Rational Preselection from Hamadryas to Homo Sapiens: The Place of Decisions in Adaptive Process

Normally biological and sociocultural evolution are explained in terms of blind variation and selective retention. This theory avoids intrinsic teleological fallacies but fails to account for a type of purposive behavior that is both distinctive and adaptively significant. The preselective hypothesis advanced here asserts that certain highly social animals including Homo sapiens are able to anticipate complex evolutionary problems. They may then beat natural selection to the draw by making their own deliberate adaptive choices, where the advantage of doing so is perceptually obvious. Such decisions occur both at the individual level and through political processes at the group level. Especially in group preselection, the result is an adaptive mechanism of unparalleled flexibility and rapidity of action, one very inadequately accounted for by ethnologists. Implications are suggested for ethology, archaeology, and ethnology in terms of redefining culture and revising models of cultural adaptation and evolution to make the study of process more effective . [evolutionary theory, cultural ecology, decision process, ethology, cognition]