There's a pretty steady effluence these days of works of sub-Darwinian evolutionary psychology, books that propound a startling, and often startlingly simple new theory to explain, and perhaps to explain away, every and any aspect of human nature. A recent example is The Eternal Child: An Explosive New Theory of Human Origins and Behaviour by Clive Bromhall (Ebury, £17.99). Bromhall was planning to write a book 'about the evolution of human homosexuality', he tells us, having made it clear he's married with children, but it turned into a book about the evolution of human everything. 'From breasts to religion, and big brains to standing upright, there is a single thread that links all human biology together': we're apes who never grow up. The evidence for this is all the things we apparently share with infant chimpanzees, such as a common ancestor a very long time ago, not much body hair, a relatively large head, and kissing. God's simply the parent we never grow out of the need for: if only Kierkegaard had known.

LRB 23 January 2003 | PDF Download