Abstract
This article discusses Mesoudi et al.’s suggestion to synthesise the social sciences based on a theory of cultural evolution. In view of their proposal, I shall discuss two key questions. (I) Is their theory of cultural evolution a promising candidate to synthesise the social sciences? (II) What is the added value of evolutionary approaches for the social sciences? My aim is to highlight some hitherto underestimated challenges for transformative evolutionary approaches to the social sciences that come into view when one looks at these questions against the backdrop of actual scientific practice in the social sciences.
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Notes
- 1.
See, e.g., the ambiguous claims regarding sociology at the end of E. O. Wilson’s (2000[1975]) chapter on “Man” in his Sociobiology,
- 2.
I will use the terms ‘synthesise’, ‘integrate’ and ‘unify’ in the same sense.
- 3.
I think that Mesoudi’s (et al.) approach should be discussed precisely because it remains one of the most sophisticated and promising ones. In this way, straw man discussions can be avoided.
- 4.
I realise that “the theory of Darwinian evolution” is quite vague. As will become clear, however, the details of this notion do not matter for the discussion in this article.
- 5.
In Mesoudi (2011, pp. 212–216), there is an expanded discussion introducing disciplines that would have to be newly developed, such as ‚cultural evo-devo‘.
- 6.
This assessment of the role of the evolutionary synthesis in biology is not uncontroversial (Lewens, 2012, p. 463). However, I will take it for granted in this paper.
- 7.
Accordingly, Kneer and Moebius (2010) argue that the multiparadigmatic state of sociology should be seen as a sign of its prosperity and controversy as a key element of its disciplinary constitution.
- 8.
There is strong evidence to support the claim that the social sciences are at least more fragmented than the physical and life sciences. There are more competing paradigms and persistent methodological disputes, including but not limited to the classic quantitative/qualitative divide (Lohse, 2017b; McLaughlin, 1991; Tang, 2011).
- 9.
A main reason for this epistemic gap is that there is, to my knowledge, no research programme in history and philosophy of science that investigates this question.
- 10.
The same goes for the sometimes sweeping criticisms of evolutionary approaches to socio-cultural phenomena as necessarily biologistic and wrong-headed.
- 11.
- 12.
In fact, there might be a sampling bias in Mesoudi et al.’s examples. In discussing the benefits of a theory of cultural evolution for the social sciences, they tend to discuss examples from anthropology, psychology, behavioural economics and other subfields that are already aligned with their focus on cultural change, transmission and explaining general patterns of human behaviour.
- 13.
Sober (1992) makes a related point by arguing that social scientists are more interested in the sources of transmission systems than in their empirical consequences, which is why evolutionary models may not be very useful in many cases. This also points to different epistemic goals in the social sciences.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Azita Chellappoo, Henk de Regt and the organisers and participants of the “Paris Workshop” for feedback on an earlier draft of this article. Special thanks to Dustin Eirdosh and Martina Valkovic for insightful discussions and feedback.
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Lohse, S. (2023). Pluralism and Epistemic Goals: Why the Social Sciences Will (Probably) Not Be Synthesised by Evolutionary Theory. In: du Crest, A., Valković, M., Ariew, A., Desmond, H., Huneman, P., Reydon, T.A.C. (eds) Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines. Synthese Library, vol 478. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33358-3_15
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