How Useful Are the Concepts “Innate” and “Adaptation” for Explaining Human Development?

• Published in: Human development 2013-06, Vol.56 (3), p.141-146
• Main Author: Racine, Timothy P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic Achievement; Adaptation; Editor's Corner; Editorʼs Corner; Environment; Evolutionary biology; Humanism; Resistance (Psychology); Sampling; Social Cognition; Theory
• ISSN: 0018-716X; 1423-0054
• DOI: 10.1159/000350925

Adaptationist thinking has played an important role in the life sciences, especially since the neo-Darwinian modern synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics that occurred in the 1930s. Adaptationist approaches focus on what a phenotype is for by reasoning about what particular adaptive problem it might have solved in an ancestral environment. This in turn leads to hypotheses regarding the manner in which the phenotype in question may have enhanced reproductive success. In the past 20 years or so, largely through the work of evolutionary psychologists, adaptationist explanation has become more common in psychology. During this same period of time, core knowledge explanations of human development have also increased in popularity. Such researchers conceive of the core capacities for which they marshal empirical evidence as the products of natural selection and, therefore, adaptations. In this article, I briefly describe these two approaches to human development and place their adaptationist programs in a historical context. I then describe recent developments that complicate adaptationist and innatist claims and briefly discuss the possibility of an alternative evolutionary meta-theory. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]