On Thu, 6 Jul 1995, Douglas C Wilson wrote:
> > The question for me is what will be gained from borrowing words from the
> life sciences, changing their meanings here and there and then trying to apply
> them to society? The example offered on individualism here is a traditional
> historicist analysis with the word "niche" tacked on at the end. 1) I don't see
> that the niche concept adds anything concrete.
To the contrary, I think that much more is gained than you portray here. The
idea that history has a purpose or a telos runs strong in the social
sciences even today, as does the idea of grounding theories in fundamental
presuppositions which are universal (ie., timeless, contextless) and
which escape history -- notions of rationality, of the unfolding logic
of successive modes of production, etc.
2) The logic of evolutionary
> thinking is closely related to historicism and hence is open to the same sorts
> of criticism. The reason it ends up looking like historicism is because on
> the way from biology to sociology it has to drop the concrete mechansim - i.e.
> natural selection through reproduction - than gives it its power in biology.
I think you are misunderstanding what I mean by employing Darwinian metaphors
and evolutionary thinking. Here you are equating evolutionary thinking
with historicism. While i realize that there is a great deal of this
kind of baggage associated with evolutionary thinking in the social sciences,
I was suggesting quite the opposite: that ideas such as "path dependency"
and "contingency" and "fitness" might illuminate the way in which
institutions evolve over the course of time, in particular as a way to
*counter* historicism.
3)
> I would question how much it would be able to free us from our current blinders
> in light of the fact that evolution, adaptation, and selection is among the
> oldest and most frequently used set of concepts in sociology.
>
My belief is that static, mechanistic Newtonian metaphors predominate
in the social sciences today. Moreover, the evolutionary concepts that
have long been employed in the social sciences as you correctly point
out, are, I am suggesting, misinterpretations, borrowed from Spencerian
views of Darwin and evolution. But you may be right that because of
this baggage, it might not be a useful metaphor.
In any case, others are probably getting tired of this side-track,
and I initially opened up the discussion merely to second Sanderson
that evolutionary thinking still has some utility in the social
sciences.
> Doug Wilson
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