Abstract
In this paper I argue the best examples of the methods in the evolutionary social sciences don’t actually resemble either of the two methods called “Adaptive Thinking” or “Reverse Engineering” described by evolutionary psychologists. Both AT and RE have significant problems. Instead, the best adaptationist work in the ESSs seems to be based on and is aiming at a different method that avoids the problems of AT and RE: it is a behavioral level method that starts with information about both the trait in question and knowledge of the EEA. I describe some examples from the literature, and suggest how a behavioral level ESS might still contribute to the discovery and understanding of human psychology. Finally, I describe some remaining problems for adaptationist reasoning of this kind.
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Notes
By “evolutionary psychologists” I mean here the so called “Santa Barbara” school of evolutionary psychology with its specific commitments to massive modularity, a Pleistocene EEA and so on. The “evolutionary social sciences” is the term I use to refer to what many philosophers call “evolutionary psychology” more broadly: a range of projects that aim to use evolutionary thinking to understand both the origins and nature of human behavior and cognition, these include evolutionary psychology proper as well as human behavioral ecology, dual inheritance theory, evolutionary behavioral economics, and so on.
There may, of course, be multiple adaptive responses to any adaptive problem posed by some set of conditions, especially where those conditions include the behaviors of other individuals.
For a discussion of the relative merits of studying behavioral strategies vs. psychological mechanisms and the role of each in evolutionary social science, see Driscoll (2004).
This appears to be a genuinely psychological level claim: I’ll return to this shortly. In this part of the project Bowles and Gintis don’t do a lot with it, and mostly concern themselves with describing the resulting behavioral strategies.
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Driscoll, C. Neither Adaptive Thinking nor Reverse Engineering: methods in the evolutionary social sciences. Biol Philos 30, 59–75 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-014-9466-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-014-9466-7