The second part of the master’s thesis on science and religion at Durham University (2015) describes the scientific component that I wanted to evaluate against sin, the Evolutionary Social Sciences (ESS). To write this part of the thesis, I crash-coursed Evolutionary Biology and learned everything I could about the ESS within the available time frame. This short section belies the insane amount of time and effort it took to get up to speed on these disciplines, to be able to describe and evaluate them, and to understand their history and philosophical / metaphysical commitments. Thankfully, my engagement was more from a humanities perspective rather than from a practitioner’s one.

The Evolutionary Social Sciences and Wilson’s Consilience Project

Since the 18th century, naturalists noticed that the fossil record did not cohere with a scientific reading of biblical cosmogony and posited theories of biological evolution to explain the evidence. By the 19th century, books such as Robert Chamber’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which proposed that ‘God did not separately create species and actively oversee them, but that He had created life on Earth only once […] and had let it run its vital course’, were published. [9] The hypotheses that instinct had an evolutionary function and was heritable were also implied and explored in the works on evolution and natural selection by Darwin and others in that same century. Darwin’s concept of natural selection to explain apparent design has been defined as heritable variation among organisms within a reproducing population, which, when causally connected to the differential ability to survive and reproduce, leads to differential reproduction. [10] This means that ‘over the generations, favourable variations will be preserved, multiplied, and conjoined; injurious ones will be eliminated’. [11] It was Francis Galton, Darwin’s half-cousin, and Herbert Spencer’s ideological reflections on this concept of “survival of the fittest”, referred to now as Social Darwinism, [12] that was used to ‘justify doctrines such as social conservatism, militarism, eugenics, laissez-faire economics, and unfettered capitalism’ in several nations. Arguably, the historical repercussions of this ideology turned some research fields like anthropology in America off hereditarianism to environmentalism in the early 20th century. [13] However, within biology, Gregor Mendel’s population genetics was being re-discovered and synthesized with natural selection by Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, and Julian Huxley which then reinstated the orthodoxy of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution within biology. [14] This unified framework, taking into consideration the Mendelian chromosomal theory of heredity (MCTH), asserted that ‘development is irrelevant to heredity’. This and other developments led researchers to consider adaptation the most important explanation for the selection of evolved traits from ancestral populations. [15] This then laid the groundwork for Ethology, a discipline that was committed to the exploration of innate behavioural tendencies in animals in the first half of the 20th century. [16]

Wilson’s seminal book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis continued in a similar vein to Ethology, but, ‘laid much more emphasis on the functional significance of behaviour […] at the expense of causal processes’. While still adopting optimality modelling as a means to determine adaptive behaviour, Sociobiology also imbibed and disseminated some of the revolutionary developments that were going on within evolutionary biology in the 1960s and 70s. The first of these was the movement from group selection to kin selection, largely because of George Williams’ book on adaptation and the subsequent work of William Hamilton, with its mathematically equivalent interpretations of gene selection-ism and inclusive fitness. [17] The second was Robert Triver’s concept of reciprocal altruism. [18] This later received game theoretical support from the iterated prisoner’s dilemma developed by Hamilton and Robert Axelrod in 1981 which showed that the “tit-for-tat” strategy could beat the “always defect” strategy and become evolutionarily stable in an interacting population. [19] The third related development was John Maynard Smith and George Price’s collaborative work on game theory and the search for evolutionarily stable strategies, which bolstered Hamilton’s idea of inclusive fitness. [20] The debates between “adaptationists” and “pluralists” were still present at this time, but the straw that broke the camel’s back, bringing about the “sociobiology wars”, was Wilson’s speculation on how these insights might apply to human nature and behaviour in the first and final chapter of his Sociobiology and his other book On Human Nature published three years later.

In his first chapter of Sociobiology, he writes that humans, like animals, are programmed to manifest certain behaviours and emotions to maximise the proliferation of their genes. For example, altruistic behaviours can be explained selfishly by kin selection and inclusive fitness. In his final chapter, he clarifies his position on the evolution of morality by pointing out that

ethical philosophers intuit the deontological canons of morality by consulting the emotive centers of their own hypothalamic-limbic system. […] Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the canons be deciphered.

This enables him to propose that behaviours like deception and hypocrisy are ‘neither absolute evils that virtuous men suppress to a minimum level nor residual animal traits waiting to be erased by further social evolution’, but are in fact ‘very human devices for conducting the complex daily business of social life’. Furthermore, this approach helps to account for the universal prevalence of double standards in morality between tribes’ in-groups and outgroups, manifesting as nationalism and racism in modern society. [21]

In the preface of his book On Human Nature, he argued that the purpose of the book was to show that the blank slate, or environmentalist interpretation of human nature, dominant in the humanities and social sciences of the time of its original publication, was mistaken and should be corrected by biology. [22] He devotes a chapter to each of what he calls the elementary categories of behaviour: sex, altruism, religion, and aggression, two of which, altruism and religion, concern this dissertation. Regarding altruism, he writes that ‘no sustained form of human altruism is explicitly and totally self-annihilating. Lives of the most towering heroism are paid out in the expectation of great reward, not the least of which is a belief in personal immortality’. And concerning religion, ‘an unthinking submission to the communal will remains among the most emotionally potent virtues among “good” people in the mainstream of the society’. He argues that much of the intellectual strife of his time was caused by a conflict among three mythologies: Marxism, traditional religion, and scientific materialism. The first he dismisses because it is based on a faulty understanding of human nature modelled on pure economic process and social environment, and the second he sees as unhelpfully supporting the imposition of an immutable tribalistic will on people that is no longer adaptive. [23] Only knowledge gained from a commitment to scientific materialism, he argues, can ever come and remain closest to the objective truth about human nature and so enable the human race to know how to flourish politically, economically, socially, and ecologically in their biosphere. [24]

Unsurprisingly, his ideas met with a storm of opposition. In November 1975, a group of people around Boston, including his own colleagues Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, formed the Sociobiology Study Group and attacked Sociobiology for forwarding a kind of genetic determinism that would legitimate ‘past and present social institutions such as aggression, competition, domination of women by men, defense of national territory, individualism, and the appearance of a status and wealth hierarchy’. [25] They connected his work with those of the Social Darwinists and associated the term “sociobiology” with the ‘German Sozialbiologie and the Nazi legacy’. Soon after, they teamed up with Science for the People, a national forum for left-wing activism, who had also taken up issues ‘such as the IQ controversy, the recombinant DNA debate, and the controversy over the XYY (“criminal”) gene’ and continued their attack on Wilson’s Sociobiology. Some of their criticisms, however, were off the mark. Concerning genetic determinism, Wilson and his critics were equivocating on what the term “gene” referred to. As is evident from Wilson’s work, his concept of the gene was derived from Mendelian population genetics, but his left-wing critics assumed that he was referring to Watsonian molecular genetics. Far from being a genetic determinist, he was in fact a gene-environment interactionist. He believed that ‘the biases in mental development are only biases; the influences of genes, even when very strong does not destroy free will’. He later argues that ‘by acting on culture through the epigenetic rules, the genes create and sustain the capacity for conscious choice and decision’. Furthermore, he did not see his work as a justification for conservatism and considered himself politically liberal. After the first wave of moral and political attack, which was largely rhetorical, Gould and Lewontin co-wrote their now famous “Spandrels” paper critiquing the adaptationist programme of Sociobiology from a much-needed scientific perspective. [26] They argued that by seeking an adaptationist explanation for every trait, other important factors, such as allometry, genetic linkage, pleiotropy, and developmental constraints would be ignored. [27] Consequently, adaptationists would concoct “just so” stories about the linear adaptive history of traits based on optimality models that did not meet the standards appropriate for science. [28] Wilson accepted some of these criticisms and he later adapted his discipline accordingly. However, before that happened, sociobiology had been re-branded into human behavioural ecology (HBE) by anthropologists.

These researchers, the most influential of whom was IrvenDeVore, were interested in ‘whether human beings might be able to alter their behaviour flexibly, depending on present circumstances, to maximise their own reproductive success’. This is based on the assumption that the ‘history of selection has endowed our species with a tendency to respond to the environments in which we find ourselves by weighing up the costs and benefits of adopting particular strategies’. Despite continued stalwart critique from pluralists like Gould and Lewontin, these researchers continue until today to defend the legitimacy of methodological adaptationism, optimality modelling, and the phenotypic gambit, all of which are utilized in HBE. [29] Optimality models originated in engineering and were first utilised in animal ecology by Robert McArthur. [30] When the behavioural evidence did not fit an optimality model, researchers, adopting the phenotypic gambit, would assume that there is something wrong with the model, for example, some adaptive constraint that they had not accounted for, rather than attempt to find a non-adaptive hypothesis. [31] This method has been used to predict optimal group sizes for foraging strategies among hunter-gatherer societies around the world, [32] to explain differing marriage practices, from polyandry to polygyny, precipitated by particular environmental circumstances in certain cultures, [33] and, less successfully, to account for ‘the lack of a positive correlation between wealth and number of offspring’ in post-industrial societies. It has been suggested that ‘this area of research may benefit from the inclusion of cultural processes into the models, and hence the incorporation of factors such as the presence of contraceptives and the increased opportunities for women to be financially independent’. [34] These apparent limitations in the methods of HBE anticipated Wilson and other researchers’ gene-culture co-evolutionary approach, or dual inheritance theory, created soon after the publication of Sociobiology. However, the discipline also received criticism from what is now the most visible of the ESS: evolutionary psychology.

From the middle of the 20th century, psychological states began to be largely understood in computational terms in cognitive science. [35] By the 1980s, behaviourism had been abandoned for cognition and

minds could be described in terms of information processing in which representations of the world were constructed on the basis of information from sensory inputs, while cognitive decision rules determined motor outputs. […] This led evolutionary psychologists to propose that “innate psychological mechanisms” guided decision-making.

Donald Symons, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, who collectively founded the first Center for Research in Evolutionary Psychology at Santa Barbara, argued that ‘natural selection cannot act directly on behaviour, but rather on the behavioural regulatory machinery that underpins it’. Behaviours are merely manifestations of modular, or domain-specific psychological mechanisms, and it is those mechanisms that have a discoverable evolutionary history. [36] Furthermore, they argue that ‘many human adaptations might not be currently adaptive, but rather were adaptations to a bygone world inhabited by our ancestors’. [37] This concept of the Environment of Evolutionary Adapted-ness (EEA) located in the Pleistocene is the cornerstone of evolutionary psychology and has been used to hypothesize the reasons for the output of mechanisms that cause currently maladaptive dispositions such as ‘mental illness, drug abuse, violent crime and child abuse’. [38] This approach has also been used to show how humans have evolved keen cheater detection mechanisms in social exchanges. Cosmides developed a social contract version of the Wason selection task, itself derived from Axelrod and Hamilton’s iterated prisoner’s dilemma, [39] called the “Cheater Detection” test. Her research, which earned her the AAAS Behavioural Science Research Prize, showed that subjects’ performance improved dramatically when the abstract version of the task was substituted for one that involved social contracts. [40] This strongly indicated that human minds are ‘equipped with cognitive adaptations for social exchange, of which one procedure is a psychological mechanism dedicated to looking for cheats’. [41]

However, even though evolutionary psychology has since become a thriving research programme, it is not without its critics. Some have argued that the EEA is not well defined and covers too large an evolutionary epoch to be of value. For example, many peoples in the Stone Age did not live in the African savannah, [42] and archaeologists believe that ‘Homo erectus and even Neanderthals lived completely different lives to modern hunter-gatherers’. Another critique that questions adaptive lag has noted that it is during the Holocene, not the Pleistocene, that has witnessed the greatest human population growth thus far. Kevin Laland has proposed that niche-construction theory, developed from gene-culture co-evolution, [43] which ‘lays emphasis on the fact that organisms themselves modify important components of their selective environments’, and therefore the possibility that ‘the modern world has actually been fashioned by us to suit our psychological and behavioural adaptations’, is not accounted for in this approach. [44] The gene-culture co-evolutionary method proposes a solution to this apparent shortcoming.

Gene-culture coevolution had a genesis when Wilson and Charles Lumsden, Luca Cavalli-Sfroza and Marc Feldman, and Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson published their converging work on it from the beginning to the middle of the 1980s. This new research direction was precipitated by an increasing respect for humanity’s unprecedented ability to produce and inherit culture via social learning, and the consequent need for mathematical models that could determine how cultural and genetic inheritance interact and co-evolve in human populations. [45] While Wilson’s concept of epigenetic rules translating genes into culture received unfavourable responses, probably because of his association with sociobiology, the others’ research was well received. They were all of the opinion that

the “leash” that ties culture to genes tugs both ways. The advent of culture was a precipitating evolutionary milestone, generating selection that favoured a reorganization of the human brain that left it specialized to acquire, store, and utilize cultural information. It was culture, loosely guided by genes, that allowed humans the adaptive flexibility to colonize the world.

One famous example of the successful application of this approach is the discovery of the coevolution of dairy farming and the genes for processing milk, which edged out the competing latitudinal theory of lactose tolerance and accounted for the fact that ‘there were a broad range of conditions under which the absorption allele did not spread despite a significant fitness advantage’. The most relevant advancement from this approach was the revival of group selection under the explanatory framework of cultural inheritance. Group selection had been pushed out of orthodox evolutionary biology because it was considered too weak a force to prevent selfishness from prevailing over cooperation in interacting populations and consequently could not account for the ethnographic data. However, Boyd and Richerson’s proposal and research findings on small communities in New Guinea showed that cultural group selection did have explanatory power. [46] Their work suggested that ‘a long history of cultural group selection would have created the social environment that favoured the selection of genetic predispositions for altruistic behaviour to in-group members and also hostility to outsiders, which they label “tribal instincts”’. [47]

While the co-evolutionary approach is at present the most “evolved” and mathematically minded of the ESS, it has received its share of criticism. They include the objection that culture is too complex to be ‘modelled as if composed of discrete psychological and behavioural characteristics’, and the possibility that ‘biological evolution is too slow and cultural change too capricious for their interaction to be genuinely coevolutionary’. However, Laland has been quick to come to its defence with an appealing analogy:

The human brain is also a complex and interconnected system of interacting processes. Yet this has proved no barrier to the unstinting march of neuroscience, which has made phenomenal progress in understanding brain functioning, often by employing extremely crude methods. […] Gene-culture researchers recognize that culture is an elaborate and diverse entity. Yet the fundamental lesson of science is that patient chipping away at such perplexingly intricate problems yields dividends in the long run. [48]

The above survey of the genesis and speciation of the ESS has shown their respective strength and weaknesses. Laland has pointed out that their core difference lies in their ‘different views as to how humans learn from each other’:

Are we predisposed to learn what is currently adaptive, guided by proximate motivational cues such as hunger or fear as the human behavioural ecologists maintain? Or is our brain set up to prioritize learning which was important in the past, as the evolutionary psychologists suspect? […] Or is our learning dependent partly on evolved predispositions and partly on cultural processes, as the gene-culture coevolution theorists have it? […] It is not inconceivable that all these perspectives could be correct to some degree […]. The question then turns to how frequently each finds empirical support.

Researchers from their distinct traditions do incorporate methods from the other traditions, whichever they think is more suitable for their specific project. [49] Wilson himself saw all attempts ‘to describe human behaviour as subjected to biological constraints’ to be ‘part of the same genre’ as his sociobiology. He argued that evolutionary psychology is essentially the same as sociobiology, but was consciously separated because its researchers ‘needed to get their academic credit within their own field of psychology’. [50] If the distinctions among the ESS can mostly be explained in this way – as merely limitations in the structure of the academy and little else – then constructive integration is certainly possible, as time has shown. [51]

However, even though these disciplines were making exponential progress from the 1980s, increasingly confirming the value of genetic and evolutionary approaches to interpreting and predicting human nature and behaviour, science, in general, began to receive critique from postmodern and constructivist thinkers in the 1990s in what is now known as the “science wars”. Unlike their forebears, these theorists were less interested in left-wing politics and, having imbibed ideas similar to those of Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, were more focused on ‘postmodernist theory and “standpoint” epistemologies’. For example, sociologists attempted to explain scientific knowledge from a sociological perspective, arguing that ‘scientific facts were socially constructed’ and that ‘scientific convictions could in fact be reduced to social and political interests’. As one might expect, this was met with incredulity and strong denunciation from the scientific community, perpetuating the divide and animosity between the “two cultures” detailed by Charles Percy Snow decades earlier. [52] This was the period of the publication of Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition and the Sokal hoax. Wilson himself had joined the league of pro-science activists with Gross and Levitt to speak up for the value of science. His book Consilience, wherein he argues most extensively for the unitive power of scientific knowledge to counter the contemporaneous resurgence of fundamentalist religion–reminiscent of his 1930s childhood in Alabama – and postmodern relativism, is a direct product of this zeitgeist. [53]

In Consilience, he questions the value of the kind of non-scientific thinking perpetuated by postmodern theorists within the humanities and among religious fundamentalists when he writes that

prescientific people, regardless of their innate genius, could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives.

Having been brought up in a fundamentalist Christian environment, which offered no provision for evolution, combined with his distaste for the genocidal wars and arbitrary moral commands in the Bible and his discovery of some fraudulent activity in his church, he suffered cognitive dissonance. He became a free thinker at fifteen and began to conceive of faith, and by extension, its moral precepts, as a form of maladaptive tribalism that would cause ‘unnecessary human suffering’ when imposed on people. Consequently, as part of his campaign for consilience, he wanted scientific facts to be of supreme relevance for discerning moral truths so that scientific materialism could replace traditional religion for the betterment of humanity. [54] This motivated his defence of the objectivity of an empirical moral theory based on biological knowledge which he believes is incompatible with a transcendentalist moral theory that holds that ‘moral guidelines exist outside the human mind’. [55] This latter theory he associates with the assertions of Christian theologians and some moral philosophers.

He argues that if moral philosophers of a transcendentalist bent had the opportunity to truly understand the developments in neuropsychology and evolutionary biology in the late 20th century, they would also abandon their views. This is because

religious faith are entirely material products of the mind. For more than a thousand generations they have increased the survival and reproductive success of those who conformed to tribal faiths. There was more than enough time for epigenetic rules […] to evolve that generate moral and religious sentiments.

He argues that the naturalistic fallacy is itself a fallacy because there is no “ought” without “is”, since from a naturalistic perspective, ethical precepts are ‘very unlikely to be ethereal messages outside humanity awaiting revelation, or independent truths vibrating in a non-material dimension of the mind’. With an empirical moral theory, researchers can incorporate the findings of the ESS, taking into account ‘the needs and pitfalls of human nature’ and ‘fashion a wiser and more enduring ethical consensus than has gone before’. He concludes by writing that if the human race imagines themselves ‘godlike and absolved from [their] ancient heritage’, they will continue, unbeknownst to them, to be controlled by their mammalian nature, misuse the exponentially growing power of technology to harm the biosphere, banish the rest of life, and destroy themselves. [56] Before engaging with the claims of Wilson in support of this dissertation’s thesis, it is first imperative to sketch the broad theological understanding of sin within the framework of Christian anthropology.

Endnotes:

• [9] See Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos (London: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 178, 178.
• [10] See Brandon Robert, ‘Natural Selection’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta
• [11] Ayala, Darwin,p. 57.
• [12] It is important to note that Darwin himself was a pluralist. He believed that natural selection is not the only factor in the selection of traits. The Social Darwinists were not, see Tim Lewens, ‘Cultural Evolution’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta.
• [13] ‘During the 1930s, the support for the eugenics movement, which had earlier in the century been strong in the United States, was dwindling rapidly amidst reports of escalating Nazi sterilization practices’, and by 1952, UNESCO banned biological research on human behaviour, Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth, p. 30.
• [14] See Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, p. 91.
• [15] See Ron Amundson, ‘Development and Evolution’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), pp. 257-8, 253, 257-8.
• [16] Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown, Sense and Nonsense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 42, 54-64. 17See Samir Okasha, ‘Biological Altruism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta. In support of inclusive fitness, the prisoner’s dilemma has been used to show that inter-organismal fitness enhancing behavior can also depend on donor-recipient correlation rather than merely genetic relatedness. This ‘provided a theoretical explanation for the haplo-diploid sex determination and eusociality of the social insects’, J. McKenzie Alexander, ‘Cooperation’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 418.
• [18] See Robert Trivers, ‘The evolution of reciprocal altruism’, Quarterly Review of Biology, 46 (1971). Here altruism must be understood in a biological sense as a behavior that somehow confers benefit to the actor or the actor’s genes because it is ‘defined in terms of fitness consequences, not motivating intentions’, Okasha ‘Biological Altruism’.
• [19] See Robert Axelrod, and William Hamilton, ‘The Evolution of Cooperation’, Science, 211 (1981), pp. 1393- 94; and Okasha, ‘Biological Altruism’.
• [20] Laland, Sense and Nonsense, pp. 69, 83, 85; see also Segestrale, Defenders of the Truth, p. 65.
• [21] Edward Wilson, Sociobiology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 4, 563, 553, 565; see also G. Hardin, ‘Population skeletons in the environmental closet’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 28 6 (1972); and Wilson, On Human Nature (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 92, ‘we seem able to be fully comfortable only when the remainder of humanity can be labelled as members versus non-members, kin versus nonkin, friend versus foe,’ p. 70.
• [22] See Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth, p. 16.
• [23] For example, he writes that the Roman Catholic Church ‘asserts that the primary role of sexual behavior is the insemination of wives by husbands’, while science asserts that ‘most of the pleasures of human sex constitute primary reinforcers to facilitate bonding’. He also writes that ‘Judeo-Christian morality is based on the Old Testament, written by prophets of an aggressive pastoral nation whose success was based on rapid and orderly population growth enhanced by repeated episodes of territorial conquest’. Consequently, their castigation of homosexual acts ‘seems consistent with a simplistic view of natural law when population growth is at a premium’, Wilson, On Human Nature, pp. 141, 142, 142.
• [24] Wilson, On Human Nature, pp. 97, 154, 184, 190, 190-91, 141-47,209.
• [25] ‘Sociobiology: Another Biological Determinism’, by Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People, BioScience, 26 3 (1976), p. 182. Interestingly, Noam Chomsky did not join the group. Segestrale writes that ‘in my interview with Chomsky in 1982, I asked him about his non-involvement in the sociobiology controversy. The main reason was indeed that they disagreed with the critics of Wilson, who seemed to think that it was wrong to even try to find out about the nature of human nature. For Chomsky, finding out about human nature constituted the most interesting challenge there was’, Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth, p. 205.
• [26] See Stephen Gould and RichardLewontin, ‘The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 205 (1979)
• [27] See Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth, pp. 26, 20, 294, 36,395, 36, 108.
• [28] See Peter Godfrey-Smith and Jon E. Wilkins, ‘Adaptationism’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 188.
• [29] See Steven Hecht Orzack and Patrick Forber, ‘Adaptationism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta; Driscoll, ‘Sociobiology’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• [30] See Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, ed. by J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies (Oxford: Blackwell Science,1997), p. 6.
• [31] See Catherine Driscoll, ‘On our best behaviour: optimality models in human behavioural ecology’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 40 (2009), p. 135.
• [32] See E. A Smith, ‘Inuit foraging groups: some simple models incorporating conflicts of interest, relatedness, and central place sharing’, Ethology and Sociobiology, 6 (1985)
• [33] See J. Crook J. and S. J. Crook,‘Tibetan polyandry: problems of adaptation and fitness’, in Human Reproductive Behaviour: a Darwinian Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
• [34] Laland, Sense and Nonsense, pp. 109, 115, 116, 123-24, 130, 131-32; see also K. Hill and A. M. Hurtado, Ache Life History: the Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996) 35 See Driscoll, ‘Sociobiology’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• [36] See D. M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology (London: Allyn and Bacon,1999)
• [37] Some use the term broadly to refer to the ESS in general. Tooby and Cosmides do not. This dissertation adopts Tooby and Cosmides’ definition for typological purposes, see Laland, Sense and Nonsense, p. 157.
• [38] Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews, The Complete World of Human Evolution (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), p. 225.
• [39] See P. Wason, ‘Reasoning’, in New Horizons in Psychology (London: Penguin, 1966); and Driscoll, ‘Sociobiology’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• [40] See L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, ‘Cognitive Adaptations for social exchange’, in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 163-228. 41 Laland, Sense and Nonsense, pp. 155-6, 137, 162, 134, 134, 168, 169-70.
• [42] See R. Foley, ‘The adaptive legacy of human evolution: a search for the environment of evolutionary adaptedness’, Evolutionary Anthropology, 4 (1996)
• [43] See Paul Griffiths, ‘Ethology, Sociobiology, and Evolutionary Psychology’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 409-10.
• [44] Laland, Sense and Nonsense, pp. 178, 178, 182, 144; for niche construction see also K. Sterelny, Thought in a hostile world (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003)
• [45] See Henrich, J. R. Boyd and P. J. Richerson, ‘Five Misunderstandings about Cultural Evolution’, Human Nature, 19 (2008),p. 134.
• [46] See J. Soltis, R. Boyd and P. J. Richerson, ‘Can group functional behaviors evolve by cultural group selection? An empirical test’, Current Anthropology, 36 (1995)
• [47] Laland, Sense and Nonsense, pp. 245,243, 261, 263, 266.
• [48] Laland, Sense and Nonsense, p. 271, 273.
• [49] Laland, Sense and Nonsense, pp. 314, 304; see for example Driscoll’s contemporary defense of behaviours as adaptations in Catherine Driscoll, ‘Can Behaviors be Adaptations?’, Philosophy of Science, 71 1 (2004)
• [50] F. Miele, ‘The Ionianin saturation. An interview with E. O. Wilson’, The Skeptic, 6 (1998); Segestrale, Defenders of the Truth, pp. 318, 317.
• [51] After describing the recent history of integration, Griffiths writes that ‘if this trend continues, evolutionary psychology may one day return to Tinbergen’s project of constructing a single, integrated “biology of behavior”’, Griffiths, ‘Ethology’, p. 410.
• [52] See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, 1959 Rede lecture (Cambridge University Press, 2012). ‘A conference in Durham (England) in December was arranged in the hope of bringing scientists and social scientists together. That conference’s focus on case studies, however, may have only widened the gap. The scientists present could not agree with the social scientist’s analyses’, S. Fuller, ‘Two Cultures II: Science studies goes public’, EASST Newsletter, Spring 1995.
• [53] Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth, pp. 307-10, 308, 336, 337, 309-10.
• [54] Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth, pp. 39, 38. In this respect, he differed from the British sociobiologists Dawkins and Maynard Smith, who ‘in the irregular Enlightenment quest were striving to keep science separate from moral concerns’, p. 3.
• [55] Edward Wilson, Consilience (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), pp. 50, 6, 6, 260.
• [56] Wilson, Consilience, pp. 272, 269-70,273, 273, 274, 262, 326.