Abstract
The social sciences need to take seriously their status as divisions of biology. As such they need to recognize the central role of Darwinian processes in all the phenomena they seek to explain. An argument for this claim is formulated in terms of a small number of relatively precise premises that focus on the nature of the kinds and taxonomies of all the social sciences. The analytical taxonomies of all the social sciences are shown to require a Darwinian approach to human affairs, though not a nativist or genetically driven theory by any means. Non-genetic Darwinian processes have the fundamental role on all human affairs. I expound a general account of how Darwinian processes operate in human affairs by selecting for strategies and sets of strategies individuals and groups employ. I conclude by showing how a great deal of social science can be organized in accordance with Tinbergen’s approach to biological inquiry, an approach required by the fact that the social sciences are all divisions of biology, and in particular the studies of one particular biological species.
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Notes
There is a vast literature on these two notions. To a first approximation, and for present purposes, a function can be defined as the behavior of a system’s component that meets a need, confers a benefit or provides an advantage to the system, and whose occurrence or presence is contingent on its doing so. An adaptation is a “selected effect,” a trait that has emerged through a process of Darwinian (but not necessarily genetic) selection owing to its enhancing the fitness of systems that bear it. The factual thesis that all functions are adaptations is uncontroversial in biology. That function should be defined in terms of selected effects is a somewhat controversial claim in the philosophy of biology. See Rosenberg and McShea (2008) for an introduction.
Variation is usually qualified as random, not blind. But its blindness to need or benefit is crucial. Darwin described the process he discovered as natural selection. A better label is ‘environmental filtration.’ It emphasizes the crucially passive character of the process Darwin misleadingly called ‘selection.’ I use ‘environmental filtration’ hereafter as a terminological variant on ‘natural selection’ to emphasize this point.
This notion is explained further below. Competing (and for that matter cooperating) adaptations will effect one another’s fitness, and eventually find themselves in a local equilibrium. Owing to the persistence of random variation among all traits, including adaptations, there is a constant threat that one or the other will change perhaps only slightly but enough to exploit the other adaptation. This breaks up the local equilibrium, and precipitates an “arms race” in which variations in the second adaptation that can respond to the first one’s new variant will be selected for. Thus is provoked an “arms race.”
In general, the beneficiary of a trait (such as a function) is the individual that benefits from the presence of the trait. One feature of an individual instance of a practice (or hereafter, a strategy’s feature) confers a benefit on that practice or some other practice, if it enhances the persistence of that practice or the replication of further particular instances of that practice (or strategy).
See Mackie (1996) for an introduction to Chinese foot binding in a game-theoretical framework. I am indebted here to Andres Luco.
As becomes clear below, “Darwinian processes” are construed somewhat broadly to include operant learning, which is only Darwinian selection operating ontogenetically, and other means of producing non-hard wired environmentally appropriate behavior put in place by Darwinian selection. The argument of this paper is certainly not that human institutions and behaviors are the result of selection operating on genes. Quite the contrary, Darwinian cultural selection is mainly social and only in a few early but important cases matters of dual genetic/cultural coevolutionary processes, e.g. lactose tolerance and pastoralism.
Recognizing the limitations on rational choice theory or intentional human design to be identified here does not however relegate mathematical models that employ it, or experimental and evolutionary economic results that employ it to explanatory and predictive irrelevance. Just as biological processes appear to approach optima of various sorts well modeled by attributing “design” to mother nature, the same kind of instrumental approach in the social sciences can sometimes make use of rational choice models. More on the role of models below.
There is further reason to suppose that the processes of human conscious intentional creation are themselves Darwinian ones carried out within the brain(s) of those who intend them. For the explanation of the apparently purposive creations of human intention faces the same problems as the explanation of other biological adaptations: once we have ruled out future causation, immanent teleologies or vital/spiritual forces and disembodied minds, there seems no alternative to treating brain processes that eventuate in individual actions as Darwinian ones as well. Pursuing this argument would take us into the intricacies of neuroscience. But see Dennett (1995), Campbell (1965).
See Maoz and Russett (1993). Rare dissenters from this view have invoked the US Civil War, and the belligerency of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany as counterexamples (Layne 1994), since both parties to the civil war considered themselves democracies, and Germany had an elected (if largely powerless) Reichstag. Suffice it to say that these counterexamples are controversial and have been rejected on a variety of counts. If accepted they would not undermine the argument advanced here.
Consider what was until recently thought to be the most invariant of biological regularities: all genes are composed of DNA. For a long time this regularity was subject to no exception. But because it remained invariant over a very long period, its operation provided an environment that would allow for the selection for any new biological system that could take advantage of the fact that all genes are composed of DNA. Such a system eventually came into existence—the RNA viruses, whose genes are made of RNA and which parasitize the machinery of DNA replication (the HI virus is the most notable example of these viruses). Thus, the regularity that all genes are made of DNA gives way to the regularity that they are all made of nucleic acids (either RNA or DNA). But we can be sure that the arms race of evolutionary competition will eventually undermine this new invariant regularity, by producing an alternative means of genetic transmission that exploits the regularity (unless it already has done so, by bringing about the prion protein that transmits Mad Cow disease). The same arms race between DNA and RNA and prions also disposes of another invariance of molecular biology, the so-called Central Dogma (in its strong form) that the flow of genetic information is always from DNA to RNA to proteins.
Natural selection even produces locally invariant regularities between traits that are not adapted at all, but are correlated as the by - products of traits mutually selected for. For example, consider a remarkable discovery of Darwin’s: In all mammalian species subject to domestication at least some examples are “piebald”— i.e. have spots, usually white on dark—and this trait is heritable. Darwin’s observation has since been widely confirmed, even in “natural experiments,” in domestication of hitherto wild and non-piebald species such as the mink have produced this trait. Presumably, being piebald is not an adaptation, and in general animal breeders do not select for it. The relationship between being domesticated and being piebald is nevertheless invariant, or has been hitherto. However, we pretty much know why. Domestication has always proceeded by allowing the tamest, least aggressive young to reproduce with one another. Tameness is a hereditary trait. At least some of the genes involved in tameness behavior are probably located close together on the same chromosomes as recessive genes that control for variegated coat color. Repeated interbreeding always brings out the recessive trait of piebald coat in at least some descendants. So long as those chromosomes are not broken in meiosis at points between the herd genes and the piebald genes, the regularity that domestic species have some piebald members will be invariant. But of course this generalization is evolutionarily contingent. There are several obvious circumstances—human and natural interventions—that can and some day probably will break it down. Besides a suite of mutations, a founder effect recombination that breaks the chromosomal link, or (equivalently) a persistent program of artificial selection to breed non-piebald domestic animals, there is the possibility of a new move in some arms race we have not noticed breaking the invariance. Being piebald may become an adaptational disadvantage owing to the conspicuousness or other fitness lowering effect of such marks in an evolutionary arms race with predators or parasites.
R. A. Fisher’s model of the sex ratio is a particularly powerful illustration of the restricted character of generalizations and mathematical models in biology. It is a regularity that in almost all vertebrate species, indeed in almost all sexually reproducing species, the sex ratio is 1:1—50% males, 50% females. That there is almost always, almost exactly the same number of men as women, was long treated as strong evidence of the benevolence of God. Fisher developed a mathematical model to show that the 1:1 sex ratio generalization is an adaptationally advantageous stable equilibrium that results from a Darwinian process of blind variation and passive environmental filtration. Women have varying hereditary predispositions to give birth to males or to females. Whenever the sex ratio departs from 1:1 in favor of more females, those mothers who disproportionately bare male children will have more and fitter grand children, since their sons are scarcer relative to females and can be choosier. More grand children carrying genes that favor having boys results in more boys and so moves the sex ratio back to 1:1. When ratio begins to favor males over females the same process in reverse shifts it back to 50% of each. Whence the stable sex ratio equilibrium. But of course the model gives false results for a number of species, including us. In humans the long run equilibrium sex ratio at birth is 1.05 to 1, slightly favoring male births. Why? Because boys’ mortality rates are higher than girls’, or at least were higher in the environment that selected for homo sapiens. Darwinian natural selection had to fine tune the sex ratio to make it 1:1 at sexual maturity. Doing that required more boys at birth than girls. So, the model needs to be revised: what is equalized is not the sex ratio, but the amount of parental investment in males and females. Additionally, there are several species of insects in which the sex ratio is heavily biased towards females.
I employ the term ‘meme’ here to identify whatever it is that is the replicator in Darwinian cultural evolution. At about the same time Dawkins coined the term Wilson and Lumsden (1981) introduced the word ‘culturgen’ to name whatever fills the replicator role in culture. Had things turned out differently, Wilson’s term would have become the meme for ‘memes’ instead.
In biological cases, “De-Darwinization” frequently occasions and in fact is required for reproduction and thus selection at higher levels. This will not be invariable in cases of social and cultural de-Darwinization.
The aspen trees in a grove are all parts of a single organism—ramets of a genet. They are genetic clones, the offshoots of a spreading root system, which persists and grows new buds, even as its older buds, the trees, grow up and die off. The single individual may survive thousands of years. But it remains the unit exposed to the vicissitudes of a Darwinian process. Many human institutions—packages of strategies—will be like the aspen.
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I am indebted to Sir Patrick Bateson for comments on an earlier draft. No agreement on his part with the views here expressed should be assumed.
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Rosenberg, A. Why Social Science is Biological Science. J Gen Philos Sci 48, 341–369 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-017-9365-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-017-9365-0