It is hard summarizing the heart of a great idea or the intellectual history of a paradigm being integrated in a few words or even a paragraph. I think I have a hard time doing it, so I am interested in instances that don’t quite seem to capture it.¹

Going over various thinking on the evolution of psychological diversity, I came across Tooby & Cosmides² contending that

At the heart of Darwin’s theory of the origin of adaptations is the following precept. The more important the adaptive problem, the more intensely selection should have specialized and improved the performance of the mechanism for solving it. (p 27)

This is not the heart of Darwin’s theory (which is instead modification by differential reproduction, i.e., natural selection) and seems to be the opposite of his thinking. Darwin notes that that highly specialized adaptations (such as the eye) present “difficulties” for this theory (Origin p 186). Morever, he did not see nature as crafting ‘perfection’ but only sufficiency. You don’t have to be great, just better than your competiion.³

Tooby & Cosmides then define the Modern Synthesis:

Neo-Darwinism is an account of how functional integration in biological systems can arise through selective retention of a superior functional variant—superior in the sense that the variation modifies the functioning of the system in ways that promote the variant’s own propagration. (p 28-29)

The Modern Synthesis was the formal integration of Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian and Weismannian conceptions of transmission and inheritance. I don’t see what ‘functional integration’ has to do with it.

It is bothersome to get caught up on small details like this in an essay, where you can skip over these glosses and get to the new arguments made by the authors. But it sharpens in one’s own mind the exact expression of these ideas by previous thinkers and how we got to where we are now. Perhaps it is the quality of the rest of Tooby & Cosmides explanations (even if I do not agree with many of their conclusions) that make these two minor scuffs stand out.