Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene by Niles Eldredge

From the Publisher

A major refutation of the almighty status of genes in evolution and human behavior.Over the last thirty years, many scientists have come to insist that our behavior is governed by our genes—above all when it comes to sex, which, we are told, is how genes perpetuate themselves. Not so, argues evolutionary biologist Niles Eldredge in this powerful book. Sex certainly seems to us more complicated than a matter of our DNA struggling to survive, and that's because it is. Eldredge directly confronts those who would cast us as puppets of biological imperatives rooted deep in our hunter-gatherer past. Their models, he points out, are based on lower forms of life. In humans, there is an intricate interplay between meeting our needs for day-to-day survival, sex, and reproduction ("the human triangle")—further complicated by cultural forces (customs, laws) that routinely override selfish-gene behavior. Authoritative and delightfully combative, Why We Do It challenges us to rethink the assumptions of today's science in the important task of understanding ourselves.

Author Biography: Niles Eldredge is a paleontologist and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and the author of many books on evolutionary theory. He lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

The New York Times - Robert J. Richards

In Why We Do It, the eminent paleontologist Niles Eldredge, of the American Museum of Natural History, takes up the problem. His goal in this accessible book, however, is not so much to solve the puzzle as to discover the purpose of life, which for him is not sex. He takes his stand against scientists who adhere to the theory of the selfish gene and, more generally, the doctrines of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. They (prominently, Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson) maintain that most of life's activities are ultimately aimed at procuring a sex partner for the propagation of one's genes.

Publishers Weekly

As the title promises, this is all about sex, but not the way you might think. Eldredge (The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism, etc.), a paleontologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History, believes that sociobiologists like Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson are dead wrong in their explanation of life as a mechanism by which "selfish genes" try to propagate and ensure their own survival. Explaining that life as we know it combines two drives, one economic and one reproductive, Eldredge writes that "the drive to eat and simply stay alive" is as fundamental as the drive to reproduce. In fact, he argues, the very fact that we've evolved to have sex, a "horribly inefficient way of passing genes along," seems to indicate that there's more at play in our sex lives than the machinations of selfish genes. Eldredge persuasively describes sex itself as having been "decoupled" from reproduction and bound up with the economic side of human life (sex for "fun, profit, and power," as he puts it). While at moments it can be a bit difficult to wrap one's mind around his argument, Eldredge has thankfully picked up at least one thing from the sociobiologists: their clear and friendly prose style (among other things, the book contains perhaps the most accessible overview available of the history of evolutionary biology). Eldredge doesn't offer as simple an answer to his eponymous question as those against whom he is arguing, and his insightful thesis that genes alone do not govern human behavior is bound to provoke controversy in the evolutionary biology world. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0393326950
  
• ISBN-13: 9780393326956
• Format: Paperback, 269pp
• Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
• Pub. Date: June 2005
• Sales Rank: 645,432

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents