Evolutionary Theory and Philosophy

In this book, I investigate issues of adaptationism to delineate the scope and limit of the explanation by natural selection, by examining its use in such cases as the explanation of human behaviors in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, or in the controversy over gene selectionism. The conclusions to be drawn are two-fold: First, although appealing to natural selection is a powerful thinking, there are naturally unavoidable limits. Especially, when it comes to human behavioral or psychological traits, the application of adaptationist reasoning must be subject to even more constraints than in the case of non-human traits, for then a variety of non-biological factors are involved the existence of which we may not even recognize. Second, adaptationist reasoning is closely tied to a "gene's eye" view of evolution. It is unfounded, however, to assume that any selection processes in nature are caused by some properties of alleles of certain adaptive values. Therefore, we need toonce make a conceptual separation between adaptationism and gene selectionism and then probe the possibility of explanations that are not reduced exclusively to the "gene's eye" view.