Alternative to faith-based science

Abstract

Finding myself in the company of a large group of researchers labeled as particularistic, atheoretical, and nonscientific by Gremillion et al. (1), I take issue with many of the assertions in their recent defense of the application of optimal foraging theory (OFT) to origins of agriculture (OA) research. First is the premise that regional-scale analyses can only identify more general evolutionary processes if they are explicitly situated with an “overarching framework for explaining the diversity of life,” which, according to Gremillion et al., is provided by OFT, held to be virtually synonymous with the larger disciplinary categories of human behavioral ecology (HBE) and evolutionary ecology (EE). In …