JB: Darwinism remains a big subject in the United Kingdom. Books on Darwin are often at the top of bestseller lists while the same books published in the United States may receive scant review attention and come and go with little notice. Is this because Darwin is a home-town boy?

JONES: There's elements of that. Darwin was on the 20-pound note. You saw his face every day. He is a home-town boy; he's an iconic figure in Britain. And he's really fed into everybody, not only as a wonderful scientist, but as somebody having an exciting and interesting life. Any school kid can tell you what the Beagle voyage was. And he comes across as such an attractive character, which helps. That's why so much of the best science writing is about evolution. Where are the Goulds or Pinkers when it comes to the chemistry of chlorine? I'm sure it's just as interesting, but as far as I know there is no King of Chlorine around whom you could weave the tale.

JB: What do you think about the emerging field of evolutionary psychology?

JONES: I find myself a bit depressed by the whole thing — a lot of it is the bland saying the banal. Of course, certain aspects of human behavior descend with modification from the past. About half of all genes are switched on in the brain and its foolish to say that those genes are different from all others, they can't evolve. It's clear that we descend from social primates and it's no accident that the worse punishment second to the death penalty is solitary confinement. If we descended from orangutans, which are rather solitary, the worst punishment would be to force someone to give a dinner party. So there is an evolutionary psychology in that sense, obviously.

But the problem is obviousness disguised as insight. There's plenty of good work on, say, the rate at which stepmothers kill their children; that's respectable social science. But I have to say I am not very surprised to find that mothers love their children more than stepmothers do. But evolutionary psychologists leap on the tables and shout we've made this fantastic discovery, equivalent to the double helix — mothers love their children! I say, what? And men are more violent than women. Well, I kind of knew that already. It's true, but it's not very profound.