BioConcepts

Environment of Evolutionary AdaptednessUmwelt der evolutionären Angepasstheit (ger.)

• The environmental circumstances to the time when the human adapted behaviour patterns emerged.
  category cultural studies

  1969

  Man’s Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness

  Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, vol. 1. Attachment: 58.

  1990

  The “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA) is not a place or a habitat, or even a time period. Rather, it is a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of the ancestral environments encountered by members of ancestral populations, weighted by their frequency and fitness-consequences. These properties are selected out of all possible environmental properties as those that actually interacted with the existing design of the organism during the period of evolution. These ancestral conditions must be characterized when functionally analyzing an adaptation.

  Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1990). The past explains the present: adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethol. Sociobiol. 11, 375-424: 386-7.

  2005

  Among the many problems with […] conjectures about evolutionary origins, two stand out: a remarkable vagueness about the time, place, and circumstances of the environment of evolutionary adaptation, and an equally remarkable specificity about the nature of social relations in that hypothetical time and place.

  McKinnon, S. (2005). Neo-Liberal Genetics. The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology: 136-7.