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Historical Evidence and Human Adaptations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jonathan Michael Kaplan
Jonathan Michael Kaplan*
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee
*
Send requests for reprints to the author, Philosophy Department, 801 McClung Tower, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996–0480; [email protected].
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Abstract

Phylogenetic information is often necessary to distinguish between evolutionary scenarios. Recently, some prominent proponents of evolutionary psychology have acknowledged this, and have claimed that such evidence has in fact been brought to bear on adaptive hypotheses involving complex human psychological traits. Were this possible, it would be a valuable source of evidence regarding hypothesized adaptive traits in humans. However, the structure of the Hominidae family makes this difficult or impossible. For many traits of interest, the closest extant relatives to the human species are too phenotypically different from humans for such methods to provide meaningful data. While phylogenetic information can be useful for testing adaptive hypotheses in humans, these generally involve traits that are (a) not widely shared in the species or (b) fairly widely shared in the Hominidae family, and hence likely of a lower order of complexity than the sorts of traits evolutionary psychology has so far been interested in.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 69 , Issue S3 , September 2002 , pp. S294 - S304
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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