Reply to Zeder: Maintaining a diverse scientific toolkit is not an act of faith

i) We are not interested in labeling individuals or mounting personal attacks. Instead, we provide a critique of a current trend in scholarship that prioritizes informal induction from particular facts and observations over theoretically informed scientific explanation. ii) In advocating an approach that acknowledges the evolutionary basis of human behavior, we are not making the claim that optimal foraging theory (OFT) provides the only framework for investigating the origins of agriculture (OA). We believe that OFT is one …