Yes, kin selection.
Frankly, I find the idea that reproduction is the central motivation of human behaviour a little difficult to grasp. The fact is, we now don't work like that. Semantically, the notion of of a 'selfish' gene is also pretty difficult to follow (I need to read the damned book), and it is what confused me about your statement. So, the survival of an individual isn't paramount; but
who is it 'not paramount' to? The individual? His family? His genes? Is the individual conscious of this motivation? It must be pscyhologically embedded; how does it interact with his other nebulous beliefs and desires?
I really am interested in what the article says, although I can understand if you can't be bothered to trawl through it.
Quote:
In relatively untendentious Adaptationist explanations -ones that don't involve the evolution of the mind -the situation is something like this: one finds some heritable feature of a creature's phenotype (for example, opposed thumbs, complex eyes, sexual dimorphism; whatever) and then constructs a story about how developing the feature would have increased fitness (here understood as an ancestor's probability of contributing to the gene pool of his breeding group) in the environment in which the creature evolved. The logic of Adaptationist explanations in EP accords with this general pattern: the datum is that a certain kind of creature reliably exhibits a certain kind of behaviour; and the putative explanation attributes the behaviour to a psychological mechanism -typically a complex of beliefs and desires -that would have been selected for in the ancestral environment. Roughly: on the one hand, the behaviour is intelligible on the assumption that the creature acts out of a certain motive; and, on the other hand, a propensity to act out of that motive would have been selected for if the evolutionary ancestors had had it.
The point to keep your eye on -what distinguishes Adaptationism as applied to specifically mental traits -is that the explanations it has on offer incorporate the kind of reasoning in which a creature's behaviour is explained by reference to its beliefs and desires. So you can't so much as start on constructing this kind of explanation unless you know not just how a creature behaves, but also its motive for behaving that way. This introduces complications that are not found in Adaptationist theorizing outside psychology: complications to which Evolutionary Psychologists -Buller included -are pretty generally insensitive.
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