Abstract
Evolutionary theory has outgrown its natural habitat. Increasingly, researchers outside biology frame their questions and results in evolutionary terms, and propose counterparts to mechanisms and entities that are central to our understanding of the organic world. This “second Darwinian revolution” has not escaped philosophical scrutiny. Critical reflections (e.g., Sober 1991) have focused mostly on general theories of cultural evolution, such as dual-inheritance theory (Boyd and Richerson 1985), or on general issues such as the lack of clarity and unanimity concerning the unit and level of selection. However, research in evolutionary economics, engineering and archaeology rarely mentions general frameworks such as dual-inheritance theory and only occasionally discuss the possibilities of defining suitably general evolutionary concepts. Instead, the results reported are gained by applying specific tools and techniques to problems within a particular discipline. This paper focuses on one example of these “local” efforts at Darwinizing culture, namely phylogenetic reconstructions of tool traditions, as recently given by evolutionary archaeologists.
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- 1.
Whether phylogenetic analyses provide evidence for the homology-analogy distinction is a thorny issue. It is left aside here, because it affects applications in biology as much as those in archaeology.
- 2.
The consistency index (CI) is the ratio between the minimum possible number of character changes and the number of changes on the resulting tree. The retention index (RI) is a slightly more complicated ratio that does not depend on the size of the data set.
- 3.
Another choice is to focus on the characters of artefacts instead of those of, e.g., use practices or larger cultural units.
- 4.
- 5.
O’Brien and Lyman (2000, 207–213) summarize this so-called “Ford-Spaulding” debate.
- 6.
This contrast between biology and archaeology is drawn only to clarify the relevance of phylogenetic reconstructions for archaeology, not to analyse the relation between phylogenetic reconstructions, classification and explanation in biology.
- 7.
- 8.
Many evolutionary archaeologists stipulate, following Dunnell (1978), that natural selection operates on functional features, and that stylistic features are subject to drift. Qualitative arguments against this function-style distinction (Hurt and Rakita 2001) are supported by first results of modeling (e.g., Brantingham 2007). This demonstrates the present difficulties and uncertainties regarding the extension of population-level explanations to artefacts.
- 9.
See Laurence and Margolis (2007) for philosophical discussion and psychological research on artefact kinds.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments on a previous version. Research for this paper was made possible by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
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Houkes, W. (2012). Tales of Tools and Trees: Phylogenetic Analysis and Explanation in Evolutionary Archaeology. In: de Regt, H., Hartmann, S., Okasha, S. (eds) EPSA Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009. The European Philosophy of Science Association Proceedings, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2404-4_9
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