The collective amnesia of marketing scholars regarding consumers' biological and evolutionary roots

Abstract

Despite the extraordinary advances in biology in the 20th century, along with the infusion of Darwinian theory across countless domains of human import, marketing and consumer scholars have doggedly forgotten, rejected, or ignored that consumers are biological beings shaped by a common set of evolutionary forces. Accordingly, this collective amnesia has yielded disciplines that largely focus on the disjointed and incoherent cataloguing of empirical findings, all of which operate at the proximate level. A complete and accurate understanding of any biological organism requires that it be studied at both the proximate and ultimate (in the Darwinian adaptive sense of the term) levels. Hence, at best, marketing and consumer scholars generate incomplete accounts of Homo consumericus and at worst they provide erroneous theories that eventually fall by the epistemological wayside. Should the collective amnesia persist, marketing and consumer scholars will further contribute to the sinking of our discipline into the abyss of irrelevant sciences, disconnected from the revolutionary work that is being conducted within the natural sciences.