Evolution's Eye-CL

Evolution's everywhere these days, and some of its most strenuous public explainers like to make claims about genes and human nature: often they say they can show how the first shape the second. Oyama (The Ontogeny of Information) wants to complicate that picture. Her subtle and sometimes abstruse study of recent concepts in biology and social science--concepts like ""evolution,"" ""development,"" ""phenotype,"" ""construction"" and ""competition""--aims to displace models of selfish genes with models of competing and interacting processes: these processes, working at every level, can improve our explanations of how populations and (especially) people grow, differ and change. Oyama's developmental systems theory draws on the newish field of ""science studies"" (in which philosophers and sociologists look at the assumptions and logic of scientific disciplines), on biologists' critiques of their field (among them Richard Lewontin and Evelyn Fox Keller) and on bits of literary theory. A professor of psychology at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the CUNY Graduate Center, Oyama writes for a highbrow audience, though one spread across many disciplines. Her prose can sound too academic or drably general: she hopes, for example, ""to adopt a thoroughgoing interactive constructivism with respect to both developmental and evolutionary processes."" What she means is that she wants to think--and to get us to think--about how culture, environment and genetic programming are constantly ""talking to"" one another, and how it's their interaction that creates us. It's a worthy goal, and one her book should advance. Illus. (May)