When the “satisficing” is the new “fittest”: how a proscriptive definition of adaptation can change our view of cognition and culture

Since Darwin’s theory of evolution, adaptationism is frequently invoked to explain cognition and cultural processes. Adaptationism can be described as a prescriptive view, as phenotypes that do not optimize fitness should not be selected by natural selection. From an epistemological perspective, the principle of a prescriptive definition of adaptation seems incompatible with recent advances in epigenetics, evolutionary developmental biology, ethology, and genomics. From these challenges, a proscriptive view of adaptation has emerged, postulating that phenotypes that are not deleterious will be evolutionary maintained. In this epistemological investigation, we examine how the shift from adaptationism to a proscriptive view changes our view of cognition and culture. We argue that, while adaptationism leads to cognitivism and a view of culture as strategies to optimize overall fitness, the proscriptive definition favors embodied theories of cognition and a view of culture as the cumulative diffusion of behaviors allowed by the constraints of reproduction.