Joseph Lopreato

From Social Evolutionism to Biocultural Evolutionism

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 latters 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.

SOCIOBIOLOGY AND THE WAYWARD CRITIC

The article begins by underscoring the widely noted “sociological crisis” and the message from the history of science that the crisis may be susceptible to resolution through an application of a general law pertaining to a neighboring science (sociobiology in our case). From here, the article proceeds to pinpoint the basic argument of Professor Crippens article (this issue) and then critically examines the two articles that critically accompany it. We find some errors of interpretation in Professor Maryanskis article, but on the whole it is a constructive critique of Crippens essay and a related invitation to a biologically informed evolutionary sociology. By contrast, Professor Freeses interminable article fails to confront Crippens argument and in the process offers a tortuous, tendentious itinerary of politically correct interpretations of scientific inquiry in general and sociobiological science in particular.

Class conflict and images of society

[The article commences by referring to a resurgence of interest by social theorists in conflict and coercion in society. Among recent works, Dahrendorf’s (1959) theory of social conflict “stands out for its clarity of expression and its generality”. The purpose of Lopreato’s study is, then, to “examine the empirical validity of some aspects of this … approach”.]