Homo Sapiens Adaptation and the Law of Natural Selection

Abstract

The article discusses whether the general biological law of natural selection works in formed human communities. The author proceeds from the understanding of natural selection as a mechanism of self-preservation and self-development of living systems, carried out through adaptation to environmental conditions. The author considers adaptation as a modus existendi of self-purpose substantive systems of biological and social type, capable of preserving the fact and quality of their life by changing its significant parameters. The article considers modes of adaptation of biological systems (individual and collective, somatic and ethological, passive and active), which determine the criteria of intraspecific and interspecific selection by bodily or behavioral properties. Turning to the analysis of social systems, the author considers human activity not as an alternative to adaptation, but as a special kind of it — active behavioral adaptation, acting in the form of labor, based on the synthesis of verbal and conceptual thinking with an instrumental attitude to the environment. The article criticizes the point of view about the absence of qualitative boundaries between human and animal lifestyles, which gained strength after the primatological revolution in biology. The author is convinced of the uniqueness of man, whose activity creates a fundamentally new socio-cultural reality based on the production and reproduction of social life, the institutional division of labor and value-normative regulation of behavior. In the sociocultural environment, of course, the laws of biological heredity persist, affecting the way people live, but not determining it. Similarly, in human communities there is intrapopulation and interpopulation competition, which, with the development of history, loses the form of natural selection by somatic and ethological traits. The latter retains its force only at the beginning of human history, manifesting itself, in particular, in the process of formation of somatic racial differences between humans. According to the author, the action of natural selection ceases as a result of the Great Neolithic Revolution, associated with the transition from the economy of the foraging type to the economy of the producing type.