Theme Issue 38
The Return of Science: Evolutionary Ideas and History
Edited by D. Gary Shaw and Philip Pomper
Cover image: Untitled, by Markus Spiske (8 September 2019)
+ DAVID GARY SHAW, Introduction: The Return of Science, History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 (December 1999).
No abstract.
+ ALBERT F. H. NACCACHE, A Brief History of Evolution, History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 (December 1999), 10-32.
This paper presents a non-reductionist framework of eight nested modes of evolution that have successively emerged to organize the reproduction of all organisms, from the blue-green algae to our societies. The processes of biological, "Darwinian," evolution are those of drift during reproduction, and of selection. The key unit of evolutionary time is the generation, and its locus is the organisms' life-cycle setup. Different life-cycle setups support different mechanisms of reproduction, and therefore different modes of evolution. By tracing the different life-cycle setups attested throughout Life's History, we are able to characterize the successive modes of evolution with which they are associated. The present attempt has led to a characterization of the following eight nested modes of evolution: Basic; Reptilian; Archaic Mammalian; Progressive Mammalian; Socio-cultural; Extrasomatically Enhanced Socio-cultural; Tinkering; and finally Para-biological. These successively emerging modes govern a progressively reduced number of life-forms. The first four modes are "Darwinian" in the strict sense. The fifth, or socio-cultural mode, which governs whale and elephant societies in addition to hominoids, is already not "Darwinian" in the traditional sense. The last three modes have emerged with the genus homo, through the progressive extension of its life-cycle setups. The present framework is to be used heuristically, as a prism with which to separate the evolutionary spectrum of the constituent elements of human behavior. An example of such a behavioral evolutionary spectrum is presented in the conclusion, and is used to compare the present framework with those recently proposed by Maynard Smith and Szathmáry and by Foley.
+ MARTIN STUART-FOX, Evolutionary Theory of History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 (December 1999), 33-51.
Several attempts have been made recently to apply Darwinian evolutionary theory to the study of cultural change and social history. The essential elements in such a theory are variable components and their selective retention during the processes of replication and transmission. Location of these component "units" in the semantic structure of cognition provides the individual psychological basis for an evolutionary theory of history. Selection operates on both the level of cognition and on its "phenotypic" expression in action in relation to individual preferred sources of psychological satisfaction. Social power comprises the principal selective forces within the sociocultural environment. Sociocultural evolution takes place both as a result of the unintended consequences of action and through the struggle of individuals and groups in pursuit of opposing interests. The implications for historiography are methodological in that evolutionary theory of history sharpens the focus of explanatory situational analysis, and interpretive in that it provides a new metanarrative for the understanding of historical change.
+ JOSEPH FRACCHIA and RICHARD C. LEWONTIN, Does Culture Evolve? History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 (December 1999), 52-78.
The drive to describe cultural history as an evolutionary process has two sources. One from within social theory is part of the impetus to convert social studies into "social sciences" providing them with the status accorded to the natural sciences. The other comes from within biology and biological anthropology in the belief that the theory of evolution must be universal in its application to all functions of all living organisms. The social scientific theory of cultural evolution is pre-Darwinian, employing a developmental model of unfolding characterized by intrinsic directionality, by definable stages that succeed each other and by some criterion of progress. It is arbitrary in its definitions of progress and has had the political problem that a diachronic claim of cultural progress implies a synchronic differential valuation of present-day cultures. The biological scheme creates an isomorphism between the Darwinian mechanism of evolution and cultural history, postulating rules of cultural "mutation", cultural inheritance and some mechanism of natural selection among cultural alternatives. It uses simplistic ad hoc notions of individual acculturation and of the differential survival and reproduction of cultural elements. It is unclear what useful work is done by substituting the metaphor of evolution for history.
+ DOYNE DAWSON, Evolutionary Theory and Group Selection: The Question of Warfare, History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 (December 1999), 79-100.
Evolutionary anthropology has focused on the origins of war, or rather ethnocentricity, because it epitomizes the problem of group selection, and because war may itself have been the main agent of group selection. The neo-Darwinian synthesis in biology has explained how ethnocentricity might evolve by group selection, and the distinction between evoked culture and adopted culture, suggested by the emerging synthesis in evolutionary psychology, has explained how it might be transmitted. Ethnocentric mechanisms could have evolved by genetic selection in ancestral hominids, or through the interaction of genetic and cultural selection in modern humans, or both. The existence of similar behaviors in chimpanzees and the parallel development of early human societies around the globe are arguments for such inherited mechanisms. There may have been some adaptive breakthroughs in purely cultural evolution, but this process does not seem likely to produce long-term Darwinian adaptations because of the prolificity of cultural traits. Warfare may once have been a major agent of group selection, but the rates of extinction among human groups are so slow as to render this improbable since the rise of state-level societies, whose warfare tends to become a cyclical balance-of-power situation. Perhaps the most serious implication of current evolutionary thought is that the individualistic model of culture common in the social sciences and humanities is outmoded, and should be replaced by a new model that recognizes the organismic nature of human societies.
+ ALONSO PEÑA, On the Role of Mathematical Biology in Contemporary Historiography, History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 (December 1999), 101-120.
This essay proposes that mathematical biology can be used as a fruitful exemplar for the introduction of scientific principles to history. After reviewing the antecedents of the application of mathematics to biology, in particular evolutionary biology, I describe in detail a mathematical model of cultural diffusion based on an analogy with population genetics. Subsequently, as a case study, this model is used to investigate the dynamics of the early modern European witch-crazes in Bavaria, England, Hungary and Finland. In the second part of the article, I sketch the methodological significance of this type of 'scientific history' and, in particular, I identify three lessons that mathematical biology can contribute to historiography. The first lesson is on the fundamental distinction between agent's purposes and structural social processes. I argue that mathematical modeling can be fruitfully applied to describe social processes, while agents' purposes ought to be addressed following an hermeneutic tradition. The second lesson is on the aim of mathematical modeling. Here I argue that the object of modeling, rather than being the prediction or retrodiction of events (a deductive-nomological approach), is the understanding of the factors involved in the dynamics of social processes (an analytic-descriptive approach). Finally, the third lesson is on the new understanding of science after the collapse of the standard view. In summary, while mathematical modeling can provide an extremely powerful approach to clarify the dynamics of certain macro-historical processes, scientific methods ought to be regarded as a complement, not a substitute, to classical historiography.
+ STEPHAN BERRY, On the Problem of Laws in Nature and History: A Comparison, History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 (December 1999), 121-137.
In the philosophy of science there has traditionally been a tendency to regard physics as the incarnation of science per se. Accordingly, the status of other disciplines is evaluated then with respect to their ability to produce laws resembling those of physics. This view has yielded a considerable bias in the discussion of historical laws. Philosophers as well as historians have tended to discuss such laws mostly with reference to the situation in physics; this often led to either one of two conclusions, namely that (1) history is epistemologically completely separated from natural science, because it does not have universal laws, or that (2) the ultimate goal of the study of history must be the formulation of such universal laws. I would maintain that neither conclusion is necessary. To substantiate this position, aspects of laws in nature are discussed. One aspect being often neglected is the fact that there are many cases of statistical laws in nature; there is no close link between laws and determinism. Moreover, there are natural systems which have a history, i.e. systems which are, like human history, shaped by irreversible, singular events. One important case is biological evolution and accordingly I discuss the relation between evolutionary theory and historiography. However, since we are part of the living world, one could also ask whether the laws of evolution are of direct relevance for understanding our history, in addition to the methodological similarities between the two fields. This issue of history as evolution is being investigated in detail in the final section of the paper.
+ DONALD E. BROWN, Human Nature and History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 (December 1999), 138-157.
What motivated British colonialism? What motivated renaissance Florentines to finance their state? Why did Brazilian men find mixed-race women so attractive? What promotes falsity in reports of human affairs? Why did historical-mindedness develop in ancient Greece and China but not India? When homosexual communities developed, why did gay men pursue sexual strategies so different from those of lesbians? Why does a Heian-period Japanese description of fear of snakes sound so familiar to a Westerner? Why have rebels tended to be youngest rather than eldest siblings? To each of these (and many other) questions part of the answer lies in specific, identifiable features of human nature. Thus human nature is and should be a subtantial concern to anyone trying to understand the past. But human nature is also an object of scientific study. This paper explores a portion of this convergence of humanistic and scientific concerns by outlining and illustrating interrelations between human nature and history. Exploration of the interrelations between history and human nature requires a detailed understanding of what human nature is. And whatever human nature may be, it is a product of human evolution. Accordingly, key concepts in evolutionary psychology are presented to provide theoretical tools for understanding the centerpiece of human nature, the human mind. As much as the study of history may benefit from an understanding of human nature, the study of history and the use of historical materials may also promote the scientific study of human nature. Examples are given and several suggestions are presented to forward this task. Finally, an argument is made for a sort of back engineering in which historical events and conditions are traced to the specific features of human nature that motivated, facilitated, or shaped them. Insofar as this task is achieved, it closes the gap between recorded history and evolutionary history, between the humanities and the sciences.