Nature and History

The Evolutionary Approach for Social Scientists

Ignazio Masulli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000063677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Originally published in 1990, Nature and History examines how Darwin's theory of evolution has been expanded by scholars and researchers to include virtually every scientific discipline. The book presents a morphological analysis of historical and social sciences – sciences which have traditionally have been viewed as too random in their progressions to conform to a model. Through the evaluation of empirical and factual evidence, the book builds a case for an evolutionary paradigm which encompasses both natural and social sciences, and presents the form's adaptiveness in working historical models.

PART ONE:

The paradigm of form

CHAPTER 1

Synthesis of Biological and Psychological Processes

The last few decades have witnessed some astonishing advances and achievements in science. This has brought about a situation where we can no longer view the evolution of nature and of man, his behavior, his form of organization, or his very thought, in the more traditional, more stock terms of our culture. Yet again science has forged ahead far beyond the conceptions we cling to, of ourselves, our lives; and this advance has come about not merely in the common way of such things, it pushes beyond many of the categories still predominant in the organization of scientific knowledge. The very grammar of this knowledge is changing before our eyes, demanding that we adopt new paradigms.

Several of the findings of contemporary science have contributed to new applications and substantiations of a basic question that has never been absent from the background and has often been touched upon or openly mooted. Today it can once again be raised in all its theoretical implications.

Can evolution, progressing by stages and degrees, from the simplest to the most complex forms, be subjected to a “historical reading”? So numerous and of such moment are the contributions of recent developments in the sciences, that even as regards the two points of evolution where the qualitative leap seemed at its most striking—that of the origins of life and that of human thought—we may assert with Jacob that today “physics dissolves in the study of the cell as biology dissolves in the study of man”.¹

The findings and developments of molecular biology, genetics, embryology, population genetics, the biology of evolution and palaeontology, on the one hand, and the achievements of neurophysiology, the biology of knowledge, genetic psychology and the theory of cognition on the other, have led to an extensive reappraisal of the phenomena and conceptions regarding man’s natural and cultural evolution. An important part has also been played in these achievements by the so-called “transverse disciplines”: cybernetics, systems theory, information theory.

The emergence of new perspectives and new scientific paths in seemingly more distant research fields, such as non-equilibrium thermodynamics, non-linear chemistry, and the dynamic systems theories in the area of theoretical mathematics, not to speak of the social sciences and cosmology—all have lent further scope and diversification to the overall picture.

On the basis of this scientific pluralism the problem has been posed as to how to establish an epistemology of complexity that shall be capable of accounting for “those articulations that are destroyed by the separations between disciplines, between cognitive categories and types of knowledge”².

The study of complex systems, independently of whatever specific field of investigation they belong to, now enables us to deal in more general terms with the problems of evolution³. But we must be ready to abandon several of our more traditional perspectives and points of reference. Among these the relationship between biological evolution and man’s cultural evolution is foremost in posing the greatest problems of conceptual revision.

These are no longer questions arising out of the Darwinian perspective, however viable that perspective may still substantially be. We can no longer rest content merely to trace the history of human evolution, of the determining of superior traits in the evolution of the human species that characterize it in some special way and mark it off from some other species or other outcomes, different yet contiguous, in the course of evolution. The problems are quite new ones, engendered by the latest findings of biological, cognitive and systems sciences; and even as they repropound the problem of the relation between the biological and the cultural evolution of man, so they shift this problem to a different qualitative plane.

To sum up, we stand at the crossroads of epistemological problems and the findings in various research fields—m biology, psychology, sociology and the sciences of cognition⁴.

The relation between two levels of man’s evolution represents a junction at which several new research hypotheses converge and from which new paths branch out towards different results.

In the meanwhile, the terms “biological” and “cultural” are themselves in process of thorough-going redefinition. On the one hand, the biological elements reveal themselves to be of ever greater consequence and function, so much so as to break the bounds within which they were traditionally confined. On the other hand, the cultural elements, when analyzed as to certain of their essential and recurrent characteristics, disclose such deep substrata of acquisition and elaboration as to require thorough reappraisal of the patterns and significances of the demarcations that have traditionally circumscribed that “other” realm, the realm of culture.

Far-reaching and radical these redefinitions may be; but it is in the study of these new connexions that we ultimately come face to face with the problem of the relationship between the two levels of evolution, the biological and the cultural.

How far should we consider biological evolution as the “basis” for explanatory models of man’s behavior and cognitive functions? In what way do the genetic “dictate”, the heredity “historically” amassed by the species and the refinements continually performed at the first level, open out onto the second level? And what is their relation to the evolution of man’s thought and action on the second, the cultural level?

The genetic dictate and the heredity amassed by the species clearly cannot be considered as a finished datum in itself, something on the “basis” of which is grafted and unfolded the current, eminently cultural history of man’s latest achievements in knowledge and organizations; in which case, how should we view the “vertical” axis of the cultural-biological relationship? There is, too, another so-called “horizontal” dimension, which also belongs with the traditional way of conceiving the relation between the two levels: it sees cultural evolution as history, as having followed a biological evolution now concluded—how should we reappraise this in the light of the latest findings of science?

As regards both dimensions of the relationship, it can be seen that there is plenty of scope for presupposing a solution of continuity from the biological level to the cultural level. But each time this solution is once more posited, and however it is advanced, it results in a non-explanation, a sort of a posteriori annullment of that relationship; ultimately, a recoil from examining and reappraising all those linkages between man’s cultural and biological dimensions towards which so many of the latest developments in science have pointed. And this leads to the positing of an eminently theoretical problem, that of reformulating the terms of the relationship.

Piaget rightly remarked that the “reconstruction” performed by human knowledge, starting from the bursting of instinct, is actually so thorough-going that it has kept many theorists of knowledge aloof from the need to explain it “by going back to the obviously necessary frameworks of the living organization”⁵.

But cybernetics, advances in neurophysiology and new approaches to the problem of knowledge, interwoven with the expansion and elaboration of topics in the field of evolutionary biology, were to underline this need once again. And already by the mid-sixties a whole series of findings which the study of evolution had amassed had to be taken into account⁶.

On the basis of these premises, in their general implications, and to the extent that the hereditary tools of knowledge were more directly referred to, Piaget was able to go ahead with his biological interpretation of the higher forms of knowledge.

Cognitive regulation began by using the tools generally employed by organic adaptation: heredity and phenotypic accommodation. But with the final emergence of instinct,—which leads to a dissociation of its two components, internal organization and phenotypic accommodation—we get a complementary reconstruction in opposite directions, leading to the dual formation of logical-mathematical structures and experimental knowledge⁷.

Thus Piaget can assert that, as far as its content is concerned, thought starts from scratch, but it is functionally prepared, not only by sensory-motor and nervous coordinations but also, and more fundamentally, by everything that the nervous functions have, in turn, inherited from the organic functions as a whole. “It must, indeed, be clearly understood that the general organizational conditions that we proposed…. as a possible basis for logico-mathematical structurations are not, chronologically speaking, initial ones, but generalized and at work all the time”⁸.

Thus the mechanisms which they (general conditions of organization) determine can very well serve as objects for the reflective abstractions that characterize thoughts. In other words, logical-mathematical structures extend the general organizing function common to all living systems, both because this function is present in action and in the nervous system, and because the reflective abstractions cannot be said to have an absolute beginning but, rather, can be retraced to the “convergent reconstructions with overtakings”⁹.

As for experimental knowledge (a higher form of learning), it differs from, but is closely linked with, logical-mathematical knowledge. This is very important in as much as “to say that physical knowledge is an assimilation of the real world into logico-mathematical structures amounts, in fact, to affirming…. that the organization belonging to a subject or to any living creature is a condition of exchanges with environment and cognitive exchanges, just as much as it is a condition of material and energy exchanges. In this respect, conceptual and operational “forms” appear yet again as the extension of organic “forms”¹⁰.

Formulations like these were later to be resumed or reworked in research and in theoretical elaboration. To this we shall return later on in the book. But as regards the elements considered hitherto, it must already be apparent that the configuration of the relation between the biological and the cultural levels of evolution may be seen, quite wrongly and unsatisfactorily, as one of subordination, whereby the one level constitutes a “basis” for the other, with an irremovable demarcation between them.

In actual fact, the acquisitions, the elaborations, the achievements at biological level interact and link up with cultural findings at every point and passage of human evolution. Far from being a precisely delimited datum, no longer subject to change, or merely underlying, the biological level not only influences or acts upon the cultural level but actually opens onto the entire unravelling that may be possible at cultural level¹¹.

Just as the acquisitions and elaborations of the cultural level comprehend the biological level, i.e. include a biological content; and this content comprehends and unfolds in the evolution that pertains to it. In other words, cultural evolution is also, simultaneously, biological; as biological evolution is also, simultaneously cultural.

The second, as it were “horizontal” dimension of the relationship has rather to do with the continuity from that which precedes to that which follows in man’s biological and cultural evolution. In this case, too, traditional logic, purely linear and consequential, delimiting what precedes in terms of what follows, may conceive it as minus habens and may easily establish an improper hierarchy in the horizontal and temporal dimensions of evolution as well.

Once again we find ourselves face to face with a “mysterious” solution of continuity: the relationship is not really explained and the continuity is interrupted only because to the second level is assigned what is denied to the first. Or so it would be, were it not for the fact that, once again, the latest findings and tendencies of research suggest that the continuity between the two levels of human evolution has a much greater significance.

The ever more obvious relevance in human thought and action of all that is implied in the heritage of our species—an evolving heritage, not merely acquired and transmitted but also constantly enriched at each stage of evolution—calls for the complete revision of the merely consequential relation between the first and second levels. To put it another way, we can no longer conceive of a relationship between biological and cultural evolution such that, “at a certain point”, the “historical” result of what took place on the first level determined the conditions necessary for the second level to “begin”.

Here, too, within...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One The Paradigm of Form
• Part Two Morphological Analysis Applied to Historical Phenomena
• Bibliography to Part One
• Bibliography to Part Two