Abstract
Cultural evolution is a growing, interdisciplinary, and disparate field of research. In ‘Cultural evolution: conceptual challenges”, Tim Lewens offers an ambitious analytical survey of this field that aims to clarify and defend its epistemic contributions, and highlight the limitations and risks associated with them. One overarching contention is that a form of population thinking dubbed the ‘kinetic approach’ should be seen as a unifying and justifying principle for cultural evolution, especially when considering the role of formal modelling. This book makes a number of extremely valuable contributions to the literature. However, I argue that not all is as it may seem regarding the kinetic approach and that, while it does little to diminish the book’s value, the use which Lewens makes for it is problematic.
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Notes
The terms are shamelessly cribbed from Sterelny (2017).
This methodology is given a cautious fleshing out in chapter 8. Psychological sciences are to be taken into account but also disciplines such as social anthropology and history; no particular methods are seen as ‘core’. On the whole, the version of cultural adaptationism endorsed is extremely leery of the kind of enthusiastic evolutionary psychology that the term might otherwise conjure up, with Lewens seeing reason “to reject the idea that reflection on the general demands faced by our ancestors in the Pleistocene will offer much heuristic insight when we come to investigate how our minds function right now” (p. 167).
If criticised for being racist, you’re not going to satisfy anyone by responding: “I’m a Nazi, of course I’m being racist”.
My thanks to Kim Sterelny for this point.
This is hardly a novel thought, as there are obvious parallels to the ‘great man theory’ of history, in contrast to economic determinism.
Robust psychological traits of the ordinary folk are apparently kosher as far as justifying kinetic mechanisms of attraction or transmission biases, so might there also be robust traits in the psychology of leadership to justify top-down regularites? Or are there macro-level effects we might consider, in analogy to the distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics perhaps?
As Lewens points out, Darwin had only the most cautious notion of culture evolving; he classifies his overall approach as ‘historical’ rather than selectionist or even kinetic.
The final sentence of the book states what he sees as the promise of cultural evolution: to “show how the natural and social sciences might ultimately be knitted back together.” p. 183.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Kim Sterelny, Rachael Brown, Christopher Lean, and the evolutionary theory reading group at the Australian National University for helpful suggestions and discussions.
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Brusse, C. Making do without selection—review essay of “Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges” by Tim Lewens. Biol Philos 32, 307–319 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-016-9560-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-016-9560-0