Human Nature and the Limits of Science by John Dupré

Author:John Dupré [Dupré, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0199248060

end p.97

of mechanisms that ensure that a machine works even when some unwanted factor threatens to interfere. In some cases social rules achieve conformity less easily, by imposing sanctions or occasionally rewards. Rules are successful, presumably, to the extent that they provide individuals with compelling motivations for acting in conformity with them; and perhaps most successful to the extent that such conformity is seen as something that should be done simply because there is a rule.

3. Cultural Change: Anagenetic Evolution7

A few hundred years ago the ancestors of contemporary Europeans lived very different lives from those enjoyed by their descendants today. Few today could distinguish between the holding of land by free-alms or sokage, sergeantry or knight-service, villein tenure or freehold, matters of enormous importance to the thirteenth-century Englishman. Such things were important, of course, because they determined how people could behave, how they spent their lives. Nowadays there are no villeins, knights, or, in the relevant sense, sergeants, and a good deal of the behaviour characteristic of these roles no longer exists either. Now people drive on motorways or travel by plane, surf the internet, eat TV dinners, and engage in countless other activities unheard of even a hundred years ago. Brains that grow up surfing the internet, it is safe to say, turn out significantly different from those that developed in preparation for a life of villeinage.

The point of these banalities is just to indicate that only someone tightly in the grip of a theory could refrain from drawing the obvious conclusion that humans have been evolving rapidly over the last several centuries. The relevant theory in question is of course the theory that only to the extent that changes are recorded in the genetic endowment of the species should they be counted as true evolutionary changes. But I hope that earlier chapters have undermined the motivations for this gene-centred view. In the absence of such a

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