On the Use and Misuse of Darwinism in the Study of Human Behavior

Abstract

Daiwin ’s theory of evolution by natural selection answered one of the great existential questions: “Why are people?” (Dawkins, 1976). But once we know why people are, a second question immediately suggests itself: “What of it?”(Medawar, 1982). Had such tough-minded thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Johnson been apprised of Daiwin ’s discovery, says Medawar, they might well “have demanded to know what great and illuminating new truth about mankind followed from our realisation of his having evolved” (p. 191 ). This essay is a meditation on the question, “What of it?” One of the major aims of this essay is to critically analyze the following hypothesis, which many scholars believe to be entailed by the proposition that human beings are the products of natural selection: Human behavior per se can be expected to be adaptive (i.e., reproduction-maximizing), and hence a science of human behavior can be based on analyses of the reproductive consequences of human action. My critique of this hypothesis perhaps can be introduced most easily by way of an example.