Is Sociobiology Really A Big Set Of ‘Just So Stories’?

“Today’s biologists tend to be cautious about labelling any trait an evolutionary adaptation – that is, one that spread through a population because it provided a reproductive advantage. … When it comes to studying ourselves, though, such admonitions are hard to heed. So strong is the temptation to explain our minds by evolutionary ‘Just So Stories,’ Stephen Jay Gould argued in 1978, that a lack of hard evidence for them is frequently overlooked.”