Helena Cronin

Helena Cronin (born 1942 ) is a British Darwinian philosopher and rationalist. She is the co-director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and the Darwin Centre at the London School of Economics. Her 1991 book, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today brought her public attention; she has published and broadcast widely since.

Life and work

Cronin attended Henrietta Barnett School in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

She is co-editor of Darwinism Today, a series of short books in evolutionary theory. She writes popular articles for newspapers such as The Guardian. She is a Patron of Humanists UK.

She ran a series of seminars, "effectively a salon at the London School of Economics specialising in the implications of Darwinian theory for humans" according to Times Higher Education. The seminars featured Richard Dawkins, David Haig, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley among others.

Cronin was acknowledged in the preface to the second edition of 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins.

Reception

Cronin's strong rationalistic views have brought her prominence in areas including sexual selection, Darwinism, the relative abilities of males and females, and gay rights. These are discussed in turn below. Ridley notes that there are two reasons for sex differences like the peacock's train, and that Cronin explains them through the debate of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin proposed female choice: female aesthetics drive male displays. Wallace both "ignored Darwin's problem" (ornamentation) and "denied Darwin's solution" (female choice rather than natural selection). In Ridley's opinion, "The subtlest and most original insights in "The Ant and the Peacock" concern differences between Darwin's ideas and modern ideas." Ridley writes that Cronin "moves easily between the Victorians and ourselves", not entirely avoiding the danger of anachronism, "the historian's mortal sin", that this movement creates. He suspects that the book will therefore "appeal more to philosophically minded readers than to historians", but states that "luckily" evolution is "one of the more philosophical of scientific ideas", and Wallace and Darwin can survive being treated as our contemporaries.

Nils K. Oeijord, in his book Why Gould was Wrong, noted that Stephen Jay Gould Gould's criticism of Cronin was misplaced, not least since Cronin was just presenting "the new consensus in evolutionary biology—the gene-selectionist approach", which contradicted Gould's position. Oeijord noted that two well-known figures in the philosophy of evolution, John Maynard Smith and Daniel Dennett, had defended Cronin against Gould's charges.

Darwinism

The English evolutionary anthropologist Camilla Power, in A reply to Helena Cronin, described Cronin as "authoress of 'The Ant and the Peacock' [who] was pontificating .. on how Darwinian theory should inform Blairite social policy...this is a Darwinian's response". Power sets out to "nail a few myths".