Having only a basic understanding of Darwinism and a vague understanding of Genetics and related science in general, I read books like The Origins of Virtue and Birth of the Mind more from a philosophical perspective on mind and identity. I wish to take the former to task for many things, whilst the latter constitutes the closest thing to my understanding of God and the Universe.
The Origins of Virtue is none-the-less interesting, presenting examples from game theory (the famous prisoner's dilemma "tournaments"), historical anecdotes concerning altruism etc. A particularly undesirable chapter concerns Australia's aboriginal people, stating firstly that they had nothing resembling "law" when settlers arrived. This view, inherently racist, was well discredited with the Mabo case (years before the book was published). The central tenet of the book is the old "we are only altruistic through selfishness" argument, utilising the desire for genes to propagate themselves as its main advocate. I think, philosophically, this is a redundant argument. Socialogically, I think it is a stupid argument. Any talk of virtue has to relegate itself to our own preconceived ideas of what it means to say something is selfless and how this impacts our outlook on the world. Once this talk is buried in "selfish genes", we are reverting to radical determinism, where talk of virtue means nothing. Once we take this line, ideas of individuality and agency become meaningless, which in turn makes any talk of ethics meaningless. The fact is, we choose to do things for a variety of reasons, and an overriding "good-intention" is still something that should be valid as a philosophy. As an upshot of this: I wonder why books like this bother publishing themselves.
The Birth of the Mind, on the other hand, I found clearly expressed and very fascinating. The book traces the development of the mind to the (chance) mutation of dna and this makes so much sense as to make obselete any discussion of an eternal soul, a creator, or anything such. I take the absurdist stance that we can can still have meaning in our lives in this framework - because our minds have developed to a point where we want to make sense of the world, giving that yearning its own importance.
So, both these titles obviously stem from the Darwin work, each looking into different aspects of existence based on this relatively new way of looking at the human condition.
