The price of metaphor

History and Theory

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 14-29

  Fracchia, Joseph ^a   Lewontin, R C ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

^b HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 44249096052     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2005.00305.x     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. Runciman, Culture Does Evolve, 3 (hereafter cited as CDE).
2. See also Runciman, "The Selectionist Paradigm and its Implications for Sociology," Sociology 32:1 (February 1998), 164. Hereafter cited as SPIS.
3. SPIS, 171. Our original essay did address the problem of hindsight and postdictive readjustment (76); and we also noted (75) that next-generational selectionists such as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson claimed that "Darwinian models can make useful predictions" about cultural change.
4. CDE, 3.
5. Robert Boyd and Peter .1. Richerson, "How Microevolutionary Processes Give Rise to History," in History and Evolution, ed. Matthew H. Nitecki and Doris V. Nitecki (Albany: SUN Y Press, 1992), 201.
6. SPIS, 175.
7. W. G. Runciman, "Heritable Variation and Competitive Selection," Proceedings of the British Academy 112 (2002), 13. Hereafter cited as HVCS.
8. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 52.
9. G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981), 11, 13.
10. Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 19, 20.
11. Marion Blute, "History versus Science: The Evolutionary Solution," Canadian Journal of Sociology 22:3 (1997), 349.
12. HVIS, 10.
13. Runciman attempts to refute this objection by adopting Elliot Sober's and David Sloan Wilson's claim (Unto Others [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998], 186ff.)
14. that Raymond Kelly's The Nuer Conquest (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), is a "smoking gun" of social/cultural evolution. Correctly depicting Kelly's book as "a tightly argued, fully documented" analysis, Runciman expropriates it as a work in which cultural differences are "explained in accordance with selectionist criteria though not couched in selectionist terms" (CDE, 11), as a case of selectionism "avant la lettre" (HVIS, 22).
15. Having translated Kelly's analysis into a "coherently structured story of heritable variation and competitive selection of information affecting phenotype," Runciman insists that it "dispos[es] at a stroke [our] contention that cultural evolutionists, by viewing societies as populations of individuals rather than organized systems with properties of their own, are driven to having to prove that culture consists of 'isolable, individual entities' and is 'only the sum of its parts'" (CDE, 12).
16. First, Runciman again misreads our argument, which was not that social/cultural evolutionists feel they must "prove" this, but that they methodologically assume it - as Runciman did by "purg[ing]" social theory of "societies." For this reason, second, Runciman's translation of Kelly is suspect. For Kelly did not voluntarily enlist in, but was drafted into, the ranks of cultural evolutionists. Kelly explicitly cautions that "models of adaptive structure and regulatory process drawn from cybernetics and evolutionary biology may fail to fully bring out the distinctive pattern of relationships between relationships that obtains within socioculturel systems," that the "distinctive features" of soci-ocultural systems "necessarily elude" analogies "drawn from machines and biological systems" (Kelly, The Nuer Conquest, 241-242).
17. And elsewhere he and Roy Rappaport insist that "the price of generality is decreased explanatory power" ("Function, Generality, and Explanatory Power," Michigan Discussions in Anthropology 1 [Fall, 1975], 29).
18. Kelly did not use (or need) selectionist assumptions or terms for his systemic analyses; he does not model society and culture as inheritance systems; the story he tells is not one of heritable variation and competitive selection. It is rather a study of the complex and distinctive patterns of relationships within and between the Nuer and Dinka societies; it is the coherently structured story of the internal logic, the systemic relations linking and defining the properties ("practices" and "memes") of two fairly equally well-functioning social systems, one of which produced for consumption and was homeostatic, and the other exchange-dominated and expansionist (see Kelly, The Nuer Conquest, 197, 247-248).
19. Boyd and Richerson in Nitecki and Nitecki, eds., History and Evolution, 181 (our emphasis).
20. CDE, 11, 6.
21. HVCS, 50.
22. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1989), II, 42.
23. See Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), I, 175.
24. Runciman recognizes that "practices involve reciprocal action by two or more role-incumbents: wage-labor, for example requires both employers and employees." But within the borders of his puzzle, the evolution of wage labor, its displacement of "the practices and roles constitutive of other modes of production," succeeds when "collectivities such as farms, plantations, mines, shipyards, building or transport firms, manufactories, and commercial enterprises which carry the practice and the roles defined by it take market share away from those which do not" (HVCS, 17).
25. See Alan Caring, "The Darwinian Weberian: W. G. Runciman and the Microfoundations of Historical Materialism," Historical Materialism 12:1 (2004), 75.
26. Runciman, "The Origins of Modern State Theory in Europe and as a Topic in the Theory of Social Selection," in Visions sur le Developpement des États Européens (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1992), 53-54.
27. Mary Midgely, "Choosing the Selectors," in The Evolution of Cultural Entities, in Proceedings of the British Academy 112 (2002), 129.
28. See Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
29. Runeiman's insistence on one proper form of "scientific" explanation consisting of covering the facts with a general explanatory law explains why he finds our mention of C. P. Snow's essay "unhelpful" and Snow's essay itself "intellectually crass, politically naïve, historically short-sighted, and rhetorically inept" - even "silly" or "fundamentally mistaken" (CDE, 12-13).