The Darwinian theory of Evolution roughly falls into two ideas: the Tree of Life (two living beings always have a common ancestor) and Natural Selection (populations adapt by random individual variations being discarded by the environment). The first idea was not that new in darwin's time; nowadays, it is widely accepted in the knowledgeable opinion (at least in Europe). The second one has always been more controversial; still it underwent 150 years of experimental testing and remains, to this day, completely intact. The theory of adaptation by natural selection is Darwin's Dangerous Idea; it is the gist of evolutionary thought. It describes how complex functions such as photosynthesis, breaathing, and thought, can arise from a blind and dumb process of random variation and selective retention. Evolutionism recently took four major turns.

The first one consisted in applying the adaptationist program to certain aspects of the human brain. It is obvious that eyes, which are part of the brain, are adaptations; why should Evolution have given us the rest for free, without endowing us with certain recommandations related to what must be done (mating, mating and mating), and what must not (do not tread over abysses; do nottouch snake; do not relish in dirt; etc.). When Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology asked these questions, they rose major uproars whose echo is still to be heard in many academic places. Yet they ar eboth alive and well (sociobiology is now called behavioral ecology), and produce interesting results; this site echoes their findings. Their neglect of culture, which was and remains their major flaw, gets milde and milder everyday; that is why we consider the time nripe for a reconciliation with mainstream anthropology.

The second turn is in silico modelling of evolutionary processes. It started with then invention of genetic algorithms. In spite of its abstraction, it fostered some nice discovery, such as the importance of cross-over phenomena in the apparition of phenotypic variations. Its philosophical contribution is even more important: it allows us to confront the possibility of a general theory of evolution, of which biological evolution as we know it would be but a particular case. We are now able to sketch a very approximate picture of what a carbon-less evolution,an extraterrestrial evolution, a cultural evolution, might be. That is the third turn.

Evolutionary modelling has been applied to problems as diverse as technological change or the spreading of religious beliefs. Memetics is the most popular model around, but it is far from being the only, let alone the most refined one. The memeticians' slogans can be exchanged for less metaphorical and more testable theories of cultural evolution.

The last great transition in evolutionary theory is the synthesis of evolutionary biology and game theory. It allows scientists to translate into both languages important notions such as cooperation, fitness, frequence-dependence, stable equilibria, etc. Coupled with models of cultural evolution, or sociobiological ones, evolutionary game theory is a powerful tool to understand how altruism and cooperation evolved in humans. These models are far from the survival of the fiercest to which its adversaries too easily reduce evolutionary theory.

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