From social evolutionism to biocultural evolutionism

Abstract

A brief review of the evolutionism of Comte, Marx, Spencer, and Durkheim, representatives of the Masters, reveals an excessive concern with the integration of differentiation. This represents their most common feature, but neither it nor anything else adds up to a definite evolutionary theory. An antithetical convergence, with Comte excluded, refers to a varying utilization of the Darwinian “mechanism,” natural selection. It is not clear, however, that the masters fully grasped the meaning of natural selection, or indeed that this could be understood unequivocally. As a result they failed to convey unambiguously a fundamental interest in evolution to subsequent generations of social scientists. A period of estrangement from evolutionary theory ensued in which the focus seemed to shift from social evolution to social change. By the 1950s, sociology and anthropology experienced a revival of evolutionary interest largely in the form of a reiteration of old conceptions and problems. A critical glance at evolutionary biology reveals, next, an ambiguity in the concept of natural selection when understood as ultimate cause and mechanism of evolution. The basic significance of the evolutionistic alliance known as sociobiology lies in the latter's partial redressing of the ambiguity by way of the “maximization principle.” Equally important, indeed complementary, is the sociobiological appeal to the social sciences for help to discover the environmental parameters that impinge on the principle — and thus for a contribution to the development of a biocultural model. A few examples of biocultural theorizing follow that show varying degrees of systemic dependence between the biological and the cultural. The basic nomothetic thrust of the emerging biocultural model is to emphasize the adaptive paths along which cultural phenomena are likely to evolve.