
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Evolutionary Psychology. Richard Dawkins redefined human nature in 1976, when he wrote in The Selfish Gene: “They swarm in huge colonies, safe inside giant lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rational of our existence…they go by the name of genes and we are their survival machines”. Potent ideas like this have given birth to a new discipline, ‘Evolutionary Psychology’: It claims that all of human behaviour can be understood in terms of a single compulsion - we must sexually reproduce so that our genes will live on. How has this idea developed, what can it tell us of how we behave, and can it be trusted? With Janet Radcliffe Richards, Reader in Bioethics, University College, London; Nicholas Humphrey, Professor of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York; Professor Steven Rose, Professor of Physic, Open University.
By BBC Radio 44.6
705705 ratings
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Evolutionary Psychology. Richard Dawkins redefined human nature in 1976, when he wrote in The Selfish Gene: “They swarm in huge colonies, safe inside giant lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rational of our existence…they go by the name of genes and we are their survival machines”. Potent ideas like this have given birth to a new discipline, ‘Evolutionary Psychology’: It claims that all of human behaviour can be understood in terms of a single compulsion - we must sexually reproduce so that our genes will live on. How has this idea developed, what can it tell us of how we behave, and can it be trusted? With Janet Radcliffe Richards, Reader in Bioethics, University College, London; Nicholas Humphrey, Professor of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York; Professor Steven Rose, Professor of Physic, Open University.

7,716 Listeners

889 Listeners

1,063 Listeners

5,537 Listeners

1,800 Listeners

3,251 Listeners

1,879 Listeners

868 Listeners

607 Listeners

285 Listeners

1,768 Listeners

1,035 Listeners

1,925 Listeners

498 Listeners

425 Listeners

308 Listeners

760 Listeners

233 Listeners

363 Listeners

2,734 Listeners

3,168 Listeners

3,392 Listeners

1,003 Listeners