Human By Nature

Between Biology and the Social Sciences

Peter Weingart, Sandra D. Mitchell, Peter J. Richerson, Sabine Maasen, Peter Weingart, Sandra D. Mitchell, Peter J. Richerson, Sabine Maasen

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134799619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Representing a wide range of disciplines -- biology, sociology, anthropology, economics, human ethology, psychology, primatology, history, and philosophy of science -- the contributors to this book recently spent a complete academic year at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) discussing a plethora of new insights in reference to human cultural evolution. These scholars acted as a living experiment of "interdisciplinarity in vivo." The assumption of this experiment was that the scholars -- while working and residing at the ZiF -- would be united intellectually as well as socially, a connection that might eventually enhance future interdisciplinary communication even after the research group had dispersed. An important consensus emerged: The issue of human culture poses a challenge to the division of the world into the realms of the "natural" and the "cultural" and hence, to the disciplinary division of scientific labor. The appropriate place for the study of human culture, in this group's view, is located between biology and the social sciences. Explicitly avoiding biological and sociological reductionisms, the group adopted a pluralistic perspective -- "integrative pluralism" -- that took into account both today's highly specialized and effective (sub-)disciplinary research and the possibility of integrating the respective findings on a case-by-case basis. Each sub-group discovered its own way of interdisciplinary collaboration and submitted a contribution to the present volume reflecting one of several types of fruitful cooperation, such as a fully integrated chapter, a multidisciplinary overview, or a discussion between different approaches. A promising first step on the long road to an interdisciplinarily informed understanding of human culture, this book will be of interest to social scientists and biologists alike.

PART I

CONTEXTS

INTRODUCTION: BRIDGES BETWEEN BIOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

In Part I, the various perspectives on the biological foundations of human culture found in Parts II and II are set into three different contexts: (a) historical disciplinary development, (b) sociopolitical history, and (c) philosophical and methodological reflection. The reasons for this threefold contextualization are as follows.

The discussion of disciplinary history sheds light on what have often been long and intricate conflicts over the demarcation of disciplinary boundaries, in particular between the biological and social sciences. Any attempt to cross the boundary between biology and the social sciences makes visible the connections and reveals the blind spots created by these disciplinary divisions. Past history is still present in the definition of concepts, the images created by them, and, above all, in the resistance to interdisciplinary interactions. For these reasons, awareness of the sources of potential misunderstandings can help focus attention on real, rather than spurious, disagreements.

Likewise, the sociopolitical context has played, and continues to play, an enormously important role in shaping the discourses on “biology” and “society.” Biological categories such as race, and inheritance or genetic makeup or metaphors such as the struggle for existence have assumed ideological functions in the political arena and at times have been invoked to legitimate discrimination and oppression, taking such extreme forms as mass murder.

Reactions to the most notorious associations of biological science and social policy have intervened in scientific debate in attempts to give political and public support to a variety of positions and counterpositions. In this process, the demarcation line between biology and the social sciences is fortified by societal memory, and appears even more insurmountable than ever before. To engage in interdisciplinary programs that presume that biology has something important to contribute to social science, one must understand the ways in which ideology has traveled between science and policy.

Finally, an overly strong defense of the autonomy of the social sciences which precludes any fruitful interactions with the biological sciences, is predicated on the false dichotomy between reduction and isolation. This image of science emerges from a methodological goal of global unification. A third, pluralistic conception of the place of the various scientific theories and their integration in explanation provides the methodological foundation to support the types of strategies described in the remainder of the book. There is much to be gained from interdisciplinary transactions, but to reap the benefits both the promise and the problems must be acknowledged.

Part I attempts to smooth the ground to building bridges between the biological and social sciences. The discussions that follow represent a variety of efforts, incorporating differing assumptions about how to do just that. The more abstract and programmatic messages of Part I have not all been integrated into the analyses that make up the remainder of the book. We believe that progress in this important domain of science is made through the continuing dialogue among these positions, in conjunction with reflection on their historical, sociopolitical, and methodological presumptions and implications. This book is a contribution to that dialogue.

1

LOOKING BACK: HISTORICAL AND
THEORETICAL CONTEXT OF PRESENT
PRACTICE

Jonathan H. Turner

University of California Riverside

Leda Cosmides

University of California Santa Barbara

Geoffrey Hodgson

University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Stephen J. Shennan

University College London London

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

University of California Davis

Bernhard Giesen

Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany

Alexandra M. Maryanski

University of California Riverside

John Tooby

University of Californi Santa Barbara

Boris M. Velichkovsky

Dresden University of Technology Dresden, Germany

The various social sciences emerged as distinct modes of inquiry in the latter part of the 19th century. Enlightenment thinking about the inevitable march of human progress was coupled with a metaphorical use of concepts and terms from the other established sciences of physics and biology. The transfer of metaphors between areas of inquiry, back and forth and back again, has characterized scholarly discourse on nature, society, and humans. As this volume seeks to demonstrate, this discourse has entered a new, and potentially revolutionary, phase. Yet in the past, images and concepts that described one phenomenon were borrowed as analogies to describe the other. When the discrepancies between the images of such analogies and the objects they were supposed to represent, as well as the implicit values attached to them, became apparent, biology and the social sciences diverged. Thus, the question of the role of biological thinking in the social sciences is as old as the social sciences.

However, the past borrowings from biology by the various disciplines and subdisciplines do not afford a unitary interpretation of evolutionary theory, nor do they display uniformity of impact. As is explored in this chapter, the fate of biological ideas in sociology, anthropology, archaeology, economics, and psychology has been uneven: Sometimes they flourished in a discipline, and other times they languished at the margin. In anthropology and sociology, biological arguments greatly influenced the early phases of these disciplines. Indeed, many ideas from the pre- and post-Darwinian period were incorporated into the emerging conceptual cores of sociology and anthropology. But even in these cases, the influence of biology was to wane, even in fields such as anthropology which, in America at least, had kept its biological wing within the discipline. Other social science disciplines, such as economics, political science, and psychology, have all flirted with biological ideas, but have nonetheless kept them somewhat at the margins. Even psychology, which Darwin had entered and in which physiology and neurology have always been components, has not been greatly influenced by biology until recently. Still, there is a new rapprochement with biology in all of the social sciences. If this new spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry is not to falter, as have past periods of interchange, we need to know something of what occurred in the past, where concepts were borrowed back and forth between the social and biological sciences.

However, more than mere historical curiosity guides this review of the history of interchange between the social sciences and biology. If the current receptiveness to true conceptual interchange is to remain on track, it is important to understand where it went wrong in the past and, perhaps equally important, where it was on track, but somehow became sidetracked and pushed to the margins of a discipline. If we do not know what occurred in the past, we are potentially doomed to make the same mistakes as our scholarly forbearers.

There are additional reasons to be concerned with history. One is that current approaches within the social sciences are still subtly influenced by their past connection to biology, although this connection has often been lost as new vocabularies have been adopted within each of the social sciences. Yet another is to document the loss of early insights that have had to be rediscovered in the present era, and hence, to warn against a similar loss in the future. Another reason to examine history is to reveal that the borrowing of ideas from biology was not just one way. Biology borrowed from the social sciences, as is most evident in Darwin’s use of Malthus’ essay on population, Hughlings–Jackson’s reliance of Spencer’s views on differentiation and hierarchy, and, more recently, Maynard Smith’s adaptation of game theory to evolutionary equilibria. A final reason to pay attention to history is to learn that the social science disciplines were not always so well insulated from each other, and that if biology and the social sciences are to once again influence each other, the boundaries among the social sciences disciplines need to be reexamined to see what they once had in common.

We need not adopt E. O. Wilson’s somewhat arrogant belief that sociobiology would be the basis for the “new synthesis” to recognize that the use of biological ideas within the social sciences may represent an important way to bridge disciplinary boundaries. Hence, there are good reasons to look back at the history of the social sciences and their involvement with biology before we look forward to the creative use of biological concepts and models in the social sciences today.

The purpose of this chapter is not to present a comprehensive history of these disciplines. Rather, it offers reflections by contemporary theorists on the past and current impact of biology in each of their disciplines. The situating of contemporary attempts to bridge disciplinary gulfs between social sciences and biology within their respective contexts is necessary both for understanding the significance of the current foray into what have been embattled territories and for eluding the traps of potential confusion and misunderstanding.

BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY

Jonathan H. Turner, Alexandra M. Maryanski, and Bernhard Giesen

Sociology and economics share common roots in the work of Adam Smith (1776 [1937]), who posed the central problem that was to guide the use of biological metaphors in sociology as they were blended with Newtonian physics and Enlightenment philosophy. For Smith, the key dilemma of modern society was the division of labor: If societies were to reveal ever more specialization of activities, what force was to hold this diversity together? A similar question consumed the French Philosophers. In the first decades of the 19th century, Auguste Comte (1830–1842) merged the British and French wings of the Enlightenment into a discipline that, in deference to Newtonian mechanics, he initially termed social physics and later sociology. In seeking to forge sociology as a “positivistic” social science, Comte turned to biology. Sociology was to arise out of biology in the hierarchy of the sciences, and, once developed, was to inform biology. But aside from superficial analogies between society and organisms, Comte’s linking of sociology with biology seems to have been primarily a legitimating ploy to make sociology respectable—by associating it with what was fast becoming the most respected of all the sciences.

It was Herbert Spencer (1874–1896 [1898]) who systematically incorporated biological concepts into sociology and, in so doing, articulated three lines of biosocial thinking. One was a sophisticated developmentalism, or stage model of human history ranging from simple to complex societal forms. Another was a revived organicism, or the drawing of analogies between organic and superorganic (societal) bodies. A third was selectionism, or the view that a driving force behind the evolution of superorganic bodies was conflict and selection of the fittest. Each of these modes of thinking about society was to be developed more fully in the post-Darwinian era, but the seeds for all three were clearly evident in Spencer’s synthetic philosophy. Spencer is a key figure in establishing the basic way sociologists and other social scientists still use biological and evolutionary thinking.

Spencer’s initial borrowing from biology involved an analogy between the growth of an organism and the development of a society. Before Darwin, evolutionary thinking often focused on how a single cell becomes a multicellular organism, and hence developmental and evolutionary ideas were often fused. In particular, the embryology of van Haller, Bonnet, Wolf, and, most important, Karl Ernst von Baer was critical of Spencer’s analogy to organismic development. Spencer’s view that societal evolution involves a movement from “homogeneity” to “heterogeneity” was taken from von Baer’s work on embryology and cell theory. It was then blended with notions from physics about “matter,” “motion,” and “force” to form a general “law of evolution” for all domains of the universe—organic, superorganic, psychological, inorganic, and ethical. Thus, by employing an embryological, rather than Darwinian, analogy, Spencer saw, as a process of growth and differentiation, a conceptual emphasis followed by virtually every sociologist since Spencer.

Only well after Darwin did evolutionism become associated with the notion of “descent with modification” through selection processes as these affect heritable variation. With Darwinian theory, the emphasis was on speciation through competition and selection, whereas with pre-Darwinian thinking, the concern was about growth and development. Ironically, the most Darwinian sounding ideas in Spencer’s philosophy (i.e., competition and the “survival of the fittest”) predate his major scientific treatises on biology (H. Spencer, 1864–1867 [1887]), psychology (H. Spencer, 1854–1855), and sociology (H. Spencer, 1873, 1874–1896 [1898]). As Spencer moved into sociology in the 1870s, he was more apt to emphasize organicism and developmentalism. Yet curiously, it is H. Spencer’s (1852 [1888]) early, more philosophical tracts on “survival of the fittest” that are most remembered. Even when H. Spencer (1874–1896 [1898]) employed selectionist arguments in his sociology, these are group-selectionist in tone: Better organized societies are more “fit” and can conquer, annex, and assimilate less organized societies, and thus over the long course of human history, war has been a force in increasing the scale and complexity of societies. In these arguments, societies are the units of competition, selection, and adaptation. This position is still dominant in modern theorizing in sociology that employs selectionist models.

Spencer’s other modes of thinking are also still prominent. His analogies between organisms and society ultimately represent the logic of modern functionalism (J. H. Turner & Maryanski, 1979), where a socio-cultural part is analyzed with respect to its functions for the operation, maintenance, and adaptation of the larger social whole. In his more functional analyses, which are explored in more detail in chapter 6, he implicitly introduced another kind of selectionist argument: The potential for disintegration or “dissolution” of a population creates selection pressures for new kinds of social structures in the absence of density and competition among structures (i.e., selection often works without an existing range of variation on which competition and selection can operate).

Spencer’s construction of an evolutionary stage model, where basic types of historical societies are arrayed along an assumed evolutionary continuum from simple to complex, is still the dominant way sociologists think about evolution (e.g., G. Lenski, 1966; G. Lenski, J. Lenski, & Nolan, 1991; Maryanski & J. H. Turner, 1992; Parsons, 1966, 1971; Sanderson, 1990; J. H. Turner, 1972, 1984). Indeed, Spencer’s model is by far the best of all the 19th-century models constructed by sociologists and anthropologists.

In the late decades of the 19th century, and well into the first two decades of the 20th-century, some sociological theorizing became intertwined with Darwinian metaphors, although it should be emphasized, once again, that the most prevalent mode of evolutionary thinking in sociology was, and still is, the non-Darwinian stage model, which, it can be argued (e.g., Nisbett, 1969), represents the continued influence of Enlightenment thinking about human “progress” (especially the French who provided the vision of progress for Saint-Simon, Comte, de Tocqueville, and Durkheim, but also the lineage of German idealism from Hegel through Marx and on to Habermas and his disciples in contemporary social theory). Notions of competition and selection were often blended with organicism in Europe, particularly after the widespread translation of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, published in 1880 (cited in Barnes, 1925). Beginning in the 1870s, Lilienfeld (1873–1881; 1898), Schaffle (1875–1878), and Worms (1896) all sought to extend Spencerian organismic analogies to social systems. Although Lilienfeld went so far as to argue that society is an organism, most of these thinkers simply repeated Spencer’s views that societies and organisms reveal some common processes (e.g., growth and development, size and differentiation, structural and functional interdependence). These analogies were undergirded by a view of societal development (i.e., growth, differentiation, interdependence, decline, and death) as being driven by competition and selection. True to Enlightenment thinking, scholars like Schaffle could conclude that “the progressing formation of society (civilization) is the highest result of perfecting selection of human struggles for life.” (p. 3)

Other Europeans, such as Gumplowicz (1875), pursued a more explicitly Spencerian, geopolitical argument: As humans evolved, they formed heterogeneous groupings, which, inevitably, came into conflict over resources; the conquered were often exterminated, but eventually the state was created for political subjugation; once the state existed, internal conflicts increased, leading to assimilation of diverse groups to mitigate such conflicts. Thus, in Gumplowicz’s view, societal evolution had revolved around war, internal conflicts, state formation, amalgamation, and assimilation. Others (e.g., Ratzenhofer, 1881) pursued these ideas, although they saw selection for the political state primarily as a response to internal conflicts.

These approaches all appeared in early 20th-century texts of the first generation of American sociologists (e.g., Ward, 1903; Small, 1905). It was William Graham Sumner’s student and colleague, Albert Galloway Keller (1915), who, in his Societal Evolution, sought to use Darwinian concepts as replacements for Spencer’s ideas about evolution as movement from incoherent homogeneous to coherent heterogeneous. Instead, Keller proposed that notions of variation, selection, transmission, and adaptation should be used in the analysis of societal evolution. Drawing on Sumner’s (1906) conception of “mores,” as well as his ongoing collaborative work with Sumner (Sumner & Keller, 1927), Keller anticipated modern coevolutionary theory’s emphasis on cultural symbols and memes, arguing that certain variations in mores are selected and then transmitted (through imitation and education) when they increase the adaptation of groups (rather than individuals) to an environment.

Accompanying this kind of sophisticated analysis in both Europe and the United States was, unfortunately, a more sinister ideological argument: Social Darwinism (Hofstadter, 1945). Keller’s mentor, Sumner (1914), was the most vociferous advocate of the view, in...