Adaptationism is the view that all or most traits are optimal adaptations. The critics (most notably Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould) contend that the adaptationsists (John Maynard Smith, W.D. Hamilton and Richard Dawkins being frequent examples) have over-emphasized the power of natural selection to have shape individual traits to an evolutionary optimum, and ignored the role of developmental constraints, and other factors to explain extant morphological and behavioural traits.

Adaptationists are accused by their critics of using ad-hoc "Just So Stories" to make their theories unfalsifiable. The critics, in turn, have often been accused of attacking straw men, rather than the actual views of supposed adaptationists. Many putative adaptationists do not dispute that the alternative explanations advanced by the critics may be of relevance, and suggest that the controversy over the relative importance of various factors would be a quiet debate over subtleties if the critics were less prone to caricaturing their opponents. This is not to say that dyed-in-the-wool do not exist. The debate has a political subtext, with the Marxist-leaning Lewontin and Gould accusing sociobiologists of employing adaptationist fallacies in supporting socially regressive views of biological determinism. The history of this debate, and others related to it, are covered in detail by Cronin (1992) and Segerstråle (2000).

References

• Cronin, H. (1992). The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gould, S.J. & Lewontin, R.C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society London B. 205: 581—598.
• Lewontin, R.C. 1979. Sociobiology as an adaptationist program. Behavioral Science 24: 5—14.
• Lewontin, R.C. 1991. Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. New York: Harper Collins
• Maynard Smith, J. (1988). Did Darwin get it right? Essays on games, sex and evolution London:Penguin books. ISBN 0140230130.
• Orzack, S.H. & Sober, E.R., eds. (2001). Adaptationism and Optimality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Segerstråle, U. 2000. Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sober, E. (1998) Six Sayings about Adaptationism in D. Hull and M. Ruse (eds) The Philosophy of Biology Oxford: Oxford University Press.

See also

• Adaptation
• Gene-centered view of evolution
• Spandrel

External links

• ^*
• Tooby & Cosmides comments on Maynard Smith's New York Review of Books piece on Gould et al.

evolutionary biology