Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031333583
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

11.11 Conclusion

Kevin Laland and his fellow gene-culture coevolutionists have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of how human social evolution works. Yet, when he invokes the electric pylons, cars, brick buildings and chimneys outside his window, he can do no more than gesture towards explaining a set of phenomena that he and his colleagues lack the tools to understand. My paper makes no pretense of being able to fill in the requisite details in a manner that would turn Laland’s industrial (or is it postindustrial?) scene into something more intellectually akin to Darwin’s entangled bank. I will readily acknowledge that the strategy I have outlined in these pages poses many challenges of comprehension and implementation. As currently formulated, my four-level scheme – with its complex interaction of multi-level units following multiple, overlapping logics of societal selection and/or transformation, must sometimes seem like a Rube Goldberg monstrosity. With its warren of feedback loops and contingent agent interventions along almost incomprehensibly jagged pathways, it promises to take us through an n-dimensional evolutionary landscape that can be visualized only with greatest difficulty, and whose outcome may not be predictable, and is certainly not guaranteed.

The most that I can say in advocating for this program is simply that it avoids the defects of the only two alternative approaches to the same objective that have each been tried over many decades but have repeatedly failed. On the one side stand the hulking ruins of those once vaunted grand monocausal evolutionary theories, with their breathtaking etic and nomothetic ambitions, which would reduce the entire record of human species development to a single overarching logical dynamic of political, economic, or cultural/intellectual change. On the other side stand the still on-going deluge of ad hoc multi-causal scholarly explanations that are offered by today’s social scientists and historians in a seductive spirit of epistemological modesty, but which only seem to work when they are confined to explaining a narrow range of empirical data, within very constrained time/place parameters. The dangers of the monocausal grand theories are indeed avoided in the best exemplars of this proudly emic and idiographic specialist scholarship. But this hazard of hubris is averted only at the cost of eschewing responsibility for explaining how the limited conclusions laboriously arrived at in each micro-study can be reconciled with the conclusions of other studies that draw on a different set of research questions, and an alternative constellation of empirical evidence. The vain hope that all these incommensurable micro-studies in a host of divergent disciplines might somehow spontaneously self-assemble into some general pattern of social scientific understanding is a naïve fantasy that most practitioners have abandoned a long time ago.

In one sense, I suppose, the schema I am advocating can be understood as an attempt to replace the defunct monocausal evolutionary theories of old with an approach that jettisons their toxic features and fraudulent universalism, while rescuing what remains viable within them to offer a provisional organizing framework for the findings that more modest, nominalist, empirical scholarship has turned up.

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