Abstract
While there is certainly no scientific debate left on whether or not humans evolved, there is still considerable heat over how to make use of that fact. Technically, evolution is defined as changes in population gene frequencies. To the theoretical population biologists who promote this definition, the primary factors of interest are genes and their transmission generation-to-generation. A certain amount of lip service is given to the environment and to development, but these nods to propriety are quickly forgotten. Phenotypic development and interaction with the environment are treated as secondary (Brandon & Antonovics, 1996; Endler, 1986). Yet in the human sciences, development and interaction is all that we can really observe. Proponents of the “gene’s-eye” view of evolution anthropomorphize “the gene” and ask how selfish genes made their organisms behave so as to maximize their genetic success (Dawkins, 1976). The phenotype, or observable characteristics of the organism, is assumed to simply mirror the genotype (Grafen, 1984). These strategies work well enough with fruit flies and flour beetles, but the apparent reduction to lower levels of analysis creates major obstacles for evolutionary perspectives on human behavior. The selfish gene is a heuristic device that substitutes a fiction for the complexities of interaction with environment; genes are imbued with the very characteristics that psychologists try to explain.
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Caporael, L. (2003). Repeated Assembly. In: Scher, S.J., Rauscher, F. (eds) Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0267-8_4
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