Analogy Recapitulating Homology?

Abstract

Drs Claidiere and Andre provide a clear and thoughtful treatment of the problem of conceptual transfer among branches of science. Establishing the idea of evolution as a natural historical process that generates variation was a fundamental contribution of the nineteenth century to modern thought. From physics and geology it moved to biology, where it led to what we understand about the origin and diversity of life, and genes as the basic elements of biological causation and variation. This paper considers cultural transmission viewed ‘by analogy’ with genetic transmission, and ably shows serious differences. The essence of biological evolution is transmission with variation—‘‘descent with modification’’ as Darwin referred to it. This happens in very specific ways in biology, based largely on genes, that are shared by all genes and all of life itself because of the homology by which present life has diverged from common ancestry. Culture is also carried by people, is transmitted, varies, and evolves. As we are one global species, culture must also have continuity with the earliest human past. But culture need not evolve the same way that its human carriers do. Ethnologists and other social scientists argued for more than a century that sociocultural traits and change should be explained mainly on their own terms, rather than, say, in terms of the molecules of which people are made—or their genes. However the landscape has been unsettled, because deep differences concerned whether culture changes mainly by the ad hoc agency of the ‘great man,’ by psychological influences, or by various dialectically driven material rather than mental processes. Generations of ethnologists made substantial progress up to the mid-twentieth century, in showing how cultures were connected and dispersed through history and dynamic processes of change. However, as Claidiere and Andre point out, some of these ideas were both teleological and I would say more stereotypical even than Darwin’s, as those ideas had cultures evolving through a series of ‘stages’, from band or tribe to chiefdom, and so on, ending (so far) in civilization. Cultural ecologists and others took more environmentally driven approaches, and Leslie White melded broad evolutionary and thermodynamic concepts to argue that cultural evolution was the result of increasing efficiency of energy extraction. But this was a purely material theory and had an implicit teleological aspect in the sense that thermodynamics works ineluctably towards a particular entropic end. His ideas were also very abstractly generic, and despite my high personal regard for White, they had a hint of seeking rigor by physics-envy: the analogy worked by invoking thermodynamic homology. For whatever reasons, this era was jarred by a postmodernist wave that largely denigrated attempts to make ethnology ‘scientific’ and minimalized the claim that studying culture (or even culture itself) could even to be objective. However, other investigators persisted to develop materialist views, taking rather literally Darwinian perspectives to bring culture to within the evolutionary tent. Claidiere and Andre refer to this as memetics and discuss the controversies surrounding it. In these theories, ‘memes’ replaced genes as atomic causal elements of culture, and formalized mathematic theory was developed to explain how memes arose, varied, and changed through time. Science historians routinely praise Darwin and denigrate Lamarck because Darwin’s ideas, but not Lamarck’s, provided a working method that led somewhere. In this sense, in my view, memetics reflects K. M. Weiss (&) Department of Anthropology, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA e-mail: kenweiss@psu.edu