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Can Sociobiology Adapt to Cultural Selection?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Sandra D. Mitchell
Sandra D. Mitchell*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Extract

Sociobiology is, in the words of Philip Kitcher (1985), a motley comprised of a variety of arguments defending biological explanations of behavior. Kitcher has shown that sociobiology offers no new theory to the corpus of evolutionary biology but, rather consists of the application of the neo-Darwinian synthesis to social behavior. In fact, one major line of attack on sociobiology (cf. Gould and Lewontin 1979, and Gould 1986) is to identify it as an instance of the worst kind of adaptationism found in evolutionary biology generally. In order to avoid the evil of just-so stories, this strategy aims to eliminate completely explanations by adaptation (including the sociobiological ones) from biology. I believe that explanations by adaptation can be legitimate provided certain necessary conditions are met. After laying out those conditions, I will address the question of the adequacy of explanations offered by William Durham (1976, 1978,1979,1982) in defense of human sociobiology.

Type
Part III. Sociobiology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1986 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1986 , 1986 , pp. 87 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

'I would like to thank James Boster, Nancy Cartwright, Tim Maudlin, Merrileee Salmon and George Schumm for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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