Cultural variation and social complexity: a comment on Nettle's ‘Beyond nature versus culture’

Abstract

Daniel Nettle’s paper is a valuable, clearly argued contribution to the rapprochement of social and evolutionary anthropology. Nettle’s distinction between evoked and transmitted culture, and his emphasis on the emergent properties of systems, are particularly helpful for social anthropology. The discovery that the parameters of the Ultimatum Game are set by the degree to which, in any culture, individuals rely on each other to reduce risk was an important step in the reconciliation of the two disciplines. I anticipate that many social anthropologists will none the less continue to think that evolutionary or adaptive explanations fail to do justice to the complexity of social interaction. This has its roots in the foundational debate between Durkheim and Tarde on explanation in social science. Tarde argued that ‘[w]e may call it social evolution when an invention quietly spreads through imitation’ (1969 [1888]: 184). The inventor was an individual with a special psychology, but his environment merely facilitated the transmission of a new idea from one individual to the next by imitation. Tarde’s approach was taken up by writers such as Cavalli-Sforza and has recently been reincarnated in Dawkins’s ‘meme’ (Dawkins 1976: 189). While this may provide a useful model for transmitted culture, Tarde’s ideas were strenuously opposed in his own time by Durkheim, whose axioms (as Nettle notes) are still accepted by sociologists and social anthropologists. Durkheim explained the Industrial Revolution as the consequence of a collective social process, rather than a series of individual inventions. ‘Darwin says that in a small area, opened to immigration, and where, consequently, the conflict of individuals must be acute, there is always to be seen a very great diversity in the species inhabiting it’ (Durkheim 1933 [1893]: 266). When rural communities expanded, they came into competition for resources and responded, analogously, by adapting specialized economies. Durkheim, in other words, took an ecological approach to explaining social change. A similar debate is active within evolutionary biology. The Tarde-like approach taken by Dawkins is implicitly challenged by the notion of evolutionary fitness landscapes advocated by Kauffman. Kauffman writes, ‘In co-evolutionary processes, the fitness of one organism or species depends upon the characteristics of the other organisms or species with which it interacts, while all simultaneously adapt and change’ (1993: 33). Both co-evolution and niche construction are aspects of the complexity of