Early in the first volume of his collected papers, the evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton retells a Victorian joke. Two ladies are conversing, and one says: 'Have you heard that Mr Darwin says we are all descended from an ape?' The other replies: 'Oh, my dear - that surely cannot be true! . . . But, if it should be true, let us pray that at least it will not become generally known!' Hamilton sees this response as being as relevant today as it was then: people have 'an instant, automatic wish for both the evidence and the idea to go away' because evolutionary notions 'have the unfortunate property of being solvents of a vital societal glue'. Whereas the Victorian ladies were concerned about evolution's challenge to conventional religion, their equivalents today are worried about its impact on the egalitarian premise on which democracy is based. Perhaps, Hamilton suggests, Darwin's lesson, put simply, is that all men are not born equal. He considers the current academic enthusiasm for political correctness - an 'escape route for less able minds' - an institutionalised form of denial.

LRB 6 February 2003 | PDF Download