individual/structural

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Sat, 06 Apr 96 19:36:23 EST

Thanks to Michael Glassman for the interesting notes on Russian
variants of evolutionary theory (not too different in spirit from
the revisionist group-selection and more definitive co-evolution
models of the last 15 years here).

If individual differences are 'residual' in structural theories
(i.e. what's left over when we allow for gender differences,
class differences, cultural differences, age-cohort differences,
etc.), they necessarily play a rather small role when one is
talking about static or synoptic social phenomena (what is). But
they can play a more crucial role when one wants to talk about
dynamic, diachronic phenomena --at certain scales. Historical
models on the very large scale can again afford to ignore
individually unique events: provided they know, as historians
always do, how things finally turned out. This is the great
historical 'cheat'. Explaining history is so easy compared to
trying to predict it! (the same thing is true of explaining
yesterday's weather, vs. predicting tomorrow's, and for the same
reasons).

We do today have alternatives to selectionist evolutionary
models, which notoriously also suffer from the retrospectivist
disease. We have developmental models based on 'epigenesis', and
so on system dynamics, and we have, almost, a grounding of these
in self-organization theory (nonlinear dynamics of complex
systems), with a lot of debate about how to reformulate the
relation to evolution (e.g. Stuart Kauffman's _Origins of
Order_). Here individual differences, and more generally unique
features of individual systems at all scales, are often critical
to the actual trajectories of future development or evolution.
But the price we pay for recognizing the role of the unique in
science (hush, Aristotle!) is the end of the 17th century dream
of predictive validity and the 18th century vision of social
engineering. Science can tell us how we got where we are, but it
cannot tell us how to get where we want to go. Structural
theories can explain the past but not predict the future;
dynamical theories tell us why.

JAY.

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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU