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The theme of this book is "to suggest how self-conscious agency gives us goals and projects puzzling or even inexplicable in biological terms as adumbrated in neo-Darwinianism". In short, it aims to point out the limits of what can be established by the current flood of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. "What is crucially at issue here," O'Hear writes, "is not how human self-consciousness might have come about but what its significance for its possessor is once it has come about." To throw light on this he focuses on "the normativity of the mental; that is to say that in pursuing knowledge, morality and the beautiful we are led to seek goals which have nothing to do directly with survival, and which may at times militate against survival." As he points out, this normativity is not an optional extra. We cannot avoid it if we insist on thinking at all because all thought involves standards. "In having and expressing thoughts and ideals we are implicitly invoking the possibility and even at times the necessity of putting into question the deliverances of our genes or our society. To attempt to read the true or the valuable or the beautiful straight off from evolutionary facts is to excogitate a hopelessly hybrid monster."

That is surely right. And there seems little doubt that such a monster does from time to time squawk out at us from the pages of current evolutionary sages, because those who now claim to be Darwin's successors tend not to take up the stern and inconvenient part of his heritage - the profoundly conscientious caution with which he approached large questions, the obstinate humility with which he refrained from extending his thought beyond the evidence. Instead at times they joyfully inflate his ideas into an extremely bizarre ideology. O'Hear discusses well the particularly striking case of "memetics", Richard Dawkins's proposal to explain thought in terms of memes - items which supposedly constitute the units of culture and are viewed as independent "selfish" entities parasitising on our minds, so that (as Daniel Dennett puts it) the mind is "an artefact created when memes restructure a human brain so as to make it a better habitat for memes".

On the formal side, the beauty of this suggestion is supposed to be that it extends Darwinian explanation in terms of mutation and natural selection to cover the mental world as well as the physical, thus providing much the same implausible kind of sweeping formal unity which used to be offered by the Marxist dialectic. On the moral side, Dennett recommends the memetic approach as a salutary mortification to human vanity, curing us of the illusion that our own activity could make any difference to anything. But, as O'Hear has no difficulty in showing, this attempt to restate all mental events in the passive voice quickly becomes meaningless, and Dennett's examples of cases where we do know that we actually are passive merely bring out this point. The distinction between mental events to which we are passive and thoughts that we think on purpose simply recurs within the new domain, losing none of its force. As O'Hear puts it: "Minds are precisely not prisoners of memes. We might, as in advertising, be irritatingly influenced by jingles and slogans, but our irritation is the greater precisely because we know that this is not the normal case." Moreover, as O'Hear points out, Dennett is of course relying on normal standards of validity to make us accept his own reasoning, so that "if Dennett's analysis is true, we have no reason in reason to accept it". Dennett must, in that case, just be one more meme buzzing in and inviting the fly-swatter.

This point has, of course, a more general application. In so far as evolutionary theorists suppose themselves to be explaining away the need for objectivity as an aim of thought - revealing it as a mere illusion caused by past eons of natural selection - they forfeit their own claim to be listened to in the same way as behaviourists did when they argued that argument is merely a convenient technique for altering behaviour. But it is not always clear how far they do want to make this sort of claim, and much of what they say does not require it. On their less extreme claims O'Hear is conciliatory, fair and often interesting.

Mary Midgley was formerly senior lecturer in philosophy, University of Newcastle on Tyne.