I don't think I've ever seen a scientist actually describe a theory as 'stupid' before in print. PW: Your refutation of the rape thesis in the book struck me. Nor is there any evidence for a disproportionate amount of babies born from men who go around raping women as opposed to those who don't. And there's no evidence of rape among the great apes, either there's a lot of indiscriminate sexual behavior, particularly in bonobos, but it doesn't qualify as rape. Well, there's no evidence that it used to be, and you can sort of get at that because we do have records of how hunter-gatherer tribes behave, which would be a sort of signal perhaps of how humans in the Pleistocene era behaved. NE: Yeah, what I call the 'Pleistocene cop-out.' Like rape some people will argue that it's not acceptable to do it now, but it used to be. PW: When critics point out that these behaviors don't appear to serve any evolutionary function, one common defense is to say, 'Well, not now.' There's no gene for religion that anybody's found yet. But nobody's done the work to actually link up particular genes with these items of behavior. Wilson was one of the guys who really developed that, in Consilience, saying that, sure, you have culture, but underneath all that, the most fundamental aspect driving everything is genes. PW: We've spent a lot of time and money trying to link just about every aspect of human behavior to genes. I think it was distorted, as I say in the book, but natural. And genes are very much a part of the real progress in biological understanding, so the impulse to translate that into an evolutionary context was natural. NE: I think a lot of it was a reaction to, or reflection of, the molecular revolution of Watson and Crick. PW: You discuss how the media have embraced the idea of genetic determinism, popularizing it for many readers.

Doitnow gene