Times have changed!\u00a0 The behavioral sciences have done a full intellectual double back flip.\u00a0 Evolutionary psychology, once anathema to all right thinkers in the field in its various earlier incarnations as ethology, the new biology, sociobiology, etc., has finally banished the blank slate obscurantists and gained acceptance, even among the most\u00a0pious leftists in academia.\u00a0 So complete has been the paradigm shift among the orthodox gentry of the field that the stunning recognition that there actually is such a thing as human nature has appeared in – a diet book!<\/p>\n
This is no ordinary diet book, mind you.\u00a0 It’s a diet book, entitled The\u00a0Six-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0whose authors, Michael and Mary Eades, write and co-produce Lo Carb CookwoRx<\/a><\/em>, a nationally televised show on PBS, a staunch bastion of the Blank Slate<\/a> no more than 15 years ago<\/a>.\u00a0 Allow me to quote a few lines:<\/p>\n According to (Naomi) Wolf and others of her opinion, there is no universal standard for human beauty.\u00a0 Were we not programmed by advertisers and the entertainment industry, we would find a fat man or woman just as attractive and desirable as a thin one.\u00a0 We disagree.\u00a0 Years of serious scientific study, across numerous disciplines, prove otherwise.\u00a0 Our attraction to a pretty face and a flat belly is in our genes and is an atavistic throwback to a time when such features represented health and the ability to reproduce.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Our ideas of beauty are not driven by Madison Avenue, but by the microchip in our DNA, placed there by Mother Nature using her most indispensable tool:\u00a0 natural selection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n About forty years ago researchers started applying the laws of natural selection, not just to physical adaptations, but to mental adaptations as well.\u00a0 Evolutionary psychologists realized that animals born with instinctive fears – for example, fear of falling or fear of snakes or fear of the dark – had a greater likelihood of surviving and passing on those inbred fears to their progeny.\u00a0 In the same way, desires were genetically hardwired.\u00a0 Those who developed the instinct to search for mates using looks and\/or body size and shape as indicators of good reproductive health were more likely to populate the world with their offspring who carried those same genes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (!!)<\/p>\n It’s really stunning to read stuff like this, in a diet book no less, if you’ve been following developments in the field that is now known as Evolutionary Psychology since the day that Robert Ardrey<\/a> published African Genesis<\/a>.\u00a0 It comes complete with an allusion to the quaint historical mythology today’s evolutionary psychologists have created to restore some semblance of academic gravitas to the field, epitomized by Steven Pinker’s<\/a> The Blank Slate<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 According to this mythology, referred to in the third quote above, the universe was once\u00a0void and without form, ruled by the chaos of the Blank Slate.\u00a0 Then E. O. Wilson<\/a>\u00a0said, “Let there be light!”\u00a0and, lo, there was light!\u00a0 And E. O. Wilson saw the light, that it was good, and he called it Sociobiology<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 And “just so,” dear reader, Evolutionary Psychology emerged from the outer darkness like Athena from the mind of Zeus.\u00a0 That’s what the authors mean with their reference to “40 years ago.”\u00a0 I’ve got news for them.\u00a0 They’ll find it in the pages of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals<\/em>, or Carveth Read’s The Origin of Man and his Superstitions<\/a>, or in the essays of Sir Arthur Keith<\/a>, or in the books of the “mere playwright,” Robert Ardrey, or in the pages of On Aggression<\/em> by Konrad Lorenz.<\/p>\n You see, Drs. Eades, human nature isn’t really a discovery of the last 40 years at all.\u00a0 Indeed, it’s not out of the question that a “Happy Few<\/a>” speculated about its existence, even before the time of Darwin!<\/p>\n