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Cultural evolution: A new paradigm for the social sciences?
In biology, Darwinian evolutionary theory is a powerful tool to explain the differentiation and change of life forms, their adaptation to ecological niches, and their interdependence in ecosystems. Through the interplay of three basic processes: random variation, environmental selection, and differential reproduction, evolutionary theories can explain how complex adaptations emerge and how some life forms proliferate while others perish. Mainstream social science has paid little attention to evolution. An important reason is that it is often associated with genetic determinism, understandable in the light of the abuse that racist and sexist ideologies have made of evolutionary and genetic arguments. In addition, genetic explanations seem to offer limited purchase for explaining the vast amount of change that has occurred in human societies over time spans much too short for significant genetic change, as well as the important differences among contemporary societies. However, evolutionary processes do not necessarily require genes and DNA as their information substrate. Variation, selection and reproduction may also shape the evolution of the social and cultural repertoires that are central to sociology and political science, such as norms, values, institutions, and technologies. This is the core insight of theories of cultural evolution that have recently been advanced from a variety of disciplinary angles, particularly anthropology, psychology, economics, as well as by biologists interested in the evolution of human societies. In this seminar we discuss various theoretical perspectives that apply evolutionary thinking to human societies. These include both theories that focus on interactions between genes and culture (sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, gene-culture co-evolution), and theories of genuine cultural evolution (cultural group selection, biased transmission/emulation, memetics) that treat culture as an independent, second system of inheritance that is, however, governed by a similar interplay of variation, selection, and reproduction as biological life. Can human cultures be viewed as the continuation of evolution by other means? Do cultural evolutionary theories offer a new paradigm for the social sciences to answer the big questions of human social life, which can move us beyond the limits of existing perspectives, such as functionalism, modernization theory and rational choice? These are the questions that are central to this seminar and that will be discussed referring both to key theoretical texts, and to concrete empirical examples. |
