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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 swarming huge coloners, safe inside giant lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by torturous and indirect routes,

manipulating it by remote control. They're in you and me. They created us a 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 you in behavior can be understood in terms of a single compulsion, can be traced back to it.

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 Ratcliffe 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, who's book of essays, edited with his wife Hilary Rose, is called Alas Poor Darwin,

arguments against evolutionary psychology, which indicate the way that he's of a different persuasion.

Nicholas Humphrey, I'm given a very broad definition of evolutionary psychology. Can you identify its core beliefs?

That's what you say. The ideas developed since that point. I think they've developed by not starting at that point, which you read out from Richard Dawkins.

That's one particular position about an important component of human nature.

But evolutionary psychology starts, not by talking about genes, but by talking about human nature, about the possibility and the fact as we believe the fact that there is such a thing as human nature,

which is pretty universal to human beings, disposes them to behave in many similar ways in similar circumstances,

and in ways which are constrained by the ways that they've evolved. Human nature came into being because to caricature it,

because our ancestors, with those particular natures, were more successful than the competition in reproducing.

But the ways by which you come to be successful in reproducing, of course, extraordinary elaborate and subtle.

It's not just a matter of having sex. You have to find a mate, you have to survive to mating age, you have to be able to look after your children,

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