Stephen M. Downes
University of Utah
Biological approaches to explaining human behavior adopt varying methodologies. Underlying much work in the biology of human behavior is an, often tacit, assumption that biologically based causal hypotheses about human behavior derived from the various methodologies are in some way compatible. I introduce some examples from the biology of human behavior and use these examples to drive an argument that there is no evidence so far for this complacency about a unified account. A unified account would be on a stronger footing if biologists of human behavior agreed upon an underlying causal framework. The framework most of these researchers adopt is not adequate to the task of unifying their various causal hypotheses.