Even where the feeling that arouses joy is localised, joy is not: if for example we rejoice in the smell of a flower. – Joy is manifested in facial expression, in behaviour. (But we do not say that we are joyful in our faces.)

“But I do have a real feeling of joy!” Yes, when you are glad you really are glad. And of course joy is not joyful behaviour, nor yet a feeling around the corners of the mouth and the eyes.

“But surely joy designates an inward thing.” No. “Joy” designates nothing at all. Neither any inward or any outward thing.

1. I should have said that, confined to its own sphere, pure physical determinism is not only unobjectionable, like the Mendel-to-molecular-biology reduction, or indeed the reduction (as appropriate) of chemistry to physics, but is obviously essential for the natural sciences to subsist at all. (Ignore the fact that at quantum level one cannot speak of determinism, only of overwhelming probability.) It’s physicalism, not physics, that is surely misconceived. There seems to be some kind of philosophical error or category mistake involved. It may well be that, in ‘the view from nowhere’ (to use Thomas Nagel’s expression), everything is ultimately reducible to physics; but we have no idea *how* that could be so, and, if my suspicion is right, in the nature of things we never can and therefore never will have any such idea. For us, the view from nowhere is applicable, and valid, only within natural science. Once our conscious selves and doings enter the field of scrutiny, we have left the world of passive objects behind, and with it strict determinism, and have entered the world of active subjects, i.e. of free will. (The unintended aggregate consequences of many individuals’ active and independent choices may qualify for ‘scientific’ study, as in economics, but we can leave all that on one side.) We necessarily adopt the view from somewhere, which is where we ourselves cannot but stand. This does not mean we can’t (or shouldn’t) *try* to be objective about human things; but it does mean we can instantly confute any would-be scientific ‘law’ concerning human behaviour, or prediction derived from such a ‘law’, by doing precisely the opposite, even if only out of sheer perversity, like the anti-hero of Dostoyevsky’s *Notes from Underground*.

2. I did not mean, in my own person, to say anything so sweeping about Nietzsche as Ray Tallis evidently thinks I did. What I meant is that Nietzsche might be thought vulnerable to a *Nietzschean* reading of him, just as Marxism is to a Marxist and Freudianism to a Freudian (and perhaps I didn’t make those two latter points clear enough either). In no case am I saying that such an interpretation would necessarily be mine, or right (though it might in the Marxist case), not least because, like many other things, a *tu quoque* rejoinder puts all those philosophies and consequently their respective interpretative approaches in question. *If* (say) Christianity can be reduced to ‘slave morality’ (and I am not concerned with whether it can), then it doesn’t seem too unfair (though it might be mistaken) similarly to reduce the *Übermensch*, together with Nietzsche’s entire ‘health’-based ethics (or anti-ethics), to a kind of compensatory Adlerian fantasy entertained by a sick, prematurely retired academic, such as poor Nietzsche had become. Incidentally, James Joyce is implicitly satirical at Nietzsche’s expense along just these lines, in his portrait of the lonely misogynist misfit Duffy, who takes refuge in his lofty biologico-ethical superiority when faced with a stranger’s need and her subsequent suicide (‘A Painful Case’, in *Dubliners*). And, in less specific, more knockabout fashion, there is Buck Mulligan in *Ulysses*: ‘He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra.’

3. If we are not to say ‘the lapwing is enticing a predator away from its nest’, as being too anthropomorphic (in that, as I myself suggested, the creature does not actually know what it is doing, even though it actually *is* doing that), and if, as Tallis quite rightly says, a word like ‘courtship’ is far too promiscuously applied across both human and animal behaviour, at just what point, and in what context, do we decide that a word common to both behaviours is permissible? It is either absurd or a jocular figurative usage to say ‘the lions are dining on the antelope’, but quite reasonable to speak of human beings dining on this or that (though not on a Mars bar or a bag of chips), just as it is reasonable to say ‘the lions are eating the antelope’. Whoever dines, is also eating, by definition; but it would be absurd, again, to describe a dinner party as (say) ‘eating behaviour’ or even ‘alimentation’. If a lion can be said, quite properly, to ‘eat’ (despite not ‘knowing’ that that is what it is doing), why cannot a lapwing be said to entice a predator away from its nest?

The problem is that the definition of humanity is either too crude or unjustified by morals, failing to be applied to every situation. Recall that Tallis said we should treat disabled persons as humans because they had the abilities that we do and that we could in turn lose our own abilities. Essentially, he is stating that temporal ownership of these abilities is enough to claim the distinction of “human.” Suppose someone is born in such a state that they are unable to rationalize or interpret the world around them. Unlike the situation I proposed in my last comment, the person is born without ever having the abilities that Tallis cherishes as belonging to humans only. Why can we still call such people humans? Some people would say that these people have the “potential” to be human beings, so we should treat them as such. However, this definition falls apart when considering that science will presumably become sophisticated enough that we will be able to bioengineer other animals to the point where “potential to be a human” is meaningless. Even if “potential” withstood these challenges, it is too vague to determine which qualities one would need to be human.

We can expand on this point further with a few more theoretical examples. As we become more and more technologically advanced, we may eventually be able to make perfect clones of ourselves, with all the abilities and biological processes that Tallis sees as distinctly human. Does this clone of myself have human properties? How will I be able to distinguish him from someone who had a real mother and father? Will they have less rights because of their origin? What if I make a robot that has all of these abilities and biological functions? Is he a human as well? Until the problem of assigning the correct criteria for human singularity is solved, we will not be able to consider such questions. Any attempt to answer them must consider all possible cases, and it must be morally justified rather than appearing to be anthropocentric for reasons that fall apart under close scrutiny.

My initial reaction to Prof. Tallis’s post was one of bemused sympathy. I was bemused because the evolutionary psychology he attacked struck me as being somewhat of a strawman creation born out of the requirements of polemic, albeit elegant polemic. And I was sympathetic because, when it comes to understanding something like literature or music, it’s not clear to me that the Real and True evolutionary psychology has so far done much better than the strawman. As far as I can tell, to the extent that so-called literary Darwinism has been able to address the analysis of individual texts, it owes more to literary criticism than to evolutionary psychology, which it deploys as a sophisticated alternative to folk psychological accounts of the actions and motives of literary characters.

But I don’t want to pursue that line of polemic here and now, I’ve done enough of that both here (in the discussion of Joseph Carroll’s piece), over at The Valve in various posts, and in a long-essay review of The Literary Animal.

I want to make some remarks prompted by Prof. Easterlin’s desire to rescue EP from being identified with the Cosmides to Tooby to Pinker Swiss Army knife school. Of course. Still, it’s my impression that that’s the school that, for better or worse, put the term “evolutionary psychology” on the map. And I’ve always wondered what was so “evolutionary” about that school since its phylogenetic depth and breadth is limited to the recent emergence of a single species, us. What about the traditional study comparative psychology or of comparative neuroanatomy and physiology? For example, Paul MacLean’s work in those areas goes back to the middle of the 20th century and has even given pop psychology the notion of one’s “lizard brain.”

In a different direction, we’ve got Eric Lenneberg’s 1967 classic, The Biological Foundations of Language, a synthesizing review with chapters on experimental and observational evidence, morphology and physiology of the speech organs, neuropsychology, ontogeny, and phylogeny. All that stuff back in the ancient times! Two years after that John Bowlby published Attachment, the first of three volumes on the relationship between infants and mothers. As Prof. Easterlin knows, Bowlby was trained as a psychoanalyst who looked to avian and primate ethology and to the “systems” psychology of Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (Plans the the Structure of Behavior, 1960) and others in reformulating psychoanalytic object relations theory on more contemporary intellectual grounds. Bowlby also gave us the notion of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA).

And so forth and so on.

Interest in the biological foundations of human behavior has been around for a long time, earlier than my examples, which are themselves earlier than Cosmides and Tooby and, for that matter, E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology. And, sure, we can easily add Steven Mithen and Donald Merlin into the mix if we wish. We can make “evolutionary psychology” a rather grand catch-all term for a lot of work that emerged in various intellectual genealogies.

But we might also want to ask just why the phrase “evolutionary psychology” – the EP meme? – took off when it did and why it is associated with particularly reductive attempts understand human behavior. Yes, perhaps some suggestive new ideas or models here and there. But we might also want to think about intellectual branding and marketing both within in the academy and in the popular arena. There we encounter the desire for easy answers to difficult questions. And that puts an end to inquiry.

Dr Polivnen’s analogy between evolutionary and historical understanding does not seem to me to hold up. It is least persuasive in her own area of literary studies. Whereas Irish history may help one to understand A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the catastrophe of WWI may cast light on the difference approaches of Mrs Gaskell and Virginia Woolf to the novel, I do not think the events of 5,000,000 years ago or even of 10,000 years ago would help us to engage better with the works of Joyce, Gaskell or Woolf. And even history would cast very little light on the utterly singular progression of Joyce from A Portrait to Finnegan’s Wake. To generalise (and perhaps illustrate the polemic mode that Dr Polivnen has reservations over!), the application of evolutionary theory to literature (and art in generalise) fails to make helpful distinctions between one work of art and another or to fasten our attention on the unique characteristics of the work, wherein its genius lies. Evolutionary explanation takes a sledgehammer to miss a nut; or looks at works of art through the ultimate wrong-ended telescope. Someone once declared that the great poet and thinker Paul Valéry was ‘just another petit-bourgeois intellectual’ and received the response that not every petit bourgeois was like Paul Valéry. An analogous point could be made about evolutionary categorisations of artists, their works of art, and their consumers.

I am very grateful to Professor Grant for his wide-ranging response, though I am not too sure that he and I would agree about Nietzsche! Where we are in total agreement is over his central point; namely that we need to see EP in a broader context of physicalism. The idea that ‘You are (at bottom) an animal’ is indissolubly connected with the notion that ‘You are your brain’: Darwinitis and Brain Rot go together. The link is made through the fact that, since your brain is an organ that evolved to serve certain biological purposes, you too must be in thrall to the needs that shaped the brain and so fashioned your drives, motives etc. This is the logic that waves through on the nod the reduction of those familiar and valued things that Robert talks about to ‘something else, usually something either “worse”…or purely mechanical, outside the realm of value altogether’.

The case against mind-brain or self-brain identity theories is compelling (I have set it out in Tallis passim) but the arguments have a hard time making headway for the reason that Wittgenstein pointed out: ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’ – an observation that may connect with Robert’s suggestion that meme theory itself may be a meme. I am not too sure that I would accept that – because it has none of the characteristics of a meme apart from a widespread tendency to be adopted – though Professor Blackmore’s theory does raise unanswerable questions about its own epistemological status.

One final point. Professor Grant observes, correctly, that ‘outward resemblances between human and animal behaviours may be utterly misleading’. There is a general principle here, set out very clearly by the primatologist Daniel Povinelli – a brilliant scourge of Disneyfication of beasts – in his Folk Physics for Apes. I would recommend all EP-philes to read Chapter 2, ‘Escaping the argument by analogy’. Here Povinelli exposes ‘the logical weakness in assuming that the similarity in the natural behaviour of humans and chimpanzees implies a comparable similarity in the mental states that attend and generate that behaviour’ . Part of the difficulty of escaping analogical thinking is that there has been a prior Disneyfication of the behaviour in question. Only by describing a lapwing’s behaviour as ‘enticing a predator away from its nest’ could e begin to imagine that it is analogous to the self-sacrifice of a mother who perhaps passes up on treats for herself in order to save up for a Christmas present for her children. The whole process of linguistic gap-closing becomes particularly effective because it is iterative: think of the way the word ‘courtship’ shuttles back and forth between humans and non-human animals. No wonder some people are persuaded that a person slaving over a poem addressed to the loved one is like a beast prowling round a potential mate prior to the ‘ten second jump-and-shriek’ of chimp sex.

Firstly, there is the claim that I have misrepresented EP. Well, I began by describing how it has been received within academe and, in particular, its popular reception – one, incidentally, in which many biologists and others who should know better, collude. The suggestion that I should have set aside the brand of EP (Swiss army knife model) that Professor Easterlin does not approve of is unacceptably choosy. And I think Professor Blackmore (see her earlier response) would be justifiably upset at the implication that her detailed (if wrong-headed) work on memes were dismissed as ‘trendy and controversial’ and as not echt EP. But this response does illustrate an experience that one often has when one opposes a particular intellectual fashion. Those who attack Marxism are told that they are attacking a misrepresentation of Marxism. Ditto Freudianism. Ditto post-Structuralism, as I know from personal experience. Michael Grant, in his very generous and welcome response to my piece, referred to my critique of Post-Saussurean literary theory and the encroachment of Derrida and Lacan on the humanities. This critique (set out in two books) went unanswered except where individuals denied that Lacan and Derrida had ever said the very things that had provoked such interest in their work in the first place. I therefore wrote a third book (Theorrhoea and After) which looked critically at the claim that ‘He [Lacan, Derrida et al] ‘never said that’. Of course, he did say that. And so have many Evolutionary Psychologists been saying the things that I attribute to them. That is why their work has aroused such interest outside of their own discipline. Memes and genes are widely discussed in EP. And, by the way, the idea that there could be a ‘gene for’ complex behaviours is a belief that still lives on despite its bankruptcy, as Matt Ridley brilliantly discusses in Nature via Nurture. Or have I been dreaming that people have suggested that a single gene mutation FOXP2 may have had an important role in the emergence of language and culture?

More importantly, Professor Easterlin’s response illustrates the need to distinguish between three activities:

The first is work supporting the claim that our humanity has biological roots. This is standard Darwinian business: examining the evolutionary path to H. sapiens etc. It acknowledges that we are organisms as well as people and the properties of the former are appropriate subjects for evolutionary thought. I (of course) have no quarrel with this. I am a doctor and a biomedical scientist after all!
The second activity is to think about the profound differences between ourselves and all other living creatures. This perfectly legitimate work has two aspects.
One is what we might call philosophical anthropology: an attempt to capture at the deepest and most general level what it is that sets us off from other beasts, a difference that goes deeper than, say, the difference between one mammal and another. In The Explicit Animal. A Defence of Human Consciousness (1991, 1999) I identified explicitness – that underpins rules, norms, languages, institutions and the various other features of the landscape of the human world – as the key difference. More recently, in the trilogy published 2003-2005, I focussed on what I have called ‘propositional awareness’, which encompasses both the Existential Intuition (‘That I am…’) and the sense ‘That x [is the case]’. For example, all animals feel warm; only one animal feels ‘I am warm’ and ‘That it is warm’. The animal in question is the human animal. ‘Thatter’ is as important as matter in the human world. It has no place in the non-human biosphere.
ii) The other is an attempt to construct an evidence-based account of how we came to be different in this profound way. I say ‘evidence-based’ because we are all averse to Just So stories (including, in my case, Kipling’s originals!). There is some excellent work in this area, such as the kind of ‘cognitive archaeology’ that Professor Easterlin referred to. It must, however, be rooted in an understanding of the profound and global nature of our differences from other living creatures – and this will make us aware of the difficulty of the task. EP consistently under-estimates the scale and depth of our differences and hence over-estimates the relevance of biology to explaining much of our behaviour.

The third activity is the one that I object to and which, pace Professor Easterlin’s protests to the contrary, is a major strand in EP and has had a huge influence elsewhere – witness the plague of neuro-evolutionary ‘disciplines’ that have increasingly encroached on the territory of the humanities; for example, literary criticism, aesthetics, the law, economics, history, social science, theology etc etc etc. This activity is based on the premise that, although we have moved on from our biological roots, we haven’t really left them behind, they are the true explanation of what we do, so that a biology-based evolutionary approach to our behaviour is appropriate.
The fallacy behind this way of thinking is beautifully exposed by Howard Robinson in his contribution: the idea that if the behaviour of a later species S2 evolves from that of an earlier species S1, then the explanation of the behaviour of S2 will be the same as the explanation of the behaviour of S1. The fallacy is even more evident when the species in question are ‘emotionally modern’ (to use Sara Hrdy’s phrase) hominids such as ourselves, since our behaviour takes places in a sphere – a world, a place of collectivised consciousness – that is not matched elsewhere in nature. To try to understand human history or politics or literature or even the minutiae of everyday individual life in terms of the behaviour of our biological ancestors is rather like applying a stethoscope to an individual seed or a heap of seeds and hoping to hear the wind rustling through the leaves.

William Kornarhens raises interesting points about the ethical consequences of defining what is unique about human beings. If to be human is to have such and such capacities, then an individual who lacks them would not seem to be human. Professor Kornarhens is concerned that by setting out the entry criteria for the human club in this way, might justify denying personhood, and even rights, to someone who is biologically H. sapiens. This is no mere theoretical worry, as the history of 20th century tells us. My own view is that someone who is biologically human but lacks many of the characteristics that distinguish the human race – for example my future self when severely demented or when in coma – should be treated as a human being because his/her predicament is one that I or my loved ones might face at any time; and that devaluing individuals who are not quite like ourselves but belong to our species, devalues all of us.

Professor Kornarhens’ other point, that we are sometimes not entirely aware of the reasons we do things, or we may be deceived as to the reasons for our actions, demonstrates only that we are usually rational in our behaviour but not always so. The fact remains that pretty well everything I will do today, I will do for the reason I state to myself. For example, I do all the very many things that it is necessary for me to board a train to London for the advertised reason – to get to London. The fact that I sometimes rationalise my actions – that is to say find a better, more reasonable, more altruistic reason for them than the one that actually motivates my action – is itself a testimony to the extent to which we mobilise reasons to make sense of our lives. No other form of living matter does this.

What is more, even our most irrational actions require a good deal of applied reason for us to enact them. When I practised medicine, many patients came to me with irrational fears of illnesses of various sorts. In order to get to me, at the right place and the right time, required multiple chains of reason-based actions: going to their family doctor in the first place, arranging for child care to cover their appointment, making sure the car had petrol etc. In short, even the arias of irrationality drew upon a background recitative of rational behaviour. Or, to take a larger-scale example, wars require quartermasters as well as front-line troops, pay slips as well as machine guns, being busy packing rucksacks as well as engaging in blood-curdling charges. Our human lives are woven out of wall-to-wall propositional awareness informing rational and irrational actions. They are utterly unlike the lives of animals.

It is when things, particularly mental or cultural things (rather than variant pea shapes), are explained *away* that we suspect intellectual legerdemain and an underlying (though often quite conscious) ideological motivation. Something familiar and (characteristically) valued, such as altruism, love, friendship, art, beauty or our appreciation of these things, is alleged to be ‘really’ something else, usually something either ‘worse’ (lust, self-interest, greed, status hunger, sexual display) or, as in physicalism, purely mechanical, outside the realm of value altogether. Let us take psycho-physicalism as the simplest, least invidious illustration. Here the phenomena of self-consciousness are reduced to something not only not conscious, but purely physical, e.g. the mind to the brain, or thoughts to neural processes.

This seems impossible. You cannot *experience* your self-consciousness *as* the neurone- or brain-states which (undoubtedly) accompany it and (allegedly) generate it. The one is mental, and, to exist at all, *must* be subjectively experienced; the others are physical, exist independently of our attention, and can *only* be observed from the outside. Moreover, the causal sequence is not exclusively, and perhaps not even, from the physical to the mental. My mental acts, even though they have simultaneous electro-chemical correlates, set in train, or *cause* – which is to say, I myself cause – further events both mental and physical, so there is no reason to regard physical states as somehow ‘prior’ (except as being a *sine qua non*).

If brain-events, being physical, are determined, that does not mean that the corresponding mental events are not ‘free’. They are *experienced as* free; and that is all that self-consciousness and free will *mean*, inhabiting and generating as they do a whole interdependent, self-subsistent categorical world of phenomenal experience (morality, law, responsibility, culture, value, etc.) which is not plausibly reducible to anything outside itself, even though it may depend on it. It seems as though self-consciousness, since it can never *grasp itself* in terms of its own (notionally causal) explanations, were somehow logically destined always to overshoot them, and to revert to the inexplicable, uncaused autonomy of the first person case.

Less extreme kinds of reduction, such as EP, invite the same general critique. I don’t think, with Howard Robinson, that EP explanations necessarily lead us down a slippery slope to protozoan behaviour, though they might if they began from apes. Tallis is surely right that, despite the obvious continuities (which permit and encourage inter-species sympathy), there is also a fundamental, unbridgeable and essentially logical gulf between humans and other animals, even the other primates, and that it is due to our uniquely human attribute of *self*-consciousness (as opposed to simple consciousness). But we are not so genetically distant (or even very distant in time) from hunter-gatherer *homo sapiens* as not to see that, for what little it may be worth, men’s (on average) superior strength and hand-eye co-ordination or women’s superior multi-tasking skills and olfactory memory (which makes them the best wine-tasters) may derive from traits originally advantageous to survival on the savannah, and further developed there. On the other hand, we may be so close to primitive *homo sapiens* that our similarities, though interesting, may not even fall within the scope of EP, strictly construed.

Some peripheral points: traditional Judaeo-Christian religion regards us at at once created (i.e. determined) by God and as self-determined (endowed by him with free will, and thus morally accountable). Even Richard Dawkins sees our deliberative choice (i.e. free will) as a distinctive genetic endowment, which marks us off from the other animals, and so to speak ‘hard-wires’ us for freedom. (Another zoologist, Aristotle, said much the same.)

Tallis is right that outward resemblances between human and animal behaviours may be utterly misleading. A lapwing’s enticing a predator away from its nest and a mother’s self-sacrifice for her children may look near-identical, but they are not, even though they have a similar function. The lapwing neither knows what it is doing nor can help doing it.

Finally, most reductionism, particularly of the ‘unmasking’ sort, is vulnerable to its own brand of reduction. Marxism can be seen as a gigantic myth of legitimation on the part, not of those who hold power, but of those who seek it. The unconscious roots (if any) of psychoanalysis, with its mechanical, organ-grinding view of sex, will not be flattering to that discipline. Nietzsche’s quasi-biological fantasy-ideal of the *Übermensch* is just what might be expected of a lonely invalid professor in a Swiss boarding-house. With that said, however, it would surely be preposterous to see Dawkins’s beautifully written works as a means to the survival of his own genes, though their sales will no doubt have helped out with the school fees. On the other hand, to judge by its virus-like spread, what is the theory of memes, not to say neo-Darwinism as a whole, but a mega-meme?

*Pace* Susan Blackmore, I don’t think Tallis has shot himself in the foot. He has shot EP and related explanations in the head, where (to say the least) it hurts.

I also think it is worth noting that Darwinism does not necessarily discount human singularity altogether, as Tallis seems to imply. It is true that many people believe that Darwinism and natural selection account for actions that are important for survival and reproductive success. The main point is that the choices that influence our survival and passing on of our genes are easily perceived as being a result of Darwinism. However, we are not limited by these influences, or at least not completely. We can make choices, and therefore we are people. There are two potential problems with this claim. The first problem is that Darwinism can explain our choices merely because they have direct influence on our survival. Then you may ask, what about the choices that are not influencing survival? Darwinism does not deal with these choices because these choices do not directly affect our capability to survive and reproduce. We can choose not to sleep with someone, but this decision does not necessarily go against the spread of genes, since there is always a later time that we can participate in sexual reproduction with someone else. We can choose to risk our lives, but we are still doing our best to survive while we rescue someone else out of a burning building.

The second potential problem with free will as a distinct feature of humans is that we do not always make decisions for the reasons we use to explain our choices. In 2006, Johansson and others used “choice blindness” in a study that asked people to pick the photo of the female face that was more attractive to them, and then they were asked why they chose that photo. For three out of the twelve times this was done for each person, the questioner used slight of hand to show the person the photo that they did not pick, and he asked the participants why they chose that photo. Only 26% of them were able to tell they had been shown the wrong photo. For the people unable to perceive the deception, there was no evidence that the people had difficulty coming up with reasons for a decision they didn’t make. So the ability to choose does not necessarily mean that we are as aware of the reasons for the decisions as we think we are. This example serves to illustrate how Tallis over-estimates the amount of control humans typically exert over themselves.

Discussion and video of the Johansson study can be found elsewhere on the OTH Forum: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2009/04/john-doris-do-you-know-what-you%E2%80%99re-doing/

The latter sort of evolutionary psychology includes the work of cognitive psychologists like Merlin Donald, who theorizes in great detail the evolutionary emergence of extended mind and consciousness, and thus the distinction between human mind and primate episodic mind. Likewise, Steven Mithen’s cognitive archaeology, and his theory of the emergence of cognitive flexibility, provide a great deal of insight into how human culture has emerged within an evolutionary framework. As Laland and Brown point out, none of this domain-general approach to EP is incompatible with the domain-specific model, and Tallis might find it interesting, if he would read it. But he is doing the fashionable thing, picking only one or two of the most trendy and controversial items (memetics, waist-hip ratios), and not taking a serious look at the overall picture.