Lewis Wolpert: 'No one working in the social sciences can ignore the role of our genetic inheritance'

I recently had lunch with John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the University of California at Santa Barbara. They have become famous for their contributions to evolutionary psychology, and have revolutionised thinking in the social sciences by introducing new concepts as to how one should think about culture. In the older, standard concept of the social sciences, people were born with a mind that was in effect a blank slate, which then became filled in by culture. Tooby and Cosmides have largely made such models obsolete.

When still at school, Cosmides wanted to know what were good ways for people to live happily and without conflict. She realised that to answer her question, she had to understand human nature – what actually determined human behaviour. She read BF Skinner's behaviourist novel Walden Two, but was not persuaded that all behaviour was due to learned conditioning. He was, she decided, just wrong. She could not believe, for example, that mothering someone else's child would elicit the same emotions and behaviour as mothering one's own. So she went to Harvard to try to understand human nature.

She was struck by how similar people were, so concluded that perhaps biology was playing a big role. She also decided that it was as important to understand normal behaviour as abnormal. But what should she focus on? She also did not feel at ease with neurobiology – not the right level, she thought, with all those cells and synapses.

She was much more ease with ethology – animal behaviour – which she had learnt about from reading the Oxford zoologist Konrad Lorenz, and was influenced in her thinking about human behaviour by Robert Ardrey's Territorial Imperative. She still could not decide what to do and so made an appointment to consult EO Wilson, the Harvard zoologist. Fortunately he was five minutes late, so she read the outline of his new book on sociobiology on his notice board, and she became at once committed to studying biology.

Wilson's book Sociobiology had an enormous intellectual impact when published in the Seventies. It evoked considerable hostility. There were demonstrations against it, with scientists such as Stephen Gould speaking against it because he claimed, wrongly, that it suggested that human behaviour might be determined by our genes. Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene was similarly ridiculed at such meetings. But a key figure at the university who gave support to such thinking, and perhaps was not given the great credit he deserved, was Irven DeVore, who was interested in both primate and human behaviour. He held "simian" seminars at his home, which brought together those interested in the biology and evolution of human behaviour.

At these seminars was John Tooby, who had started as a physicist but was studying psychology and anthropology. At that time it was not possible for him to do a PhD on evolutionary psychology, as psychologists were opposed to evolution being applied to humans. Cosmides found him both irritating and pleasing, as he always made the comment she was about to make. They were married in 1979.

Her PhD was on the psychological mechanisms that cause social exchange, and the ability to detect those who cheat. She found that while subjects were not very good at logical problems that had no social content, they were very much better when the same problem involved social exchange, and they were good at detecting cheating. She concluded that there was a specialised ability for this built into the human brain. Her interest in co-operation even led to a paper on the conflict between genes in the egg itself; for example, between the genes in the cell nucleus, and those in the mitochondria that are the energy factory for the cell.

Together with Tooby, she has brought about a genuine revolution in cognitive psychology by showing that the human brain is not initially a blank sheet, but has specialised functions dedicated to particular adaptive activities. These are, in principle, like those of the desert ant, which has a specialised nervous system that enables it to find its way directly back to its home after it has wandered off looking for food. It should now be very difficult for anyone working in the social sciences to ignore this work, or how important our genetic inheritance is in shaping our lives and cultures.

Lewis Wolpert is professor of biology as applied to medicine at University College London