In The Hard Problem, set in England in the first decade of the new century, his similarly old-fashioned heroine is beset instead by the self-confidence of her neo-Darwinian colleagues. The left is intellectually nugatory, and all the energy resides with the disciples of the late biologist William D. Hamilton, such as Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley. Stoppard explains that the play grew out of an argument he started with Dawkins over his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
Indeed, the two young men the heroine strives to out-argue sound rather like my pals at the classic blog Gene Expression circa 2005. In his “Author’s Note,” Stoppard cites Imperial College evolutionary biologist Armand Marie Leroi, an expert on human genetic variety, as his chief guide to the science. (Here’s Razib’s interview with Dr. Leroi at GNXP ten years ago.)
This surprisingly short play references a remarkable number of concepts utilized by 21st-century right-of-center intellectuals—the story opens, for example, with the heroine’s tutor explaining the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the standard introduction to theories of how altruism could evolve.
Other longtime fascinations of the Edge.org crowd featured in The Hard Problem are the replication crisis in psychology, the larger implications of the financial crisis of 2008, and adoption. The nature-nurture implications of adoption are of natural interest to Stoppard, who only discovered in his 50s that he wasn’t roughly a quarter Jewish as he had assumed, but was entirely Jewish.
