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Hello, there are those who believe that 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 and indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.

They're in you and me. They created us body and mind and their

preservation is the ultimate rationale of our existence. They go by the name of

genes and we are their survival machines.

Potent ideas like this have helped give birth to a new discipline called evolutionary

psychology.

It claims that all of human behaviour can be understood in terms of a single compulsion can be traced back to it.

We must sexually reproduce so that our genes will live on.

How has this idea developed and what can it tell us about how we behave and above all can it be trusted.

With me to discuss the summits or pitfalls of evolutionary psychology is the philosopher Janet

Radcliffe Richards, author of a new book, Human Nature After Darwin. We also have an evolutionary

psychologist with us, Nicholas Humphrey, author of A History of the Mind.

And we're joined by Professor Stephen Rose's book of essays, edited with his wife

Hillary Rose is called alas poor Darwin arguments

against evolutionary psychology which indicate the way that he's of a different

...