One sense I have is that it is only the excessive emphasis on the
individual as the unit of selection that makes it seem strange that there
should be these social and community factors in the evolved behavioral
dispositions of a species. If we see evolution as a process that applies,
first, to developmental trajectories as wholes (not simply to adults at
reproductive maturity), and if we see that systems which evolve have to be
defined across multiple scales (up to and including local and regional
ecosystems, if not Gaia herself), then the idea that a community is part of
the picture seems obvious. What is not so obvious perhaps is:
(1) how the community-scale analysis and the individual-scale analysis are
to be smoothly integrated with one another in the theory, and
(2) how the eco-community, including other co-evolving species (and the
less organic habitat), plays a part similarly to and/or differently from
the conspecific community (i.e. just the local breeding population of one
species).
I believe these are solvable problems, but not easy ones. My hunch is that
the development-evolution issue and the eco-community issue are two parts
of the same problem. In very simple terms: being adapted to members of your
own species as predictable fixtures in your habitat begins with the ways in
which children are adapted to a world in which there are adults (e.g.
social learning), and ways in which adults are adapted to a world in which
children are a predictable part of the habitat (a teaching instinct?); in
these terms we can perhaps see one core basis for evolved morality or
altruism in the relations of adults and children. When they are your own
children, or those closely genetically related, traditional neo-Darwinism
works. When they are other people's children, it is a community interest
that is at stake (healthy communities increase the reproductive success of
everybody, and minimize the chances of early demise for everybody).
But what about the other species? and the material habitat? We have
co-evolved so that our success has come to be dependent on their success,
too, and vice versa. Healthy ecologies promote transmission of gene
patterns that afford healthy ecologies, across species. Are bans on
over-fishing vulnerable stocks or polluting the atmosphere purely selfish
individual behaviors? It would not seem so since the most purely selfish
individuals in our community do not support such policies.
The neo-Darwinian paradigm has yet to assimilate the semiotic revolution.
We have no theories of how cultural beliefs influence evolution at the
community level, or any other level. Except for trivial cases like mass
celibacy. In a way, the IQ debate has also been an effort to understand how
genes and memes interact. In ecosocial systems you need a single integrated
theory of biological and cultural evolution, one that blurs the boundaries
between them in fundamental ways. Neither discipline is very happy about
this shotgun marriage, but it's pretty clear that meaning often mediates
the interaction across scales between habitat and gene frequencies, and
that cultural forms and practices are subject to a kind of natural-cultural
selection over time in which their biological consequences can be
determining factors.
It is perhaps time for biologists to stop thinking about the human species
as an 'exception' and build theories for which its case is more typical,
and for social theorists to recognize that biology, chemistry, and
thermodynamics play a normal, essential, and frequently co-determining role
in _every_ aspect of cultural processes. Culture is not what separates
'Man' from 'Nature' or 'the Animals'; it is our human way of being a _part_
of the natural world _as_ animals. And, correspondingly, naive
bio-determinisms aside, construing the biological and material
co-determinants of social behavior and cultural evolution is not something
to be embarassed about, but something necessary for a mature social science.
Nil humani alienum est.
JAY.
[the motto of our local humanities institute, it means both that nothing
human is truly strange, and that no subject is irrelevant to understanding
what it means to be human]
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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