive switch into seeing entanglement everywhere but I would have to read it again to see how. The important thing is that the switch happens and happens dramatically; these new perspectives start appearing everywhere.)However, none of these interpretive positions has a monopoly on the facts; each has preferred examples to bolster its plausibility but most of the time we can switch our interpretive hats with the same example. This becomes a big deal when we realize that interpretation is not neutral; it guides our beliefs about what is feasible, what is possible, and therefore guides our plans and projects.It’s out of this conceptual work, then, that Barker opens up whole new possibilities for action. Once we can see our relationships with various environments as plastic, interactive, and mutual, the old yarns about our fixed human nature (and the possible futures it excludes) start looking a little frayed. The scales drop from the proverbial eyes and our human future starts to burst with potential – all because of our newly interpreted nature.This is socially emancipatory philosophy at its finest.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Challenging BioFatalism By ThompNickSon At last! Somebody has written a book challenging “biofatalism’. Biofatalism is the idea that our animal nature makes some forms of social change unachievable. The public has an insatiable appetite for this idea and it has dominated the popular biology writing of the last 50 years. One cannot read these biofatalistic works without beginning to feel that their authors take a certain smug satisfaction in putting hope beyond our reach. And Lord knows, they’ve made a lot of money doing it!Barker’s main point is that the success of biofatalistic writers is due neither to their logic nor to their facts, but to the casual rhetoric they use to constrain our thinking. On her account, humans are not fated by their evolutionary history or by their current circumstances. We are responsive. To be responsive is to have the capacity to shape new means towards longstanding goals, and sometimes, even, to shape new goals in the face of unyielding circumstances. Therefore, the proper role of evolutionary knowledge is neither to tell us what we cannot do nor what we are helpless to avoid. Rather it is to guide us in making the adjustments that we can most profitably and painlessly make.Barker’s book is a great resource for optimists among us who would like to take biological facts and evolutionary history into account in making plans for our social future, but who don’t want to fall prey to the logical fallacies of biological determinism.
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