Just-so story
In the study of the biological evolution , the just-so stories (ad hoc stories or stories as that) are not very convincing explanations of the origin évolutionnaire of a milked (like a Organe or a Comportement). This expression is often employed in a critical direction, primarily against the theories adaptationnists which try to explain the emergence of such or such characteristic of an organization by speculations on the function of this feature in the history of the Espèce. Fault of being supplied with precise elements, these speculations can indeed appear unverifiable, even irrefutable, and thus little scientific.
Just like was it in its time the Sociobiologie, the evolutionary Psychologie is often criticized for its tendency to explain the human behaviors modern by such just-so stories . However, its defenders distinguish evolutionary psychology scientific from its popular version diffused by the Médias, which would be only truly concerned by this criticism.
One probably must to the biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin the diffusion of this expression, via their criticism of the adaptationnism " naïf".
The expression is inspired by the book for children of Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories ( Histoires like that ,), tales etiologic in which the author tells with humor how animals acquired their characteristic features: the leopard its spots, the elephant its horn etc.
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