History and Theory 44 (February 2005), 14-29

Wesleyan University 2005 ISSN: 0018-2656

FORUM: DOES CULTURE EVOLVE?

2.

THE PRICE OF METAPHOR

JOSEPH FRACCHIA AND R. C. LEWONTIN

ABSTRACT

In his critical response to our skeptical inquiry, Does Culture Evolve? (History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 [December 1999], 52-78), W. G. Runciman affirms that Culture Does Evolve. However, we find nothing in his essay that convinces us to alter our initial position. And we must confess that in composing an answer to Runciman, our first temptation was simply to urge those interested to read our original articleboth as a basis for evaluating Runcimans attempted refutation of it and as a framework for reading this essay, which addresses in greater detail issues we have already raised. Runciman views the selectionist paradigm as a scientific puzzle-solving device now validated by an expanding literature that has successfully modeled social and cultural change as evolutionary. All paradigms, however, including scientific ones, give rise to self-validating normal science. The real issue, accordingly, is not whether explanations can be successfully manufactured on the basis of paradigmatic assumptions, but whether the paradigmatic assumptions are appropriate to the object of analysis. The selectionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems that consist of randomly varying, individual units, some of which are selected, and some not; and with society and culture thus reduced to inheritance systems, history can be reduced to evolution. But these reductions, which are required by the selectionist paradigm, exclude much that is essential to a satisfactory historical explanationparticularly the systemic properties of society and culture and the combination of systemic logic and contingency. Now as before, therefore, we conclude that while historical phenomena can always be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do no work, nor do they contribute anything new except a misleading vocabulary that anesthetizes history.
I. INTRODUCTION

In response to the skepticism embedded in our inquiry, Does Culture Evolve?, W. G. Runciman emphatically responds that Culture Does Evolve. He acknowledges some of our criticisms as relevant to older, sociobiologicallybased theories of cultural evolution. He insists, however, that they are inapplicable to the extensive and growing neo-Darwinian literature that treats cultural evolution as significantly analogous but not reducible to biological evolution and which is consistently and explicitly anti-reductionist. Two matters peculiar to older theories of cultural evolution, progress and prediction, are not issues for this new generation that rejects notions of progress for universal nonteleological explanation of teleological achievements1 and maintains that although not
1. Runciman, Culture Does Evolve, 3 (hereafter cited as CDE). See also Runciman, The Selectionist Paradigm and its Implications for Sociology, Sociology 32:1 (February 1998), 164. Hereafter cited as SPIS.

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predictable in advance, [evolution] is always away from something explicable with hindsight.2 These claims are part of Runcimans overall attempt to give the apparently merely factual narratives of historians a theoretical grounding that they supposedly lack, to take the discussion to a more general level without weakening the force of detailed conclusions established by specialists at the level of particular case-historiesand to do so without succumbing to the teleological determinism of skyhooks.3 We are in complete accord with this not unusual aspiration to avoid both empirical eclecticism and theoretical dogmatism. Consequences, however, cannot be measured by intentions. And we begin our response by repeating the conclusion of our original essay, namely: that selectionist explanations can always be made to work, but they dont do any useful work. By this we mean that while it is always possible to manufacture an evolutionary explanation of any historical change as a process of hereditable variation and competitive selection, the selectionist paradigm neither contributes anything new (except terminology) nor does it of its own volition ask the kinds of questions required in order fully to explain historical changes.
II. THE LIMITS OF PARADIGMATIC VISION

Runcimans argument is based on some rather outmoded paradigmatic assumptions about the relation between facts and explanatory theories and between history and science (assumptions that ignore an immense literature on history and theory). He agrees with Marion Blute that biological evolutionary theory has solved the problem of history versus science by showing that there is a logical role for both.4 As two of Runcimans next-generation colleagues, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, specify: In the biological and social domains, science without history leaves many interesting phenomena unexplained, while history without science cannot produce an explanatory account of the past, only a listing of disconnected facts.5 In this clear division of labor, historians discover and collect data and about interesting social-cultural phenomena, while evolutionary theorists raise the general level of analysis by subjecting those data to the selectionist covering law. Having domesticated the historical discipline as the research assistant of science, Runciman turns to Darwins selectionist paradigm, which can furnish purely narrative explanations of the evolution of institutions and societies . . . with a theoretical grounding which they otherwise lack.6 Its superiority confirmed by its elevation to the dominant paradigm in biology, the selectionist
2. 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. 3. CDE, 3. 4. Ibid., 9. 5. Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, How Microevolutionary Processes Give Rise to History, in History and Evolution, ed. Matthew H. Nitecki and Doris V. Nitecki (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 201. 6. SPIS, 175.

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paradigm has been vindicated to the point that it is now a commonplace that the theory of natural selection is about as likely to be disconfirmed as the earth to turn out to be flat.7 In a self-validating appeal that mistakes quantity for quality, Runciman asserts that the literature in which it is taken for granted that cultural change can be modeled as an evolutionary process has expanded to the point that it is no longer a question of whether heritable variation and competitive selection are at work, but only how.8 How indeed? Though he acknowledges that a paradigm is (only) a way of looking at the world, Runciman insists that in science a paradigm is not an untestable set of metatheoretical assumptions, but a puzzle-solving device that must be tested case by case. His faith in testing as the measure of validity notwithstanding, each and every paradigm solves puzzles on the basis of its particular way of looking at the world. There is a two-sided problem here: one, as Kuhn noted, is that normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none9; it is rather the self-validating application of paradigmatic assumptions to particular casesas is evident in Runcimans attempt to validate the selectionist paradigm by appealing to the totally predictable normal scientific successes in the expanding literature. And the flip-side is that all paradigmatic ways of looking at the world relegate something to the shadows, thereby creating their own blind spots. Our point is not that selection explains nothing, but that it does not explain everything and excludes much that is essential to the understanding of social/cultural change. The fact that culture and society can be subjected to the selectionist paradigm does not mean that they are selectionist-driven evolutionary processes. It is thus ironic that Runciman regularly castigates Hegels philosophy as an untestable metahistory, yet completely ignores Hegels very acute paradigmatic understanding of his own work as a way of looking at the world, as a self-conscious (and, in his view of course, superior) construction. As Hegel put it in his Philosophy of History, philosophy brings reason to history, and to [those] who look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back. 10 The same thing can be said about those who look at the world selectionistically. This problem of self-validating circularity is especially great in the human/ social sciences. Because they deal with non-repeatable and non-mechanistic events and processes that cannot be subjected to experimentation, normal sci7. Ibid., 169, 163. There are actually two questions involved here, namely: does culture evolve?which we addressed as a transformational theory of a macroevolutionary process; and do cultures evolve?which we addressed as a variational theory of microevolutionary processes. Though concerned with the latter question about microevolutionary processes, Runciman regularly invokes the associative power of real and counterfactual macroevolutionary sequences to legitimize selectionist explanations of microevolutionary processes. Though we agree that there have been evolutionary stages from simple chemical elements to plant and animal life to human culture and machines (CDE, 3), that scores of Mozartian-like symphonies will not be found in Stone Age burial sites, nor an electronics-based telecommunications industry among Kalahari foragers (SPIS, 172), these examples of macroevolutionary path-dependence do not prove that selectionism is the surest means of explaining microevolutionary social/cultural processes. 8. W. G. Runciman, Heritable Variation and Competitive Selection, Proceedings of the British Academy 112 (2002), 13. Hereafter cited as HVCS. 9. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 52. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981), 11, 13.

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ence has an extra elasticity: it is always possible to refine an explanation by expropriating critical counterpoints, alternative hypotheses, and hitherto unconsidered data and running them through the paradigmatic millin this case of hereditable variation and competitive selectionuntil they are re-formed into variables of an evolutionary explanation. Through potentially limitless post hoc adjustments, anomalies can be domesticated and the paradigm substantiated. The crucial question, therefore, is not whether a paradigm can offer explanations of empirical data consistent with its assumptions, for it can always be made to do so. It is rather whether the assumptions are appropriate to the object of analysis. To determine this, it is necessary to consider not just the paradigm, but also the optics of paradigmatic vision. To view social/cultural history selectionistically requires categorial blinders that force us: to see society and culture as systems of inheritance consisting of units of selectionpractices in social inheritance systems, memes in cultural;11 to see these units of selection as self-replicating, though with random and heritable variation; and to see social/cultural history as evolution propelled by the selection of some variations instead of others. Only by looking at society and culture as systems of inheritance can we see history as evolutionary change, which by definition can only be explained selectionistically. But a good deal of paradigmatic myopia is required in order to see in social and cultural history only that which fits into the selectionist paradigm. The first blind spot is already apparent in Runcimans identification of evolution with selection. His categorical assertion that competitive selection under environmental pressure is the only force capable of accounting for evolutionary change12 is simply wrong. Like any of us who attempt to understand a subject in which we have no primary expertise, Runciman has clearly depended for his knowledge of evolutionary biology on the writings of vulgarizing enthusiasts who have simplified evolutionary biology in a way that seriously misleads those who depend on them. Darwins variational theory of evolution was based on three principles: organisms vary, the variation is heritable, and some variants leave more offspring than others. He then added that the variant properties themselves were the cause of the differential reproduction because some types had a greater ability to appropriate resources in short supply (including mates) in the struggle for existence. It is this last claim that constitutes the theory of natural selection. What was left open in Darwins variational scheme for evolution, however, was the possibility that some variants might leave more offspring for reasons other than the properties of the variants themselves. What the hautes vulgarisateurs have failed to tell their readers, either from aesthetic or a priori epistemological commitments, is that a major feature of modern evolutionary biology is its concern with so-called neutral evolution, the replacement of one inherited variant by another because of random events in the reproductive history of
11. Runciman defines memes as bundles of information or instructions affecting phenotype and practices as functionally defined units of reciprocal action informed by the mutually recognized intentions and beliefs of designated persons about their respective capacity to influence each others behavior by virtue of their roles (SPIS, 175). 12. SPIS, 171; our emphasis.

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finite populations. Neutral evolution, especially at the molecular level, is at the very center of modern molecular evolutionary biology, although the possible role of such non-selective evolution was already well understood by theoreticians in the 1930s. The equation of biological evolution with a selectionist paradigm is unacceptable. A similar blind spot results from Runcimans conflation of evolution with biological evolution that follows Darwins variational scheme. As our original article makes clear, the variational evolutionary scheme is only one form of evolutionary phenomenon. The Kant-Laplace theory of stellar evolution antedated Darwin by more than half a century and is a transformational rather than variational structure. Even if one wants to build a theory of cultural evolution, there is no compelling reason to make it isomorphic with the variational evolution of ensembles of individually short-lived objects like organisms, rather than the transformational evolution of an ensemble of very long-lived objects like stars. The attempt to force an isomorphism with Darwinism has led Runciman not only to adopt a universal selectionism, but to swallow the concept of memes (while admitting that he cannot say exactly what memes are13)a notion invented out of whole cloth by Richard Dawkins when he realized that his own attempt to universalize evolution by natural selection required the creation of an entity that reminds one of genes. But, unlike genes, memes are not entities with an existence independent of the theory. They are a mental construct whose only defined property is to fill in the gap in an elaborate metaphor. Both the theory of stellar evolution and the theory of organic evolution are theoretical structures that were built on the concrete phenomenology of the objects of interest. It may indeed be possible and even desirable to build a theory of the evolution of culture, but the correct way to do that is not to attempt to make it isomorphic with some other theory carefully built on the material properties of other objects.
III. SOCIETY AND CULTURE AS INHERITANCE SYSTEMS: FROM SIMILE TO METAPHOR

The linchpin that holds the selectionist paradigm together is the reduction of society and culture to systems of inheritance. In response to our argument that the definition of society and culture as systems of inheritance is metaphorical, Runciman scoffs: Metaphor? What metaphor? Nevertheless, to insist that society and culture are systems of inheritance requires a leap of faith. In our earlier essay we noted Boyds and Richersons jump from the more modest claim that culture can be modeled as a system of inheritance to the categorical affirmation that culture constitutes a system of inheritance.14 We repeat it here because Runciman seems both to have overlooked, and to have followed them in, this crucial leap. Even if, as Blute faithfully affirms, [t]he existence of descent with modification is a fact, not a theory about the sociocultural world,15 it is far too
13. CDE, 6. 14. Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 19, 20. 15. Marion Blute, History versus Science: The Evolutionary Solution, Canadian Journal of Sociology 22:3 (1997), 349.

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hasty to conclude that it is the only or even most significant factor about society and culture and social and cultural changeor that the mode of modification in culture is not significantly different from that in biology. Acknowledging a disanalogy between biological and sociocultural inheritance systems, Runciman does note that neither memes nor practices are replicated in the same way that genes are. Ideas, beliefs and tastes jump across lineages, so to speak, when they pass from one persons mind . . . to anothers, as do economic ideological and political practices from one institution of society which are imported into another16; mutations arise less from random copying error than from active reinterpretation by the receiving mind; and they can be accepted, rejected, and reaccepted over the course of the lives of the organisms whose minds are their carriers.17 But this difference, he decides, is one only of content, not form. Though seldom copied identically, memes do fulfill the formal conditions enabling them to act as replicators.18 All this means is that heritable variation and competitive selection of information affecting phenotype can work in different ways.19 Having thus dispensed with any unpleasant incongruities, Runciman draws the untroubled conclusion that the analogies between natural and sociocultural evolution are more significant than this, and other, disanalogies.20 Denial is the best way to avoid the eternal vigilance that Norbert Wiener established as the price of metaphor.21 Denied here is that the move from can be modeled as to constitutes is a shift from the likeness of simile to the identity of metaphor, which dissolves disanalogies into insignificance. This slippage into metaphor allows the leap of faith into paradigmatic certainty: we can take for granted that culture is an inheritance system and therefore (to paraphrase Martin Luthers model metaphor) a mighty fortress is our theory. This sleight of metaphorical hand is essential to legitimizing the selectionist paradigm for the analysis of social/cultural evolution. The crucial question, however, is this: if practices and memes arent inherited as genes are, if they dont replicate themselves in the same unilinearly descending way as genes, can we simply assume that analogous causal logics govern the two significantly disanalogous processes? Specifically: can a paradigm that treats the elements of society and culture as randomly varying individual units, and that reduces people to the bearers of those units, adequately model the intricate systemic logic of discrete social and cultural forms and the complexity of social/cultural change?
IV. METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM AND THE DISSOLUTION OF SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Noting what he calls our evident aversion to the term meme, Runciman attempts to reduce our argument to a nominalist matter.22 But this completely
16. SPIS, 177-178. 17. HVIS, 10. 18. SPIS, 177-178. 19. HVIS, 10 20. Ibid. 21. Widely attributed to Norbert Wieiner although the exact source is unknown to us. 22. CDE, 6. Our critique of applying a population model to society and culture is on pp. 69ff. of our original article.

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misses our point: our rather evident aversion is not to the term, but to the methodological individualism that reduces the organized systems of society or culture to a population, to the sum of its random, individual unitswhatever they may be called.23 Here we first note (again) Boyds and Richersons rather bold and axiomatic claims that cultural change is a population process and because it is, it can be studied using Darwinian methods.24 Despite this categorical affirmation by kindred spirits, Runciman nevertheless insists that selectionism is not constrained by populational logic. The matter, however, is not settled by his use of terms like meme-set or bundles or complexes of information affecting behavior, nor by his insistence elsewhere that social practices are inherently rela23. Runciman attempts to refute this objection by adopting Elliot Sobers and David Sloan Wilsons claim (Unto Others [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998], 186ff.) that Raymond Kellys The Nuer Conquest (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), is a smoking gun of social/cultural evolution. Correctly depicting Kellys 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). Having translated Kellys 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). First, Runciman again misreads our argument, which was not that social/cultural evolutionists feel they must prove this, but that they methodologically assume itas Runciman did by purg[ing] social theory of societies. For this reason, second, Runcimans 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 sociocultural systems, that the distinctive features of sociocultural systems necessarily elude analogies drawn from machines and biological systems (Kelly, The Nuer Conquest, 241-242). 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). Accordingly, functional analyses of local systems do not tell us everything we would want to know even about the operation of local systems (see our critique below of Runcimans analysis of English and French absolutism). Other sorts of analyses (particularly symbolic and structural) also are necessary (ibid., 36). And in arguing for systemic analyses of discrete social forms (like his own of the Nuer and Dinka) instead of subjecting local phenomena to global explanations, they conclude (much as do we): That an analysis does not elucidate everything does not mean that it elucidates nothing (ibid., 42). 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). There are several reasons why Kelly titled his book the Nuer Conquest. Runcimans rendering of Kellys analysis in a selectionist idiom adds nothing except a misleading vocabulary that tears apart the relational web that Kelly so carefully constructed. To translate this process as the Nuer selection is at best a metaphorical afterthought, at worst a euphemism. Our thanks to Raymond Kelly for generously providing commentary and bibliography on these matters. (We might also note that Runciman adduces Kellys analysis to refute our argument that cultural evolutionary models consist of unrolling or unfolding of the predetermined fate of each element in [a given] ensemble [CDE, 12]. Runciman, however, lifts that quotation from our analysis of transformational models, but attempts to use it against our critique of variational models which, as we argued [Part III.B], have a different set of problems.) 24. Boyd and Richerson in Nitecki and Nitecki, eds., History and Evolution, 181 (our emphasis).

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tional.25 The key issue is not the terminology, but whether the meme-sets or bundles and complexes are treated populationallywhich is determined by how the relations between the units are defined. The selectionist paradigm can only be applied to individual units26 of varying fitness some of which will be selected for and others not. Accordingly, Runciman must whittle away at society in order to make it paradigmatically fit. He insists that social practices play the same part in the theory of social selection as do genes in the theory of natural selection. Therefore, an account strictly in terms of the theory of social selection should be purged of any reference to either societies or states as such since societies are no more than sets of institutionally connected roles whose catchment area in social space may or may not coincide with either territorial or linguistic frontiers, and states are no more than sets of governmental roles the scope of whose defining practices may or may not be coterminous with those catchment areas.27 But this is only another way of saying that societies and states have no systemic logic, that they consist only of populations of individual units whose relation to one another is the merely external one of competitive selection; the fitness of a practice or meme is a function solely of its own attributes and has no direct relation to the fitness of its competitors. Methodological individualism makes possible too the methodological randomness that is required to uphold the inheritance system metaphor between social/cultural and biological replicators. Runciman insists that variation in the units of selection must be treated as random. This does not mean that variations are uncaused and therefore inexplicable, only that they are independently caused and therefore explicable only at a different level. But it does entail the irrelevance of the cause of a variation to its fate.28 While this may be true in biological evolution, it certainly is not in social/cultural history. Variations in social practices and cultural memes emerge, as Runciman would agree, within a path-dependent set of limited possibilities. Path-dependence, however, is more than what has gone before, more than just a set or population of random initial conditions.29 It includes precisely that systemic logic that Runciman paradigmatically excludes with his metaphorical transference of the attributes of genes to the elements of society. He dismisses the systemic social logic that establishes the relations among the practicesrelations that are constitutive of the individual practices or memes themselves and not at all unrelated to their chances for replication. Variations emerge not randomly, but as attempts by specific individuals and/or groups to solve specific social/cultural problems; and their origins are not unrelated to their fate. For the success or selectability
25. CDE, 11, 6. 26. As noted in our original essay (71), these units may be individual atoms or molecular aggregatesthe crucial issue is whether the relations among them are conceived as external and random as Runciman does or internal and systemic as we do. 27. HVCS, 50. 28. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1989), II, 42. See also CDE, 6. 29. See Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), I, 175.

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of a solution, whether it will be short- or long-lived, depends not just on its fitness in regard to specific problems, but also and crucially on the amount of power behind itpower that can force its selection, at least temporarily, regardless of whether it is a fit solution. Inequalities of power can guarantee that certain social practices or cultural values survivebut that has little to do with their fitness. This raises a question pertaining to an essential attribute of social and cultural, but not of biological evolution, namely the systematic reproduction of unfit memeswhich is a matter of internal systemic relations. Runciman insists that [m]emes are often replicated only within a cultural minority and practices only within one of a societys several institutions.30 But this disanalogy, he concludes, means no more than that the relevant population is not the culture or society in the way that, in natural as opposed to cultural or social selection, it is the species. It follows, accordingly, not just that influence rather than frequency is the appropriate criterion of success; it is practices which are the units of selection, not the roles which carry them, just as in cultural selection it is memes, not the minds which carry them. And he offers the apparent coup de grce by referring to Hallpikes taking the argument ad absurdum with the comment that Generals are much rarer than privates, but what would it mean to say that they had less fitness? Aside from the fact that this attribution of the replication of the fit units of social/cultural selection to a social/cultural minority ignores an immense historical literature on popular culture, it also represents a categorical dismissal of any relation between practices and memes other than that of individual entities engaged in competitive selection. Those not in that replicating minority are unintentionally condemned by social/cultural evolutionists to social deathunintentionally, because Runciman could rightly reply that there is no reason why the selectionist paradigm cannot analyze the practices and memes of popular culture. But this is where methodological individualism traps the selectionist paradigm. By analyzing what memes and practices were selected for among those systacts (Runcimans term for social group) that make up the non-replicating cultural majority, we end up in the terminological muddle of talking about selection of fit practices and memes, but for a socially/culturally unfit group. This muddle, however, can sensibly be explained through a systemic analysis of the internal relations between social groupsone that begins with the understanding that there are no generals without privates. The key issue here is that the logic of social and cultural systems is fundamentally different from that of biological populations, that survival and selection mean something quite different in human history than in biological evolution. In biological evolution, the unfit die out. But that is not the case in the history of societies. Just as generals must have their privates, so too could the fit practices and memes of the European nobility only replicate themselves because of the practices of their serfs; and the same is true of capital and wage labor.31 Unfit or disadvantaged practices do not die
30. All quotations in this paragraph, SPIS, 178. 31. 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

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outtheir survival and replication are absolutely essential in order to ensure the survival and replication of the selected, fittest, hegemonic memes and practices.32 As Marx so clearly explained, capitalism reproduces the unfit practice of wage labor and of the reserve army of the unemployedthe latter substantiated by economists who euphemistically refer to optimal rate of unemployment (an optimal rate of unfitness???) hovering around six percent, which capital must replicate in order to function optimally. Because of its inescapable methodological individualism and the methodological randomness it spawns, the selectionist paradigm produces a massive blind spot toward the logic of social relations and socially-structured antagonisms; it reduces the social conflict produced by those antagonisms to the indifferent difference of competitive selection; and it fails to realize that the greater success or fitness of certain memes/practices is not a mere matter of random variation. The survival or selection of unfit practices is a necessary part of the social relations of inequality and of the social reproduction of the fittest. This is not just an idiosyncrasy of, a disanalogy between, social and cultural as opposed to biological evolution. The active reproduction of unfit practices and memes is rather constitutive of the entire process of social reproduction.
V. EVOLUTION AND HISTORY

In order to justify selectionist explanations of history, cultural selectionists specify what is evolutionarily significant about it. According to Boyd and Richerson, the two requirements [that] capture much of what is meant by history are: history is more than just changeit is change that doesnt repeat itself; and historical change is strongly influenced by happenstanceit is path dependent.33 Similarly, Runciman maintains that selectionism seeks to explain social/cultural history not as one thing after another but one thing instead of another.34 We do not dispute the obvious point that historical change is non-repetitive and pathother 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). While true, this is an abstract description that explains nothing of the process by which wage-labor became the dominant practice: Of course wage-labor requires employers and employees, but who became which was not at all random. This is not just a matter of some practices being selected for over others. It is about the conscious and forced restructuring of social relations by those who had the property to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the expanding market economy, and the displacement of those who did not. It is about the reproduction of the unfit practice of pauperhood so extensively that it provoked Elizabeth I to cry Pauper ubique jacet, and about crimes against property leading to a prison population so high that it was used to spread English memes and practices to Australia. And as E. P. Thompson among others has shown, it is about the resistance of the displaced to the destruction of their traditional practices and their eventual acceptance of wage labor (only after older production practices were destroyed by capitalist competition) for its only advantage, namely, to avoid unemployment. While there is nothing incorrect in Runcimans statement about the selection of wage-labor, this explanation of capitalisms triumph is seriously inadequate; it abstracts from the people involved, it anesthetizes the actual historical process. 32. See Alan Caring, The Darwinian Weberian: W. G. Runciman and the Microfoundations of Historical Materialism, Historical Materialism 12:1 (2004), 75. 33. Boyd and Richerson in Nitecki and Nitecki, eds., History and Evolution, 185-186. 34. SPIS, 170.

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dependent, nor even that an analysis of historical change must explain the instead of. We do question, however, the general reduction of history to change, its specific reduction to evolutionary change explicable only by the one force of selection, and the exclusion of causal factors that fall outside the field of selectionist vision. We shall first consider overlooked issues in one of Runcimans evolutionary analyses, and then examples of paradigmatic exclusion. In a comparative study of the origin of the modern state in France and England Runciman attempts to establish, with hindsight, the necessary and sufficient conditions of the evolution of strong monarchical statesspecifically the difference between the weak absolutism and early constitutionalism in England as opposed to the stronger, more durable absolutism in France. Because of the striking similarities between the twoboth had their strong and weak monarchs and in both the great conflict was over control of the means of coercion between magnates (and lesser nobility or gentry) and kingsthe answer must be sought in the competitive advantage attaching . . . to mutant or recombinant practices.35 Runciman offers the practice of venality in France as that which created a new set of roles which linked the interests of their upwardly mobile incumbents to the fiscal system of the central state.36 In England, however, the almost accidental37 division of Parliament into Lords and Commons created a situation in which Commons could eventually, but early compared to France, exercise significant control over the means of coercion. We can easily agree with this sketch as far as it goes, but nevertheless find it woefully inadequate as an explanation. Runcimans categorial blurring of the lines between nobles and wealthy commoners under the rubric of magnates, combined with his neglect of crucial policies, especially those of the Tudors, under the platitude that both nations had their good and bad monarchs, leads him into analytical shortcuts that produce explanatory abstractions. First of all, the division of Parliament into Lords and Commons is not a historical accident. The French Estates-General after all had its Third Estate; and in both cases the division can be traced to the notion that the monarch is the nation and that representative bodies represent all the monarchs subjects organized according to their station. What needs to be explained, then, is why the English Commons was able effectively to oppose the monarchy while the French Third Estate could not. Or did not. Or did, only a century later. Crucial here is that the struggle over the means of coercion was not a two-way struggle between monarch and magnates, but a struggle involving three forces: monarch, nobles, and an increasingly influential group of commoners whose wealth, gained through the developing competitive market economy, enabled them to contend for power. In France, venality was a monarchical strategy to undermine the power of the nobility and to create an administration dependent on, and loyal to, the monarch. Venality, as Runciman notes, also diverted (or better, delayed) potential discontent
35. Runciman, The Origins of Modern State Theory in Europe and as a Topic in the Theory of Social Selection, in Visions sur le Dveloppement des tats Europens (Rome: cole Franaise de Rome, 1992), 53-54. 36. Ibid., 57. 37. Ibid., 58.

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by attaching significant numbers of those upwardly mobile incumbents to the central statemore precisely: the monarchical stateeither directly through the offices themselves, or indirectly through the aspiration to office. In England, however, in the wake of the War of the Roses, the victorious Tudor, Henry VII, implemented a policy (continued by his descendants Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) consciously designed to suppress potential rebellions by the (weakened) nobility. Not only did Tudor economic decision generally favor the upwardly mobile commoners; more importantly the Tudors used Commons as a counter-balance to the House of Lords and in so doing granted Commons representation in the most important economic (taxation) and most important cultural (the Reformation) decisions of the periodthereby generally making it part of the governing process. After more than a century of Tudor policies favoring Commons, the Stuarts had little real chance of realizing their absolutist pretensions that were defeated temporarily in the Civil War and decisively in the Glorious Revolution. Tudor policies were contingent in the sense of not inevitable, but they were neither random nor accidental; they were conscious responses of astute monarchs to the combination of systemic logic and historical process that characterized England during this period; and though they preserved the power of the Tudors vis--vis the nobility, they ultimately weakened the monarchy vis--vis Commons. The French response, venality, was equally contingent, but neither random nor accidental. It too was an astute response to systemic conflict and historical process that gave the French monarchy greater stability and a longer life by a century. But that longer life meant that the problems the monarchy temporarily avoided by having selected venality as a safety-valve (though not a solution) became that much more severe, as did the imbalance between the social and political structures, the crisis that threatened it, and the process that toppled itwhich historians call the French Revolution, but what in Runcimans selectionist vocabulary is euphemistically called cultural evolution with a vengeance.38 Runciman could certainly frame this entire analysis selectionistically. But our query is: why were these issues not addressed in the first place? The selectionist paradigm not only overlooks such microexplanatory factors, but also excludes the often monumental evolutionary consequences of what Runciman terms historical accidents (for example, plagues and natural disasters). Such accidents are external to the sequence of mutations and their phenotypic effects by which the competitive advantage (or disadvantage) of the . . . culture would otherwise have been determined and therefore can be invoked neither in support nor in criticism of the selectionist paradigm itself.39 Perhaps though it is rather suspect to preclude from the evaluation of a paradigms adequacy to the object of analysis that which the paradigm itself excludes. Nevertheless, such accidents can be invoked to show that what is external to the evolutionary paradigm can be most significant historicallyprecisely by virtue of their causal efficacy in producing the instead of. Consider, for example, the evolution of culture in North America. According to Runcimans logic, the disease-induced deaths of Native Americans is exter38. Runciman, HVCS, 21. 39. SPIS, 170.

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nal to the sequence of mutations and presumably outside of cultural evolution. If, however, the selectionist paradigm can, as Runciman insists, explain why one thing happened instead of another, then it seems that the historical accident of the diseases that killed possibly ninety percent of the indigenous American populations is crucial to understanding why the dominant culture of the Americas is essentially European. That is not to say that Europeans would never have conquered the Americas; but the genocidal number of deaths of the indigenous peoples not only made for the relative ease of the selectionwhat historians call conquestbut also for the thoroughness and overwhelming hegemony of European cultural values. Had the demographics of Native America not been significantly altered by this historical accident, it is highly likely that the conquest would have taken much longer; and demographics alone may have made the cultural evolution of North America more like that of South Africa or India instead of a majority white population bearing an almost pure derivative of European culture. As causal factors in the logic of instead of, the historical accidents that are external to the selectionist paradigm give shape to the contours of history and are therefore crucial to explanations of historical change. A second exclusionary tendency of selectionist theorists is, as Mary Midgely notes,40 that the focus on adaptive behavior tends toward myopia concerning the evolution of non-adaptive or destructive behaviors. Midgely mentions individual behaviors such as alcoholism. However atavistic or short-lived destructive behaviors sometimes are, they can have profound consequences for the direction of microevolutionary social/cultural process and the instead of that selectionists seek to explainespecially in the realm of politics. In order to see how selectionist hindsight fares in this context, we might return to an example we used in our original article against predictionist claims and ask: How should we address the destructive and self-destructive behavior advocated and produced by Nazism (which is not at all uncommon, even if unusual in this magnitude) as an evolutionary process? Runciman might reply with the example he cites of the culture of honor and violence among young-adult Southern males. Framing the conclusions of Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen (non-selectionists allegedly producing selectionist explanations by another name) with the selectionist paradigm, Runciman explains this violence as once adaptive, that is, positive, but now lingering under changed conditions as a result of cultural inertia.41 So should we view the immense popular support for Nazi practices and memes the desperation of a vulnerable and dying systact, the last flash in the pan of memes about to be selected against? Or in Runcimans nice turn of self-contradictory phrase encountered above, as cultural evolution with a vengeance (which is not far removed from simplistic Marxist analyses referring to the last gasp of a disappearing class)? The problem, however, is that despite Nazisms cultivation of a nostalgia for a romanticized past, it was much more than just a recombinant of once-fit, but now archaic memes and
40. Mary Midgely, Choosing the Selectors, in The Evolution of Cultural Entities, in Proceedings of the British Academy 112 (2002), 129. 41. SPIS, 180. See Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

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practices; fundamental Nazi practices and memes were unmistakably new and, even if misguided, they were direct and not at all random responses to particular social problems that must be understood in order to grasp the violent melding of inherited memes and newly (but not at all randomly) emergent ones. And what of the bearer and propagator of Nazi memes? We have already seen from Runcimans definitions of the units of social and cultural selection that evolutionary theory depopulates history by considering people only as bearers of practices or memes. This reification of society and culture allows their fetishized units to be treated as entities of inheritance systems, but it also raises some rather serious problems in understanding why one thing happened instead of another. Does one neglect the historical accident that none of Hitlers wounds during World War I killed him? It is not necessary to subscribe to a great-man theory of history in order to argue that the kind of fascism that came to power in Germany was uniquely Hitlers. Clearly Nazi-like memes were in existence in Germanyand elsewhere in Europe and the U.S.; but the particular form selected in Germany is unthinkable without Hitler. Hitlers early death, or the emergence of Ernst Rhm or Gregor Strasser instead as the leader of the Nazi party would have given much different form and content to this microevolutionary process. The selectionist insistence that only practices and memes count as evolutionarily significant dismisses by definitional fiat the idiosyncrasies of personal power that can fundamentally affect the direction of historical change.42 If social/cultural evolution is path-dependent, then the momentary, the accidental, the merely historical, does matter precisely because subsequent evolution proceeds from those points where history turned one way instead of another. And how do we explain selectionistically Nazisms historical meaning and effects? Do we view Nazism as a suboptimal adaptive solution? Runciman acknowledges that not every observed characteristic must have a selection value and that solutions are often suboptimal.43 But once suboptimal solutions are admitted (as they must be), the selectionist paradigm again traps itself in conceptual confusion. If selection is to have any meaning at all beyond the survival of this unit instead of others, then the suboptimal solution that asserts itself must be the fittest of the real, if not of the imaginable, alternatives. In the present case, selectionist logic requires that Nazism must be explained either as the fittest, even if suboptimal and short-lived, adaptation to German social environment in the early 1930s; or as an unfit suboptimal alternative that was temporarily
42. Other striking examples of individuals significantly affecting what would evolve instead of other alternatives include: Emperor Constantines conversion to Christianity (if the story isnt apocryphal, on a superstitious wager); if Christianity had had to continue to evolve for another two centuries without the power of the Roman state behind it, which was accomplished by an emperors choice, would Islam have spread to the northern shores of the Mediterranean? Protest of the Catholic Church was commonplace in the late Middle Ages, and a century before Martin Luther effected the Reformation, John Hus bore the same memes but was burned as a heretic. What happened instead did so because of Lutherand the fact that he managed to escape with the help of a noble protector instead of being arrested and burned. Can we imagine Leninism or the Bolshevik Revolution without Lenin, Stalinism without Stalin? Without those two, Russian history would have instead evolved quite differently. If historical accidents and the contingencies of individual actions are outside the selectionist paradigm, then the paradigm is outside history. 43. SPIS, 171.

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selected for, that was adaptive for a twelve-year period until the liberal-democratic memes that produced the Federal Republic and ultimately a united Germany were selected. But the first answer is incorrect and ignores the very crucial and complex historical question of why masses of people selected such counter-productive and self-destructive memes and practices over better, and available, alternatives; and the second offers the self-contradictory explanation of Nazi success as the selection of unfit memeswhich doesnt inspire confidence in selectionist explanation. A third possibility would be to conclude that its brief lifespan proved Nazism an aberrant historical accident without selective value; and thus outside the selectionist paradigm, it can conveniently be ignored as evolutionarily insignificantbut that would also ignore its lingering causal efficacy for postwar social/cultural evolution in Germany, Europe, and much of the world. Finally, we must add that to speak of mass destruction and mass murder caused by political decisions as selection is a horribly inaccurate (not to mention insensitive) euphemism that anesthetizes history.
VI. CONCLUSION

Seeing only the evolutionary survival or demise of practices or memes, selectionist hindsight starts with the selected outcome and seeks the random mutation that produced itand finding everywhere the selectionism already posited as the only meaningful cause of evolutionary change. And through regressive and derivative responses, selectionism can (as Runciman did with Kelly and could with our objections) backpedal into historyexpropriating and incorporating insights overlooked by its own paradigmatic myopia. Though selectionist explanations can always be made to work, they are circular, redundant, and not in the least parsimonious. The only work they accomplish is to satisfy a misplaced desire for scientific certainty by creating the illusion of a universally valid explanatory principle.44 By the time they backpedal far enough to include all that is requisite to historical understanding, selectionists are doing mere history. But they do so with what is essentially a scientific skyhook that overlooks much while explaining everything and nothingand in a euphemistic vocabulary that anesthetizes history. History is much less systematic than Runciman wants it to be and much more systematic than his selectionist paradigm allows it to be; and there is much more
44. Runcimans 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. Snows essay unhelpful and Snows essay itself intellectually crass, politically nave, historically short-sighted, and rhetorically inepteven silly or fundamentally mistaken (CDE, 12-13). But he misreads Snows essay (which discusses a communication gap and not, as Runciman alleges, a claim that social scientists believe that nothing can be learned from the humanities) as badly as he misreads our use of it. Our argument was that the abyss is not between the sciences and humanities but between explanatory paradigms of what Runciman calls social/cultural evolution and we call history. If nothing else, our exchange should make clear that we are dealing with two discrete puzzle-solving devices, both of which work, but whose real work can only be adequately evaluated, not by an appeal to an expanding literature of successful modeling, but through an analysis of the appropriateness of the framework of the puzzle, the paradigmatic assumptions, to the object of analysis. According to this measure, as we have argued, the selectionist paradigm comes up short.

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to it than fits into his paradigm. It is the existence of real people acting within discrete social relations governed by a systemic logic and whose contingent actions are efficacious in creating, preserving, varying, and destroying memes and practices. It is precisely the combination of discrete systemic logic and contingent actions that shape the texture and contours of history and that therefore is essential to any adequate explanation of why one thing happened instead of another. By reducing historically significant accidents to initial conditions, dissolving systemic social and cultural logic into populations of random memes and practices, and by reifying culture and society as disembodied memes and depopulated social practices, selectionism produces history without texture. Though claiming to take historical analysis to a more general level, the selectionist paradigm flattens the contours of history to a linear sequence of initial conditions and selective (even if suboptimal) adaptations. Cumulatively, selectionist explanations amount to a collection of tangents that momentarily touch the contours of history before heading off into empty abstract time. University of Oregon (Fracchia) Harvard University (Lewontin)