Bringing Darwin into the social sciences and the humanities: cultural evolution and its philosophical implications
HPLS
Bringing Darwin into the social sciences and the humanities: cultural evolution and its philosophical implications
Stefaan Blancke 0 1 2 3
Gilles Denis 0 1 2 3
0 Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University , Budapest , Hungary
1 Department of Philosophy and Moral Science, Ghent University , Ghent , Belgium
2 Cognition and Memetics
3 CNRS, UMR 8163 - STL - Savoirs Textes Langage, Universite ́ de Lille , 59000 Lille , France
In the field of cultural evolution it is generally assumed that the study of culture and cultural change would benefit enormously from being informed by evolutionary thinking. Recently, however, there has been much debate about what this ''being informed'' means. According to the standard view, an interesting analogy obtains between cultural and biological evolution. In the literature, however, the analogy is interpreted and used in at least three distinct, but interrelated ways. We provide a taxonomy in order to clarify these different meanings. Subsequently, we discuss the alternatives model of cultural attraction theory and memetics, which both challenge basic assumptions of the standard view. Finally, we briefly summarize the contributions to the special issue on Darwin in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which is the result of a collaborative project between scholars and scientists from the universities of Lille and Ghent. Furthermore, we explain how they add to the discussions about the integration of evolutionary thinking and the study of culture.
Cultural evolution culture; Cultural attraction
1 Introduction
Drawing lessons from nature in order to understand humans and human culture and,
at the same time, to prescribe and justify norms and values is a classic theme in
Western thinking. The ancient Greeks considered the cosmos not only to denote the
universe, but also to mean something like ‘‘the good order’’
(Daston and Vidal 2003;
Gottlieb 2000)
. Passages in the Bible state that the natural order created by God
implies a divine moral order (e.g., Romans 1: 20). And the popular concept of the
Great Chain of Being did not simply provide a scheme to rank all beings, but was
also used to legitimize the societal status quo (Lovejoy 1936).
It is no surprise then that, when Darwin introduced his evolutionary theory, many
thinkers seized upon evolution to both understand and justify social and political
processes. Their theories came in different shapes and sizes. Spencer and other
socalled Social Darwinists believed that Darwin’s theory, or at least their
interpretation of it, could be used to justify a society in which might made right and thus
provided the perfect excuse for England’s imperial and colonial aspirations and
abuses. Eugenicists, including Charles Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton,
believed that society should intervene in people’s reproduction to take over the
alleged role of natural selection and thus to generate physically and mentally fit
individuals that could contribute to the state, rather than depend on it. In the
introduction to the first French translation of The Origin of Species, the translator
Clemence Royer captures the high expectations of that period:
It is above all in its moral and humanitarian consequences that Darwin’s
theory is fruitful […] This theory contains in itself a whole philosophy of
nature and a whole philosophy of humanity […] It is the universal synthesis of
economic laws, social science par excellence […] We find in it the reason for
our instincts, the long-sought-for why of our manners, the mysterious origin of
the notion of duty and its vital importance for the conservation of the species.
We shall henceforth have an absolute criterion for judging what is good and
what is bad from the moral point of view. (Royer 1862, p. lviii)
However, evolution was often invoked to also justify immoral phenomena such
as social inequality, racism, and colonialism. The scientific and moral failure of
these projects resulted in a popular resentment in the social sciences and the
humanities to biological and evolutionary approaches. In recent decades, however,
scientists have brought evolutionary biology back into the study of culture, with the
intention of creating consilience between the life and the social sciences and the
humanities
(e.g., Slingerland and Collard 2012; Wilson 1998)
. These projects have
discarded all normative ambitions—although their critics have continued to accuse
them of doing exactly that—and set on the ambitious goal of developing
evolutionary approaches to human thought, behavior, and culture. New findings
in paleontology have shed an exciting new light on our evolutionary history.
Comparative studies such as in primatology suggest that human behavior and
cognition builds on capacities shared with other animals
(Boehm 1999; de Waal
1982, 1996; Goodall 1969; Smuts 1985)
. Sociobiology, an approach instigated by
Wilson (1975), sets out to describe and explain (human) group behavior i (...truncated)