Author: Michael

Review by Michael A. Winkelman

Richard Doyle. Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere. In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2011. 358 pp. $35 paperback, $70 hardcover.

Wrong. He was so wrong! —Cady Heron in “Mean Girls”

Judging Darwin’s Pharmacy by its cover produces a positive initial impression. The image from the nineteenth-century painting In Fairyland is quite fitting; additionally, it is cleverly apt because it is by the Victorian artist also named Richard Doyle. Cracking the book open and reading it, however, is like experiencing a really long, bad trip. Days after putting it down, this reviewer still Read more “Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere”

Michael A. Winkelman
February 7, 2012

Dangerous Persuasions

I’m not sure a correspondence with you is something a woman of honour could permit herself. —Madame de Tourvel, to Vicomte de Valmont

Formidable! Is “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988) the best costume drama ever? Yes or no, it presents an amazing fictional demonstration—almost a primer or casebook study—of what cognitive scientists and primatologists call “Machiavellian Intelligence.” In brief, that is the idea that Read more “Dangerous Persuasions”

Book Review by Michael A. Winkelman
April 17, 2005

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (FSG, 2004)

So what’s happening on campus these days? Many people have turned to Tom Wolfe’s bestselling I Am Charlotte Simmons to find out. The picture Wolfe paints isn’t pretty, but the poor quality of the novel itself dampens his disparagement significantly. Slogging through Wolfe’s magnum opus on contemporary college life turns out to be a trying experience for all but the least discriminating reader. This reviewer finds the subject matter, academia, almost endlessly Read more “I Am Charlotte Simmons”

for Evolutionary Psychology

A Review of William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2007. $39.95, 252 pp., ISBN 978-0-674-02631-5.

by Michael A. Winkelman, Department of English, Bowling Green State University, Ohio.

Comeuppance by William Flesch seeks to explain some important aspects of fiction in light of insights from theoretical biology. Flesch proposes that humans enjoy stories because they tend to showcase altruistic behavior, something that certainly exists but whose high costs make it unexpected or difficult to rationalize. Put another way, though individuals possess selfish genes, which accounts for nepotism or parental sacrifices, they also exhibit a natural disposition to Read more “Whence Poetic Justice?”