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Saturday, Nov 22, 2008
On the Evolutionary Psychology mailing list, dangerous ideas thrive -- without the usual online rancor and hatred.
Aug 30, 2000 | Are blacks programmed by their genes to be promiscuous? Can we read any morality off our genes at all? Is religion pernicious nonsense? The field of evolutionary psychology attempts to illuminate such inquiries into human nature with the insights of modern Darwinism. It raises questions that have a prickly, intense and scary quality. To get inside them is like putting on a hair shirt with explosives strapped to it. Even in sober academic journals, the discussion can rapidly become a screaming match. On the Internet, home of the flame, any attempt at a reasonable discussion seems completely futile.
Even respectable academic online mailing lists often melt down into reciprocal accusations of Nazism and censorship, as did the mailing list of the Human Biology and Evolution Society, the trade body for evolutionary psychologists, five years ago.
And if the Nazis don't get you, the nutters will. I once watched a list on Darwinism disintegrate into a series of arguments about Karl Popper's philosophy of science, a subject that can make otherwise civilized people argue like fundamentalists who think they have identified the antichrist.
Given the volatility of online debate, the existence, then, of the Evolutionary Psychology mailing list seems like a miracle. All these unspeakable things and more are debated there, yet it is actually possible to learn new things -- and the arguments, however ruthless, are always polite. The list has nearly 2,000 subscribers, among them some of the most distinguished names in the field. Richard Dawkins was on for a while; Dan Dennett lurks there; and so does anthropologist Dan Sperber.
Active participants include Nick Humphrey, one of the originators of the "Machiavellian" theory of human intelligence -- namely, that consciousness is basically a trick to let us manipulate other conscious beings by imagining how the world looks from their point of view -- and Paul Gross, one of the authors of "Higher Superstition." But there are also well-known racist scientists such as J. Philippe Rushton, of the University of Western Ontario, and Glayde Whitney, who wrote a preface to one of David Duke's books. And on the other wing there are old New Lefties like philosopher Val Dusek, who witnessed firsthand the incident in which protesters poured water on E.O. Wilson during a debate between Wilson and his fellow evolutionary theoretician, Stephen Jay Gould.
Of course, actual dousing is quite out of date now. With modern technology you can pour vitriol on people instead. The Internet is the natural home of denunciations so furious that they could never be printed in magazines. Yet, somehow, on the Evolutionary Psychology list everyone is civil and everyone keeps reading -- a testament to the nimble moderation imposed by one man, Ian Pitchford, founder and editor of the list. In the unlikeliest of locations he has created one of the few places online that are truly inimical to pompous blowhards.
Pitchford has achieved this by being much more than your ordinary moderator. In effect, he has stopped simply being the maintainer of a mailing list and has become the editor of a new kind of magazine. The Evolutionary Psychology list combines the quick, cheap distribution of the Internet with all the advantages that real magazines traditionally have over mailing lists: a really diverse readership and an editor who sits right next to a large wastepaper basket.
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