In my New Yorker article, to which David Barash has replied in these pages, I argued that his new book, Homo Mysterious, inadvertently “shows how far we still are from knowing how to talk about the evolution of the mind.”

I am disappointed, though not surprised, to see that in his eyes making such a criticism puts me in the company of the Victorian bishop’s wife who hoped that Darwin’s theories were not true. It is all too common for evolutionary theorists in psychology to regard any attack on their own work as an attack on the basic ideas Darwin stood for.

I am, however, surprised at the number of inaccurate statements in Barash’s reply. Almost every one of his concrete assertions about the contents of my article is demonstrably false.

First, he accuses me of skimming his book to find the “good parts,” like an adolescent skimming Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Thus: �…

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