Failures of Explanation in Darwinian Ecological Anthropology:

and Human Behavior was intended as a &dquo;unified, coherent, and com-prehensive&dquo; survey of theory and research in a field that the editors regard as having begun to coalesce in the latter part of the 1970s (xiv-xv). That field is a particular version of the study of human social behavior &dquo;within a simultaneously evolutionary (selectionist) and ecological perspective&dquo; (xiii). It is a field in which the number of workers and the number of their projects and publications have grown markedly since the 1970s, thus making appropriate not only such a survey volume as Evolutionary Ecology and Human Behavior and the three review articles that have been written recently by those in the field (Borgerhoff Mulder 1991; Cronk 1991; Smith 1992a, 1992b), but also critical appraisals, like the present one, by those who are not in the field. My focus here will be mainly on methodological, or, more specifically, explanatory issues, and I will rely heavily on the editors’ essays and commissioned articles in Evolutionary Ecology and Hu-man Behavior, but I will refer, as well, to other works by contributors to the volume and their congeners. Focusing on these issues with these particular works as my texts will entail addressing some issues of explanation in social and biological science in general, My thanks to Wouter de Groot, Tom Rudel, and Brad Walters for their helpful comments on an earlier draft