Online research in philosophy

Mathematical models are potentially as useful for culture as for evolution, but cultural models must have different designs from genetic models. Social sciences must borrow from biology the idea of modeling, rather than the structure of models, because copying the product is fundamentally different from copying the design. Transfer of most cultural information from brains to artificial media increases the differences between cultural and biological information. (Published Online November 9 2006).

This article argues that it is possible to bring the social sciences into evolutionary focus without being committed to a thesis the author calls ontological reductionism, which is a widespread predilection for lower-level explanations. After showing why we should reject ontological reductionism, the author argues that there is a way to construe cultural evolution that does justice to the autonomy of social science explanations. This paves the way for a liberal approach to explanation the author calls explanatory pluralism, which allows for the possibility of explaining cultural phenomena in terms of different evolutionary processes. Key Words: cultural evolution • reductionism • explanatory pluralism • evolutionary psychology.

Selectionist evolutionary theory has often been faulted for not making novel predictions that are surprising, risky, and correct. I argue that it in fact exhibits the theoretical virtue of predictive capacity in addition to two other virtues: explanatory unification and model fitting. Two case studies show the predictive capacity of selectionist evolutionary theory: parallel evolutionary change in E. coli and the origin of eukaryotic cells through endosymbiosis. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High St., Santa Cruz, CA 95064; e‐mail: rgw@ucsc.edu ; rgwinther@gmail.com.

During the 1950s and 60s, evolutionary biologists began to attribute a greater and greater role to natural selection, and correspondingly less and less a role to alternative evolutionary agents. Empirical grounds cited in support of the change in attitude consisted primarily of selectionist reinterpretations of evolutionary changes originally attributed to other evolutionary agents. In order to distinguish the respects in which the increased emphasis on natural selection was justified and unjustified, two distinctions are relied on. These are, first, the distinction between pursuing an hypothesis and accepting it, and second, the distinction between what is reasonable/rational as far as individual scientists are concerned vs. what is reasonable/rational as far as the scientific community is concerned. It was rational for at least some individual scientists to pursue exclusively selectionist accounts on the basis of the selectionist successes in question, although it was not rational for any of them to accept the hypothesis of the all-importance of natural selection on those meager grounds. Moreover, although it was reasonable for at least some individual evolutionary biologists to invoke the selectionist successes in question in pursuit of further selectionist accounts, it was not reasonable for the entire community of evolutionary biologists to pursue exclusively selectionist accounts on those grounds.

We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in “social cognitive neuroscience,” although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences. (Published Online November 9 2006) Key Words: cultural anthropology; cultural evolution; cultural transmission; culture; evolution; evolutionary archaeology; evolutionary biology; gene-culture coevolution; memes; social learning.

This chapter surveys the philosophical problems raised by the two Darwinian claims of the existence of a Tree of a life, and the explanatory power of natural selection. It explores the specificity of explanations by natural selection, emphasizing the high context-dependency of any process of selection. Some consequences are drawn about the difficulty of those explanations to fit a nomological model of explanation, and the irreducibility of their historic-narrative dimension. The paper introduces to the debates about units of selection, stating the compelling force of genic selectionnism but highlighting some critiques. Then it addresses the limits of selectionist explanations : the compared status of selection, drift and phylogenetic inertia are investigated, and the debates over adaptationism are presented, with the aim of defining the varieties of adaptationisms as research programs. In order to assess the scope of natural selection, the chapter addresses weak and strong challenges to the Synthetic theory of evolution, both from paleontology (punctuated equilibria, Gould’s contingency thesis) and evolutionary theory of development. We finally sketch some consequences of evolutionary theory concerning philosophical questions about human nature, on the basis of the hypothesis of the universality of selectionist explanations: this part deals mostly with epistemology and psychology.

The dispute between the empiricist and interpretivist conceptions of the social sciences is properly conceived not as a matter of reduction or covering laws. Features specific to the social sciences include the following. Explanations of human behavior make reference to intentional causation; social phenomena are permeated with mental components and are self-referential; social science explanations have not been as successful as those in natural science because of their concern with intentional causation, because their explanations must be identical with the propositional content of the mind of the actor, and because a social phenomenon exists only if people believe it exists. Elements of an apparatus necessary to analyze this problematic social ontology are given and include selfreferentiality, constitutive rules, collective intentionality, linguistic permeation of the facts, systematic interrelationships among social facts, and primacy of acts over objects.

From their conception to the present, the social sciences have invoked a kind of explanation that looks suspect by the standards of the natural sciences. They explain why social practices exist by reference to the purpose or needs they serve. Yet the purposes invoked are generally not the explicit purposes or needs of any individual but of society or social groups. For example, Durkheim claimed that the division of labor in society exists in order to promote social solidarity and Marx thought that the state served to promote the interests of the ruling class. Social scientists have found these explanations as irresistible as their critics have found them mysterious. This chapter traces the controversies over these explanations — generally called functional explanations — and argues that they are widespread in some of our best current social science and that they can provide compelling information in some cases, despite the many doubts about them.

This book defends the prospects for a science of society. It argues that behind the diverse methods of the natural sciences lies a common core of scientific rationality that the social sciences can and sometimes do achieve. It also argues that good social science must be in part about large-scale social structures and processes and thus that methodological individualism is misguided. These theses are supported by a detailed discussion of actual social research, including theories of agrarian revolution, organizational ecology, social theories of depression, and supply-demand explanations in economics. Professor Kincaid provides a general picture of explanation and confirmation in the social sciences and discusses the nature of scientific rationality, functional explanation, optimality arguments, meaning and interpretation, the place of microfoundations in social explanation, the status of neo-classical economics, the role of idealizations and non-experimental evidence, and other specific controversies.

We are encouraged that the majority of commentators endorse our evolutionary framework for studying culture, and several suggest extensions. Here we clarify our position, dwelling on misunderstandings and requests for exposition. We reiterate that using evolutionary biology as a model for unifying the social sciences within a single synthetic framework can stimulate a more progressive and rigorous science of culture. (Published Online November 9 2006).