ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the relationship between moral philosophy and evolutionary biology to that between incommunicative pairs of empirical fields in the social sciences. There is no such thing as a field of "evolutionary philosophy" in the sense of an empirically better-informed counterpart to mainstream pre-Darwinian philosophy. There are two general approaches to the study of behavior, and to the human mind and culture. Two examples are genetic determinism, about which philosophers now worry for nothing, and the idea that evolutionary biology can turn moral philosophy into an applied science, which is just an ignorant conceit. Evolutionary biology is in the process of narrowing the scope of plausible thought regarding the human being to an extent that no science has ever done, or even come close to doing. Applying evolutionary theory to human minds and behavior is a fledgling science in many ways, and testing components of the overall schema is very difficult.
