JOSEPH FRACCHIAAND R. C. LEWONTIN
16paradigm “has been vindicated to the point that it is now a commonplace that thetheory of natural selection is about as likely to be disconfirmed as the earth toturn out to be flat.”
7
In a self-validating appeal that mistakes quantity for quali-ty, Runciman asserts that the “literature
in which it is taken for granted
that cul-tural change
can be modeled as
an evolutionary process has expanded to thepoint that it is no longer a question of whether heritable variation and competi-tive selection are at work, but only how.”
8
How indeed?Though he acknowledges that a paradigm is (only) “a way of looking at theworld,” Runciman insists that “in science” a paradigm is not an untestable set of metatheoretical assumptions, but a “puzzle-solving device” that must “be testedcase by case.” His faith in testing as the measure of validity notwithstanding, eachand every paradigm solves puzzles on the basis of its particular “way of lookingat the world.” There is a two-sided problem here: one, as Kuhn noted, is that “nor-mal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, findsnone”
9
; it is rather the self-validating application of paradigmatic assumptions toparticular cases—as is evident in Runciman’s attempt to validate the selectionistparadigm by appealing to the totally predictable “normal scientific” successes inthe expanding literature. And the flip-side is that all paradigmatic ways of look-ing at the world relegate something to the shadows, thereby creating their ownblind spots. Our point is
not
that selection explains nothing, but that it does notexplain everything and excludes much that is essential to the understanding of social/cultural change. The fact that culture and society
can be
subjected to theselectionist paradigm does not mean that they
are
selectionist-driven evolution-ary processes. It is thus ironic that Runciman regularly castigates Hegel’s philos-ophy as an untestable metahistory, yet completely ignores Hegel’s very acute par-adigmatic understanding of his own work as “a way of looking at the world,” asa self-conscious (and, in his view of course, superior) construction. As Hegel putit in his
Philosophy of History
, philosophy “brings” reason to history, and “to[those] who look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back.”
10
Thesame thing can be said about those who look at the world selectionistically.This problem of self-validating circularity is especially great in the human/ social sciences. Because they deal with non-repeatable and non-mechanisticevents and processes that cannot be subjected to experimentation, “normal sci-
7.
Ibid.
, 169, 163. There are actually two questions involved here, namely: “does cultureevolve?”—which we addressed as a transformational theory of a macroevolutionary process; and “docultures evolve?”—which we addressed as a variational theory of microevolutionary processes.Though concerned with the latter question about microevolutionary processes, Runciman regularlyinvokes the associative power of real and counterfactual macroevolutionary sequences to legitimizeselectionist explanations of microevolutionary processes. Though we agree that there have been evo-lutionary stages from simple chemical elements to plant and animal life to human culture andmachines (CDE, 3), that scores of Mozartian-like symphonies will not be found in Stone Age burialsites, nor an electronics-based telecommunications industry among Kalahari foragers (SPIS, 172),these examples of macroevolutionary path-dependence do not prove that selectionism is the surestmeans of explaining microevolutionary social/cultural processes.8. W. G. Runciman, “Heritable Variation and Competitive Selection,”
Proceedings of the British Academy
112 (2002), 13. Hereafter cited as HVCS.9. Thomas Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1970), 52.10. G. W. F. Hegel,
Reason in History
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981), 11, 13.
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