Culture, Environment, and the Ills of Adaptationism [and Comments and Reply]

Abstract

The concept of "adaptation," properly used to describe the relation between "culture" and man's physiological needs, is commonly employed in anthropology to refer to the relationship between human sociocultural institutions and "nature." An attempt is made here to expose the "adaptationist programme" behind this latter conception, the main components of which are (1) the notion of an all-embracing ecosystem whose evolution is subject to (2) self-regulation that is (3) teleological in character and that selects for (4) the latent functions of the sociocultural institutions within the all-embracing ecosystem. It is argued that these four components, and the adaptationist programme as a whole, are inadequate for the analysis of culture-environment relations.