/lit/ - Literature

>>12773419
EP from the outset went far beyond hyper-adaptionism. If There was a scale of how adaptionist somebody was and you had - say - Gould as a 2, Dawkins as an 8 and C.G. Williams as a 9, then "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer" by Cosimides and Tooby, which served as the template for the discipline would rate as roughly 20 billion.

The thing even the most hardcore adaptionist biologists always accept, is that it makes no sense to look at traits without undestanding their primitive states. Phylogeny matters to adaptionist thinking, because only by looking at the plesiomorphy can you compare the apomorphy and argue which advantage it confers. But to EP that is not part of what they call adaptionism. Their adaptionism is contrasted to the "phylogenetic approach", which considers common descent and thus plesiomorphic traits. It's incaple even of telling just so stories on how the ancestors of humans lost their tails, because it is incapble of considering that we had tailed ancestors. It won't tell you a just-so story on how we went from no opposable thumb, to an opposable thumb, because it considers the fact that we had ancestors without an opposable thumb to be irrelevant to any questions regarding modern thumbs.