ABSTRACT
Ever since Durkheim’s seminal work at the turn of the century, social scientists have tended to insist that human behaviour is not adaptive and cannot be amenable to analysis from a biological perspective. The received view in the social sciences implies that human behaviour is not adaptive in any biological sense. Unfortunately, this view seems to be based on a rather narrow conception of what constitutes an adaptation in the sense that biologists use this term: it seems to assume that it refers only to adaptation to the exigencies of the natural world. One concerns the fact that contributing genes to the next generation is not simply a matter of solving the problem of how to mate most often. The other arises from the fact that animals can trade short-term losses against long-term gains to give rise to alternative strategies that are equally good solutions to the same biological problem.
