Abstract

Evolutionary theory is a tempting field for non-biologists, partly, I suppose, because it seems to impinge on such large questions about human and/or animal nature, “the meaning of life” and such, and for philosophers because of its tantalizing conceptual structure. Darwinian evolutionary theory in particular—the orthodoxy of the present and recurrently the most prestigious theory on and off throughout the past century—Darwinian evolutionary theory seems both remarkably simple and persistent in its basic principles, and yet remarkably flexible, not to say ambiguous, in some of its fundamental concepts. Accuse it of determinism, it turns teleological, accuse it of basing a most improbable history on chance, it tells of selection’s creative powers, creative in the full sense, like a composer or a poet. But accuse it of anthropomorphism, it turns hard-nosed and deterministic or even “merely” statistical. What material could be better suited to what my colleagues in Leeds used to call “concept-cracking”?