RC Question 19 Explanation
DISCUSSION: This is a specific detail question. You’ll want to support the answer using the passage. Remember that both authors are talking only about the influence of genes on psychology and behavior.
___________
- Neither author talks about how genes affect our appearance. They were talking about psychology.
- The author of passage A wasn’t an extremist. Lines 31-34 say that altruism “may” be explained by genes. The author never says everything we do is directly controlled by our genes.
- CORRECT. See lines 60-61. An explanation can make sense without being correct. So just because evolutionary motives could explain behavior doesn’t mean they do.
- No one mentions animal behavior. This is just here to slow you down and confuse you if you don’t know what to look for.
- The author of passage A never makes this extreme claim. We still do stupid things. The author of passage A only talks about one example, altruism.
Can we interpret choice B this way: even if it is an assumption made by passage A, it is not the one that passage B would regard as mistaken, because passage B never explicitly disprove this concept (line 53)? Rather, passage B explicitly states the reasoning in passage A is wrong, which is best captured by choice C.
I think the problem is that Answer Choice B is too broad for what passage A’s author was trying to say. We don’t care about “any action” that early humans performed, just the ones passage A’s author talked about, which defied evolutionary logic.
Also I don’t think B is an assumption that passage A makes at all. Passage A basically says:
If improves reproduction success –> explains early human behavior.