At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.
In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.
Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.
Those early steps are very important in understanding the evolution. But in themselves, maybe now you need the later records to understand the significance of the earlier records!
My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.
Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.