Killer Apes, Naked Apes & Just Plain Nasty People: The Misuse and Abuse of Science in Political Discourse

Perry (emeritus, anthropology, St. Lawrence Univ.) is perhaps best known for a textbook on anthropology and the book "Race" and Racism , in which he aimed to dismantle the concept of race. Here, Perry attempts to discredit the concept of biological determinism (BT) in evolutionary psychology: the idea that behavioral characteristics—especially those shared across cultures—are more or less hard-coded into our natures from adaptations shaped by the environment of our Pleistocene ancestors. According to the author, biological determinism is the intellectual descendant of social Darwinism, a pernicious ideology embraced first by Gilded Age social conservatives that uses respectable-sounding scientific jargon to justify white privilege, sexism, and elitism. This conflation of BT with political discourse is the chief problem with Perry's argument. To be sure, the morally bankrupt eugenics movement of the last century did claim scientific foundation. Any reader of modern evolutionary psychology will, however, not find the rightist apologia that Perry suggests is so rampant in the literature. In fact, at least one writer has maintained that accepting biological determinism does not necessitate accepting a fixed human culture in the future. See a much better criticism of the concept in Paul R. Ehrlich's Human Natures .