Adaption Versus Phylogeny: The Role of Animal Psychology in The Study of Human Behavior (original) (raw)

Advocates of Darwinian approaches to the study of behavior are divided over what an evolutionary perspective is thought to entail. Some take "evolution-mindedness" to mean "phylogeny-mindedness," whereas others take it to mean "adaptationmindedness." Historically, comparative psychology began as the search for mental continuities between humans and other animals: a phylogenetic approach. Independently, ethologists and now behavioral ecologists have placed far more emphasis on the nichedifferentiated mental abilities unique to the species being investigated: an adaptive approach. We argue that the output of complex, dynamical systems can be dramatically changed by only minor changes in internal structure. Because selection acts on the consequences of behavior, the behavioral output of the psyche will be easily shaped by adaptive demands over evolutionary time, even though the modification of the neurophysiological substrate necessary to create such adaptive changes may be minor. Thus, adaptation-mindedness will be most illuminating in the study of cognition and behavior, whereas phylogeny-mindedness will be most illuminating in the study of their neurophysiological substrates. Similarly, a phylogenetic approach to cognition and behavior is likely to cause one to overlook our most interesting, complexly designed species-typical traits, whereas using animal psychology to exfoliate general principles of behavioral ecology represents our best hope of understanding humanity's many zoologically unique characteristics. Darwin, with the pubHcation of the Origin ofSpecies (1869) and the Descent of Man (1871), united the human and the animal worlds into a single system by proposing an explanation for species' characteristics, including their similarities and differences from each other, in terms of the operation of intelligible natural causal processes. By tying all animals together in a single tree of descent, Darwin made the study of every species relevant to the study of every other species. Animals drawn from different species are separated only by phylogenetic distance; character differences separating different phylogenetic groups were produced either by chance, or they were driven by niche-differentiating selection pressures.

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