In my NRO Summer Books selections, I said I probably wouldn’t be opening any of the recent batch of hate-God books, since I already knew what I would find, but that if I did venture into them I would go for Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, just because I so much admire Dawkins books on evolutionary biology. Well, biologist David Sloan Wilson has changed my mind. In a long piece in Skeptic magazine, he argues convincingly that Dawkins is all wet on the evolutionary background to religious belief. This isn’t as surprising as it seems–that an evolutionary biologist should be all wet on evolutionary psychology, I mean. The two groups have a long history–David Sloan Wilson gives some of it in the piece–of not seeing eye to eye. Evolutionary biologists seek to explain why this or that feature of living things–typically structural (why does this mammal have a long neck?)–arose through natural selection. They use the fossil record to buttress their explanations. Evolutionary psychologists seek to extend the explanatory realm into behavior. This is a much tougher area in which to get supporting evidence for your theories. Behavior doesn’t leave fossils. (Except, sort of, in the genome–but we are only beginning to scratch the surface of that.) The evol-psych people have always been open to Stephen Jay Gould’s taunt that they engage in “just-so stories”–plausible little narratives to explain this or that behavior, for which there isn’t, and can’t even in principle be be, any evidence. In fact, as Wilson’s article makes clear, there are good evol-psych methodologies that go way beyond “just-so stories,” and deserve respect. Wilson himself has applied them to religious belief, with interesting results. Dawkins (he says) is pretty much ignorant of all this work, and in The God Delusion has just let his own prejudices off the leash, without a proper inquiry into the evol-psych side of things.