Social Evolution

Darwin Statue. Photo by Kevinzim.

I’m opening up a new category to file my thoughts on Social Evolution. This is just me thinking out loud rather than producing finished or even coherent work, so much of it will be wrong or at least naïve. The reason I’m opening it up is to pin down some thoughts. I could do it in a Word file, but this is accessible at work, and also has a slight “My goodness! Did I say something that foolish?” kick to it, which might make my thinking a bit sharper.

There is a problem of where to start. I could start in the middle with Richerson and Boyd’s book “Not by Genes Alone” which I’m about half-way through*. It’s thought-provoking and is saying a lot of what I’m thinking, only more articulately. When I’m finished I’ll be a bit frustrated by that, but for now it’s a fun read. The reason I like it so far is that it provides an argument for Darwinian Social Evolution that doesn’t use memes. That’s helpful because I’m not convinced by memes and am working on a non-memetic model, but for many in the social sciences memes and Darwinian Evolution have a bad name. Social Evolution has a bit of a bad name anyway. It’s not that historians and archaeologists resent biologists coming in with their new ideas and saying how culture works. Well at least not all historians and archaeologists. It’s that the idea of evolution in society isn’t new. It’s been around for much longer than Darwin’s work – which is why I specified Darwinian Evolution.

The alternative is Lamarckian evolution. I’ve read Mark Pluciennik’s book on Social Evolution and it’s been helpful in seeing what perspective archaeologists see evolution. My own reading had been heavily Dawkins-biased so I’d tended to see evolution in neo-Darwinian terms. The idea that someone could refer to evolution in a Lamarckian way was quite a shock. This is the first hurdle. There is a tendency in archaeology to see social evolution as teleological, people did something in order to get somewhere. I can see that there’s evidence for short term planning but I’d struggle with the idea that ancient Rome set up its constitution in order to dominate Europe. I think that was an unforeseen consequence, the Romans were planning for the immediate future and their immediate problems with their neighbours and they found a system which was well adapted to world conquest.

An interesting question to follow up on that is did ancient Rome create it’s own niche, or were they simply the best adapted to fill it? If Rome had suffered a plague or some other historically convenient disaster would we now be talking about the Carthaginian Empire in a similar way to the way we talk about Rome? I don’t know. I do think the transition from Republic to Empire was inevitable. People had been trying since Marius and Augustus was simply the first to make it stick. If he hadn’t succeeded another Roman would have tried again thirty years later.

If you could draw up an evolutionary model for the concentration of power in ancient Rome, would it be useful? It wouldn’t explain specifically why Augustus became the first Emperor or would it? Certainly I don’t think a Lamarckian explanation would. It would presuppose that there were structures that existed in Rome that people could be slotted into. I think the non-directed concept of Darwinian evolution might. It would give models of how people succeed and when combined with the historical record you would have answers for both how and why Augustus succeeded. The historical method and a Darwinian model aren’t in competition. But historians already answer both these questions anyway, so what good is the model?

The reason why modelling would be useful in the long term is that it provides me with a template for questions I find interesting. They might not be the same as yours. It’s a scaffold to build from. The danger here is that you end up with a one-size-fits-all model for human behaviour. Either that’s going to be trivial or else erroneous. I’m hoping for the latter.

The reason I’d like the model to be erroneous rather than trivial is that models are most exciting when they break down. If something’s happening that you wouldn’t expect then it’s a big red flag being waved over something interesting. It could be some peculiar religious belief, or some economic weirdness but it’s a way of highlighting what is special about a time or place.

Though I would add that most people have ideas about how societies work when they write histories. It’s simply that they may not be explicit about how their imagination works.

* I see Prof. Rob Boyd is a Visitor at the new Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies. See Athena’s blog for a description of the opening lecture. —–