The anti-selectionism of Kinji Imanishi and social anti-Darwinism in Japan

Abstract

I examine the social and biological aspects of evolutionary theory developed by Kinji Imanishi of Kyoto, Japan. Seen against the background of an economically successful Japan during the seventies, Imanishi's anti-selectionist evolutionary theory, based on the indigenous social and physical ambience of Japan during the 1930s into the 1980s, may provoke what might be called ‘social anti-Darwinism’, which could join the oppressive ideologies now threatening in Japan at a time of world-wide political and economic critis. Biologically, however, Imanishi's theory should be assessed seriously. It emphasizes the primacy of species and ‘species-society’ over the individual in the system of nature. The young Imanishi was inspired to the notion of ‘life-style partitioning’ by his investigation of ephemerid larvae in freshwater streams. Implications of those earlier observations were theoretically elaborated in his ‘biosociology’ and are now underpinned by the idea that there is mutual identification between fellow members of the ‘species-society’. This provides a general biological principle operative in all species. The concept of identification thus conceived should, like that of genetic code, transcend the concept of adaptation and pre-adaptation. I point out a certain parallelism between the theories of Imanishi, Gould and Wynne-Edwards. Wynne-Edwards asserted the density dependence of animal reproduction and tried to explain it by a theory of group selection. But the anti-selectionist theory of Imanishi leads to the concept of identification as a fundamental property of animals, rather than to kin selection used as a key concept in sociobiology. I now try to generalize Imanishi's idea of identification to the idea that there is a deep-seated perception of time and space, as well as identity, by both cells and individuals of eukaryotic organisms. And I discuss the significance of these ideas in relation to the structuralist theory of evolution recently proposed by Webster and Goodwin.