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Developmental Decomposition and the Future of Human Behavioral Ecology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Philip Kitcher
Philip Kitcher*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy University of California/San Diego
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Abstract

I attempt to complement my earlier critiques of human sociobiology, by offering an account of how evolutionary ideas might legitimately be employed in the study of human social behavior. The main emphasis of the paper is the need to integrate studies of proximate mechanisms and their ontogenesis with functional/evolutionary research. Human psychological complexity makes it impossible to focus simply on specific types of human behavior and ask for their functional significance. For any of the kinds of behavior patterns that have occupied human sociobiologists, the underlying proximate mechanisms are very likely to be linked to a broad spectrum of types of behavior, and we cannot expect that natural selection will have acted directly on any individual element from this spectrum. I illustrate this general point with a specific example, considering the traditional sociobiological account of human incest-avoidance and outlining an alternative approach to the phenomena. The example is intended to show the possibility of a more rigorous and sophisticated successor to human sociobiology, which I call “human behavioral ecology”.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 96 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Ancestors of parts of this paper were presented to audiences at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania interdisciplinary conference on mind and brain, the 1986 meeting of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, the 1986 meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, the Institute for Child Development at the University of Minnesota, and the UCLA Behavioral Biology Seminar. I am grateful to many people in these audiences for their valuable comments, and, in particular, to Rob Boyd, Robert Hinde, Jerry Fodor (twice), and Kim Sterelny. Conversations and correspondence with Bill Charlesworth, Alan Sroufe, and Donald Symons have also enlightened me on many points, and I am extremely grateful to Michael Dietrich for his research assistance. Above all, I want to thank Patrick Bateson for much advice and encouragement and Lisa Hirschman for her gentle guidance through the eddies of the clinical literature on incest.

References

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