The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
How to Carry Out the Adaptationist Program?
Abstract
1. The adaptationist program attempts to determine what selective advantages have contributed to the shaping of the phenotype. 2. Evolutionary change falls far short of being a perfect optimization process. Stochastic processes and other constraints upon selection prevent the achievement of perfect adaptedness. Evolutionists must pay more attention to these constraints than they have in the past. However, as already stressed by Darwin (1859, p. 201) there is no selective premium on perfect adaptation. 3. Even though the adaptationist program has been occasionally misapplied, particularly in an uncontrolled reductionist manner, its heuristic power justifies its continued adoption under appropriate safeguards. The application of the adaptationist program has led to important discoveries in many branches of biology.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Mayr, E. (1963) · doi:10.4159/harvard.9780674865327 · Cited by 10,175
Self-citationThe spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme
Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979) · Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rspb.1979.0086 · Cited by 7,770 · cited 3×
“Gould and Lewontin (1979) and Lewontin (1979) have enumerated such constraints and so have I (Mayr 1982) based in part on independent analysis.”
BackgroundMethod
Cited by
Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures
Buss, D. M. (1989) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x00023992 · Cited by 4,484
Natural language and natural selection
Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x00081061 · Cited by 1,330
The adaptive nature of human categorization.
Anderson, J. R. (1991) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.98.3.409 · Cited by 1,069
Coincidence, coevolution, or causation? DNA content, cellsize, and the C‐value enigma
GREGORY, T. R. (2001) · Biological Reviews · doi:10.1111/j.1469-185x.2000.tb00059.x · Cited by 730
On the Possibility of Constructive Neutral Evolution
Stoltzfus, A. (1999) · Journal of Molecular Evolution · doi:10.1007/pl00006540 · Cited by 533
Metadata
- Authors
- Mayr, E.
- Venue
- The American Naturalist
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1983-03
- Volume
- 121
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 324-334
- ISSN
- 0003-0147 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5323
- OpenAlex
- W2007886868
- Cited by
- 684
- References
- 2
- FWCI
- 9.09
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How to Carry Out the Adaptationist Program? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/284064
- The paper
- Mayr, E. (1983). How to Carry Out the Adaptationist Program? The American Naturalist. https://doi.org/10.1086/284064
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
