On Wed, 5 Jul 1995, Ronald Deibert wrote:
> On Sanderson's comments re: sociobiology.
>
> I too have problems with those who attempt a unified explanation of
> social phenomena based on biological theories. When I said that
> evolutionary theories of the non-teleogical sort were becoming
> more popular among social scientists studying "big history", I meant
> that they were employing ideas such as path-dependency and contingency
> to illuminate social processes, and in particular, as a means to rectify
> the predominance of master or grand narratives, such as progressive
> stages of development through which all societies are assumed to pass,
> or "logics" of successive modes of production.
Whether coincidentally or not, one of the early fights of
theories of biological evolution was against the Lamarckian ladder of
life, which was a progressive chain of development through which all
species were assumed to pass. But, of course, reproduction of social
institutions through enculturation in childhood is Lamarckian in the
sense that modifications in individual behavior may be passed on; and
even further removed from biological evolution are reproduction of
institutions through emulation and assimilation. So in regards the
question,
> But an interesting epistemological question is raised by the metaphoric
> use of such concepts in the social sciences. Are Darwinist
> metaphors (and here I mean to exclude Spencerian Social Darwinist
> ideas) useful merely because there are an interesting
> "way to look at" the world around us?
an explicitly evolutionary approach to the study of social change should
be wary of ocer-reliance on Darwinist metaphors, and in particular a
trying to integrate theories of biological and social evolution before
the latter is well developed is putting the cart before the horse. In
fact, given biology's fight to maintain that biology cannot be reduced to
chemistry, efforts to reduce the study of society to biology are not on
the soundest of foundations. Use of Darwinian metaphors, or reductionist
appeals directly to biological evolutionary theory, merely shy away from
the harder task of understanding social evolution and other forms of
social change in their own right. A task that, BTW, LTC does not shy
away from. So I guess that's a cut back to the regularly scheduled
discussion, already in progress.
Virtually,
Bruce McFarling, Knoxville
brmcf@utkux1.utk.edu