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Evolutionary psychologists are society's new prophets, says CHRISTIANITY TODAY's editor at large, Philip Yancey, in the following article condensed from BOOKS & CULTURE, a sister publication of CT. While their message would reduce us to mere survival machines, Yancey points out, their logic contains fatal flaws. Yancey's most recent books are Church: Why Bother? and What's So Amazing About Grace? (Zondervan).

The new science of evolutionary psychology attempts to explain all human thought and behavior as the unguided result of natural selection. As products of blind evolution, say these thinkers, we deceive ourselves by searching for any teleology other than that scripted in our DNA. We must look down, not up: to nature, not its Creator.

The hubris of this new science is breathtaking. Predicts Robert Trivers of Harvard, "Sooner or later, political science, law, economics, psychology, psychiatry and anthropology will all be branches of sociobiology." He might have added ethics to the list.

Writers on evolutionary psychology are talented and entertaining, and they fill their works with vivid descriptions of birds, bees, and chimpanzees. They explain courtship displays, infidelity, maternal instincts, gossip, and social organization in arresting ways. Newsmagazines like Time hire these writers to interpret gang behavior in the inner cities or sexual indiscretions in the capital city, and the results are so winsome that evolutionary psychologists have become the new cosmologists, helping us make sense of ourselves and our role in the universe.

Philosophers are just now beginning to scrutinize the assumptions of evolutionary psychology, and I suspect they will have a field day with its epistemology. I am more concerned with its implications for what I have called "the crisis of unmorality." As if in direct fulfillment of the apostle Paul's predictions in Romans 1, scientists have relocated our primary source for morality and meaning in the beasts.

1. Evolutionary psychology relies on one principle—that of the selfish gene—to decipher behavior. I do what I do, always, to advance the likelihood of my genetic material perpetuating itself. Even if an individual act does not benefit me personally, it does benefit the "gene pool" I am contributing to. Evolutionary theorists herald it as the most important single advance in their theory since Darwin.

By their own admission, the new scientists propose a wholly deterministic understanding of the human species. As Richard Dawkins puts it, "We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it."

Critics propose many anecdotal exceptions to the selfish-gene theory. What about gay people, or childless couples, who do not plan to perpetuate their genes—how to explain their behavior? Or consider Mother Teresa, who early in her life committed to a vow of chastity. On what basis can we account for such altruistic behavior? As if explaining algebra to a child, the evolutionary psychologists take up such thorny problems one by one and explicate them in terms of the selfish gene.

Like all monistic explanations of human behavior, evolutionary psychology has both the virtue and the defect of simplicity. When Robertson McQuilkin, who left a college presidency to stay by his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife (CT, Feb. 5, 1995, p. 32), contends that he stands by his wife out of his love for her and because of his commitment to biblical standards of fidelity—why, of course he would argue that. He makes his living as a Christian writer and speaker, does he not? He is finding a way to propagate the ideas that have served him so well.

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October 5 1998, Vol. 42, No. 11