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Post your questions, comments and outrages here to share and discuss with other members. Happy reading!

Lookin forward to reading this!

Been reading this a bit slowly as I've been busy, nearly done.

I really wanted to like this, and I was sympathetic to the impulse behind it. I respect Midgely as a pain in the ass thorn in the side of reductionists and determinists various stripes in the biological sciences.

But I felt that quite a bit of the book was flat. I think she picks good targets, but the criticisms are unconvincing.

Firstly I don't recognise what she means by 'hollow materialism'. That even the most 'scientifically minded... materialists' don't describe money or nationalism in terms of 'neurons, or indeed, quarks' does not mean they are dualists, as she says, nor is it a challenge to the even the crudest materialism. That they are conceptual representations of material 'things' is enough for them not to violate materialism. It is fine to say that their importance is arbitrary, but not non material. Nations are material things, albeit arbitrary lines on maps, but those lines are made real when we treat them as such.

Her attack on adaptationism could have been better. There's already been plenty (Gould, Lewontin) who've shot pan-adaptationism down. But I get the sense that in an attempt to recuperate Darwin's later and slightly lesser known works, she lets him off the hook. Like, because she's trying to make some novel point about how 20th century reductive biologists 'stray' from the 'real' Darwin it's ok to overlook his adaptationism in parts?

The synopsis on the back gave me the impression that there would be a lot of conceptual criticism of current pop-neuroscience. However there's very little of this despite it being alluded to. There are better books on that topic; Neuromania: On the Limits of Brain Science, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, and Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience

Lastly, politically and conceptually inclined biologists have been correctly wary of discussion about human nature, especially when they are justfying existing social prejudices in the name of supposed idealised 'human nature'. However, Midgely often talks of 'our nature' without, I think, clarifying what that would be, and without recourse to much evidence either way.

I'll need to think about it a wee bit more when I'm done, but some of it felt out of place, like it should have been in her previous book, Solitary Self.

Pretty much agree with everything you said!