When talking of adaptation in a population, two distinctions are crucial. First, to be adaptive is not to be an adaptation. A trait is adaptive in a given environment if it provides a fitness advantage. An adaptation is a trait that has evolved because it provided such an advantage – its effect is the cause of its fixation in the population. Adaptiveness and adaptation are neither necessary nor sufficient for one another. An adaptive trait may not be an adaptation if it just happens to provide a fitness advantage in an environment; an adaptation may not be adaptive anymore after an environmental change has made it suboptimal. (Sober Reference Sober1993)
Second, there is a difference between shared individual adaptations and group adaptations. A trait is a shared individual adaptation if it is present in all members of the population but evolved because it provided fitness advantages to the individuals (e.g., fast running for cheetahs). A trait is a group adaptation if it evolved because it provided fitness advantages to the group (functional organisation or division of reproductive labour in ant colonies are likely examples). In Williams' (Reference Williams1966) famous terms, a fleet herd of deer is not a herd of fleet deer.
Does the set of climatic and wealth conditions lead to “psychobehavioural adaptations,” and if yes of what kind? First, within the “cultural syndromes,” appraisals are not adaptations, as they simply report the situation's characteristics; and saying that agents have goals is just another way to express the nature of their dominant needs. By contrast, means and outcomes (agency and organisation) are possible adaptations.
Modes of agency and kinds of organisation may seem as genuine adaptations, but only because adaptiveness and adaptation all but collapse when the relevant evolutionary processes are mostly cultural. The original motivation for the concept of adaptation is the surprising fit between phenotypes and environments, given that the underlying genotypes mutate randomly, without aiming at a target. In cultural selection, however, most processes are target-driven: efficient solutions spread because they are recognized as such and copied (Claidière & André Reference Claidière and André2012). Constant mention of “adaptations” suggests a rich, intricate evolutionary past of cumulative selective pressures; but in the context of cultural selection, current success suffices to do the job – especially if money can be substituted to skill. In this sense, cultural selection trivialises adaptation.
Let us grant that these psychobehavioural traits are adaptations. Are they individual or group adaptations? The target article repeatedly mentions collective aspects – collective freedoms, collective stresses, collective meeting of climate demands, collectives adaptively responding to environmental necessities – that smack of group adaptationism. However, climatic stresses are shared constraints: they affect everyone similarly, and the collective cost is nothing than the average of individual costs. All agents may adapt individually to these stresses.
What could make these adaptations collective? Is it the collective habitat appraisal, that is, the activity of “pushing and pulling each other” towards shared solutions, that is, a shared culture? At best, discussion and mutual influences can only lead to a convergence of a range of individual solutions towards a unique one. However, it will still not have appeared because it benefits the group, but only because it benefits each individual.
One key argument may be that if climate and monetary resources shape cultures, and cultures are typically shaped by group selection (as they are taken to benefit the group as a whole), then at least some climate constraints and monetary resources can drive group adaptations – recent doubts about the importance of group selection in shaping human culture notwithstanding (Pinker Reference Pinker2012). Indeed, the signs of group selection are manifest in the collectivist societies (with high ingroup bias, outgroup derogation) found in threatening environments, and absent from these found in merely challenging ones.
However, recent work on group identification (Postmes et al. Reference Postmes, Spears, Lee and Novak2005), an important psychological factor of cooperation and a likely product of group selection, suggests that it can be triggered by shared similarities but also by individual distinctiveness. The picture is even more complicated by the fact that autocratic organisation is not a characteristic of egalitarian hunter-forager societies, considered as theoretically ideal targets of group selection. In other words, the presence or absence of group selection, and thus the possibility of group adaptations, does not straightforwardly depend on the characteristic of societies emerging under climate-monetary kinds of environments. This need not worry us: whether a trait is a group adaptation crucially depends on causal factors, which makes the insufficiency of correlations unsurprising (Okasha & Paternotte Reference Okasha and Paternotte2012).
To summarise: The target article seems to lead to the conclusion that group adaptations can arise in threatening climates and shared adaptiveness in challenging climates. However, group selection actually crosscuts these climate categories: its absence or presence is not necessarily constrained by them.
Lastly, money can allow agents to cope with climatic stresses only if agents do care in priority about their existence needs. But evolutionary theorists (e.g., Sterelny Reference Sterelny, Okasha and Binmore2012) have stressed that environment changes, including cultural change, tend to decouple individual utilities from fitness. If social evolution has made us pay disproportionate attention to social needs, then the increased freedom of choice enjoyed by members of rich societies could lead to a worse population-level state than should be expected by the target article's interpretation. Contrary to an early assumption of the target article, the appearance of new needs may well dwarf old ones. In other words, the various needs that drive the selection of behaviours cannot be straightforwardly juxtaposed, which impacts the adaptations we should expect.
So for several reasons, the evolutionary process at work behind the fascinating correlations discovered by Van de Vliert is likely to be much more complex than the target article hints, and possibly less influential on culture in general, which in turn is relevant for the inferences drawn about future trends. In any case, the premature resort to a notion of (collective) adaptation is likely to obscure the debate.
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When talking of adaptation in a population, two distinctions are crucial. First, to be adaptive is not to be an adaptation. A trait is adaptive in a given environment if it provides a fitness advantage. An adaptation is a trait that has evolved because it provided such an advantage – its effect is the cause of its fixation in the population. Adaptiveness and adaptation are neither necessary nor sufficient for one another. An adaptive trait may not be an adaptation if it just happens to provide a fitness advantage in an environment; an adaptation may not be adaptive anymore after an environmental change has made it suboptimal. (Sober Reference Sober1993)
Second, there is a difference between shared individual adaptations and group adaptations. A trait is a shared individual adaptation if it is present in all members of the population but evolved because it provided fitness advantages to the individuals (e.g., fast running for cheetahs). A trait is a group adaptation if it evolved because it provided fitness advantages to the group (functional organisation or division of reproductive labour in ant colonies are likely examples). In Williams' (Reference Williams1966) famous terms, a fleet herd of deer is not a herd of fleet deer.
Does the set of climatic and wealth conditions lead to “psychobehavioural adaptations,” and if yes of what kind? First, within the “cultural syndromes,” appraisals are not adaptations, as they simply report the situation's characteristics; and saying that agents have goals is just another way to express the nature of their dominant needs. By contrast, means and outcomes (agency and organisation) are possible adaptations.
Modes of agency and kinds of organisation may seem as genuine adaptations, but only because adaptiveness and adaptation all but collapse when the relevant evolutionary processes are mostly cultural. The original motivation for the concept of adaptation is the surprising fit between phenotypes and environments, given that the underlying genotypes mutate randomly, without aiming at a target. In cultural selection, however, most processes are target-driven: efficient solutions spread because they are recognized as such and copied (Claidière & André Reference Claidière and André2012). Constant mention of “adaptations” suggests a rich, intricate evolutionary past of cumulative selective pressures; but in the context of cultural selection, current success suffices to do the job – especially if money can be substituted to skill. In this sense, cultural selection trivialises adaptation.
Let us grant that these psychobehavioural traits are adaptations. Are they individual or group adaptations? The target article repeatedly mentions collective aspects – collective freedoms, collective stresses, collective meeting of climate demands, collectives adaptively responding to environmental necessities – that smack of group adaptationism. However, climatic stresses are shared constraints: they affect everyone similarly, and the collective cost is nothing than the average of individual costs. All agents may adapt individually to these stresses.
What could make these adaptations collective? Is it the collective habitat appraisal, that is, the activity of “pushing and pulling each other” towards shared solutions, that is, a shared culture? At best, discussion and mutual influences can only lead to a convergence of a range of individual solutions towards a unique one. However, it will still not have appeared because it benefits the group, but only because it benefits each individual.
One key argument may be that if climate and monetary resources shape cultures, and cultures are typically shaped by group selection (as they are taken to benefit the group as a whole), then at least some climate constraints and monetary resources can drive group adaptations – recent doubts about the importance of group selection in shaping human culture notwithstanding (Pinker Reference Pinker2012). Indeed, the signs of group selection are manifest in the collectivist societies (with high ingroup bias, outgroup derogation) found in threatening environments, and absent from these found in merely challenging ones.
However, recent work on group identification (Postmes et al. Reference Postmes, Spears, Lee and Novak2005), an important psychological factor of cooperation and a likely product of group selection, suggests that it can be triggered by shared similarities but also by individual distinctiveness. The picture is even more complicated by the fact that autocratic organisation is not a characteristic of egalitarian hunter-forager societies, considered as theoretically ideal targets of group selection. In other words, the presence or absence of group selection, and thus the possibility of group adaptations, does not straightforwardly depend on the characteristic of societies emerging under climate-monetary kinds of environments. This need not worry us: whether a trait is a group adaptation crucially depends on causal factors, which makes the insufficiency of correlations unsurprising (Okasha & Paternotte Reference Okasha and Paternotte2012).
To summarise: The target article seems to lead to the conclusion that group adaptations can arise in threatening climates and shared adaptiveness in challenging climates. However, group selection actually crosscuts these climate categories: its absence or presence is not necessarily constrained by them.
Lastly, money can allow agents to cope with climatic stresses only if agents do care in priority about their existence needs. But evolutionary theorists (e.g., Sterelny Reference Sterelny, Okasha and Binmore2012) have stressed that environment changes, including cultural change, tend to decouple individual utilities from fitness. If social evolution has made us pay disproportionate attention to social needs, then the increased freedom of choice enjoyed by members of rich societies could lead to a worse population-level state than should be expected by the target article's interpretation. Contrary to an early assumption of the target article, the appearance of new needs may well dwarf old ones. In other words, the various needs that drive the selection of behaviours cannot be straightforwardly juxtaposed, which impacts the adaptations we should expect.
So for several reasons, the evolutionary process at work behind the fascinating correlations discovered by Van de Vliert is likely to be much more complex than the target article hints, and possibly less influential on culture in general, which in turn is relevant for the inferences drawn about future trends. In any case, the premature resort to a notion of (collective) adaptation is likely to obscure the debate.