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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 andTheory, Theme Issue 38 [December 1999], 52-78), W. G. Runciman affirms that CultureDoes Evolve. However, we find nothing in his essay that convinces us to alter our initialposition. And we must confess that in composing an answer to Runciman, our first temp-tation was simply to urge those interested to read our original articleboth as a basis forevaluating Runcimans attempted refutation of it and as a framework for reading thisessay, which addresses in greater detail issues we have already raised.

Runciman views the selectionist paradigm as a scientific puzzle-solving devicenow validated by an expanding literature that has successfully modeled social and cul-

tural change as evolutionary. All paradigms, however, including scientific ones, giverise to self-validating normal science. The real issue, accordingly, is not whether expla-nations can be successfully manufactured on the basis of paradigmatic assumptions, butwhether the paradigmatic assumptions are appropriate to the object of analysis. The selec-tionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems thatconsist 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 reducedto 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 con-tingency. Now as before, therefore, we conclude that while historical phenomena canalways be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do no work, nor do theycontribute 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, sociobiologically-based theories of cultural evolution. He insists, however, that they are inapplica-


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predictable in advance, [evolution] is always away from something explicablewith hindsight.2

These claims are part of Runcimans overall attempt to give the apparentlymerely factual narratives of historians a theoretical grounding that they suppos-

edly lack, to take the discussion to a more general level without weakening theforce of detailed conclusions established by specialists at the level of particularcase-historiesand to do so without succumbing to the teleological determin-ism of skyhooks.3 We are in complete accord with this not unusual aspirationto avoid both empirical eclecticism and theoretical dogmatism. Consequences,however, cannot be measured by intentions. And we begin our response byrepeating the conclusion of our original essay, namely: that selectionist explana-tions 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 explana-tion of any historical change as a process of hereditable variation and competi-tive selection, the selectionist paradigm neither contributes anything new(except terminology) nor does it of its own volition ask the kinds of questionsrequired in order fully to explain historical changes.

II. THE LIMITS OF PARADIGMATIC VISION

Runcimans argument is based on some rather outmoded paradigmatic assump-tions about the relation between facts and explanatory theories and between his-tory and science (assumptions that ignore an immense literature on historyand theory). He agrees with Marion Blute that biological evolutionary theoryhas solved the problem of history versus science by showing that there is a log-ical role for both.4 As two of Runcimans next-generation colleagues, RobertBoyd and Peter Richerson, specify: In the biological and social domains, sci-ence 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, historiansdiscover and collect data and about interesting social-cultural phenomena,while evolutionary theorists raise the general level of analysis by subjectingthose data to the selectionist covering law.

Having domesticated the historical discipline as the research assistant of sci-ence, Runciman turns to Darwins selectionist paradigm, which can furnishpurely narrative explanations of the evolution of institutions and societies . . .

with a theoretical grounding which they otherwise lack.6

Its superiority con-firmed by its elevation to the dominant paradigm in biology, the selectionist

THE PRICE OF METAPHOR 15


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JOSEPH FRACCHIA AND R. C. LEWONTIN16

paradigm has been vindicated to the point that it is now a commonplace that thetheory of natural selection is about as likely to be disconfirmed as the earth toturn out to be flat.7 In a self-validating appeal that mistakes quantity for quali-ty, Runciman asserts that the literature in which it is taken for grantedthat cul-

tural change can be modeled as an evolutionary process has expanded to thepoint that it is no longer a question of whether heritable variation and competi-tive selection are at work, but only how.8 How indeed?

Though he acknowledges that a paradigm is (only) a way of looking at theworld, Runciman insists that in science a paradigm is not an untestable set ofmetatheoretical assumptions, but a puzzle-solving device that must be testedcase by case. His faith in testing as the measure of validity notwithstanding, eachand 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 nor-mal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, findsnone9; it is rather the self-validating application of paradigmatic assumptions toparticular casesas is evident in Runcimans attempt to validate the selectionistparadigm by appealing to the totally predictable normal scientific successes inthe expanding literature. And the flip-side is that all paradigmatic ways of look-ing at the world relegate something to the shadows, thereby creating their ownblind spots. Our point is notthat selection explains nothing, but that it does not

explain everything and excludes much that is essential to the understanding ofsocial/cultural change. The fact that culture and society can be subjected to theselectionist paradigm does not mean that they are selectionist-driven evolution-ary processes. It is thus ironic that Runciman regularly castigates Hegels philos-ophy as an untestable metahistory, yet completely ignores Hegels very acute par-adigmatic understanding of his own work as a way of looking at the world, asa self-conscious (and, in his view of course, superior) construction. As Hegel putit 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

Thesame 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-mechanisticevents and processes that cannot be subjected to experimentation, normal sci-

7. Ibid., 169, 163. There are actually two questions involved here, namely: does cultureevolve?which we addressed as a transformational theory of a macroevolutionary process; and docultures evolve?which we addressed as a variational theory of microevolutionary processes.Though concerned with the latter question about microevolutionary processes, Runciman regularlyinvokes the associative power of real and counterfactual macroevolutionary sequences to legitimizeselectionist explanations of microevolutionary processes. Though we agree that there have been evo-


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ence has an extra elasticity: it is always possible to refine an explanation byexpropriating critical counterpoints, alternative hypotheses, and hitherto uncon-sidered data and running them through the paradigmatic millin this case ofhereditable variation and competitive selectionuntil they are re-formed into

variables of an evolutionary explanation. Through potentially limitlesspost hocadjustments, anomalies can be domesticated and the paradigm substantiated. Thecrucial question, therefore, is not whether a paradigm can offer explanations ofempirical data consistent with its assumptions, for it can always be made to doso. 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 theoptics 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 ofunits of selectionpractices in social inheritance systems, memes in cultural;11

to see these units of selection as self-replicating, though with random and heri-table variation; and to see social/cultural history as evolution propelled by theselection of some variations instead of others. Only by looking at society and cul-ture as systems of inheritance can we see history as evolutionary change, whichby definition can only be explained selectionistically. But a good deal of para-digmatic 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 evolu-tion with selection. His categorical assertion that competitive selection underenvironmental pressure is the only force capable of accounting for evolutionarychange12 is simply wrong. Like any of us who attempt to understand a subjectin which we have no primary expertise, Runciman has clearly depended for hisknowledge of evolutionary biology on the writings of vulgarizing enthusiastswho have simplified evolutionary biology in a way that seriously misleads those

who depend on them. Darwins variational theory of evolution was based onthree principles: organisms vary, the variation is heritable, and some variantsleave more offspring than others. He then added that the variant properties them-selves were the cause of the differential reproduction because some types had agreater ability to appropriate resources in short supply (including mates) in thestruggle for existence. It is this last claim that constitutes the theory of naturalselection. What was left open in Darwins variational scheme for evolution, how-ever, was the possibility that some variants might leave more offspring for rea-

sons other than the properties of the variants themselves. What the hautes vul-garisateurs have failed to tell their readers, either from aesthetic or a priori epis-


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finite populations. Neutral evolution, especially at the molecular level, is at thevery center of modern molecular evolutionary biology, although the possible roleof such non-selective evolution was already well understood by theoreticians inthe 1930s. The equation of biological evolution with a selectionist paradigm is

unacceptable.A similar blind spot results from Runcimans conflation of evolution withbiological evolution that follows Darwins variational scheme. As our originalarticle makes clear, the variational evolutionary scheme is only one form of evo-lutionary phenomenon. The Kant-Laplace theory of stellar evolution antedatedDarwin by more than half a century and is a transformational rather than varia-tional structure. Even if one wants to build a theory of cultural evolution, thereis no compelling reason to make it isomorphic with the variational evolution of

ensembles of individually short-lived objects like organisms, rather than thetransformational evolution of an ensemble of very long-lived objects like stars.The attempt to force an isomorphism with Darwinism has led Runciman not onlyto adopt a universal selectionism, but to swallow the concept of memes (whileadmitting that he cannot say exactly what memes are13)a notion invented outof whole cloth by Richard Dawkins when he realized that his own attempt to uni-versalize evolution by natural selection required the creation of an entity thatreminds 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 prop-erty is to fill in the gap in an elaborate metaphor. Both the theory of stellar evo-lution and the theory of organic evolution are theoretical structures that werebuilt on the concrete phenomenology of the objects of interest. It may indeed bepossible and even desirable to build a theory of the evolution of culture, but thecorrect way to do that is not to attempt to make it isomorphic with some othertheory 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 ofsociety and culture to systems of inheritance. In response to our argument thatthe definition of society and culture as systems of inheritance is metaphorical,Runciman scoffs: Metaphor? What metaphor? Nevertheless, to insist that soci-ety and culture are systems of inheritance requires a leap of faith. In our earlieressay we noted Boyds and Richersons jump from the more modest claim thatculture can be modeled as a system of inheritance to the categorical affirma-tion that culture constitutes a system of inheritance 14 We repeat it here because


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hasty to conclude that it is the only or even most significant factor about societyand culture and social and cultural changeor that the mode of modification inculture 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 inthe same way that genes are. Ideas, beliefs and tastes jump across lineages, so tospeak, when they pass from one persons mind . . . to anothers, as do economicideological and political practices from one institution of society which are import-ed into another16; mutations arise less from random copying error than fromactive 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 theircarriers.17 But this difference, he decides, is one only of content, not form. Though

seldom copied identically, memes do fulfill the formal conditions enablingthem to act as replicators.18 All this means is that heritable variation and com-petitive selection of information affecting phenotype can work in different ways.19

Having thus dispensed with any unpleasant incongruities, Runciman draws theuntroubled conclusion that the analogies between natural and sociocultural evolu-tion are more significant than this, and other, disanalogies.20

Denial is the best way to avoid the eternal vigilance that Norbert Wienerestablished 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 iden-tity of metaphor, which dissolves disanalogies into insignificance. This slip-page into metaphor allows the leap of faith into paradigmatic certainty: we cantake for granted that culture is an inheritance system and therefore (to para-phrase Martin Luthers model metaphor) a mighty fortress is our theory. Thissleight of metaphorical hand is essential to legitimizing the selectionist paradigmfor the analysis of social/cultural evolution. The crucial question, however, isthis: if practices and memes arent inherited as genes are, if they dont repli-

cate themselves in the same unilinearly descending way as genes, can we sim-ply assume that analogous causal logics govern the two significantly disanalo-gous processes? Specifically: can a paradigm that treats the elements of societyand culture as randomly varying individual units, and that reduces people to thebearers of those units, adequately model the intricate systemic logic of discretesocial 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


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misses our point: our rather evident aversion is not to the term, but to the method-ological individualism that reduces the organized systems of society or culture toa population, to the sum of its random, individual unitswhatever they may becalled.23 Here we first note (again) Boyds and Richersons rather bold and

axiomatic claims that cultural change is a population process and because itis, it can be studied using Darwinian methods.24 Despite this categorical affir-mation by kindred spirits, Runciman nevertheless insists that selectionism is notconstrained by populational logic. The matter, however, is not settled by his useof terms like meme-set or bundles or complexes of information affectingbehavior, nor by his insistence elsewhere that social practices are inherently rela-

23. Runciman attempts to refute this objection by adopting Elliot Sobers and David Sloan Wilsonsclaim (Unto Others [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998], 186ff.) that RaymondKellys The Nuer Conquest(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), is a smoking gun ofsocial/cultural evolution. Correctly depicting Kellys book as a tightly argued, fully documentedanalysis, Runciman expropriates it as a work in which cultural differences are explained in accor-dance with selectionist criteria though not couched in selectionist terms (CDE, 11), as a case of selec-tionism avant la lettre (HVIS, 22). Having translated Kellys analysis into a coherently structuredstory of heritable variation and competitive selection of information affecting phenotype, Runcimaninsists that it dispos[es] at a stroke [our] contention that cultural evolutionists, by viewing societiesas populations of individuals rather than organized systems with properties of their own, are driven tohaving 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 notthat social/cultural evolu-

tionists feel they must prove this, but that they methodologically assume itas Runciman did bypurg[ing] social theory of societies. For this reason, second, Runcimans translation of Kelly issuspect. For Kelly did not voluntarily enlist in, but was drafted into, the ranks of cultural evolution-ists. Kelly explicitly cautions that models of adaptive structure and regulatory process drawn fromcybernetics and evolutionary biology may fail to fully bring out the distinctive pattern of relationshipsbetween relationships that obtains within sociocultural systems, that the distinctive features of soci-ocultural 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 ofgenerality 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 ofanalyses (particularly symbolic and structural) also are necessary (ibid., 36). And in arguing for sys-temic analyses of discrete social forms (like his own of the Nuer and Dinka) instead of subjecting localphenomena to global explanations, they conclude (much as do we): That an analysis does not eluci-date everything does not mean that it elucidates nothing (ibid., 42). Kelly did notuse (or need) selec-tionist assumptions or terms for his systemic analyses; he does notmodel society and culture as inher-itance systems; the story he tells is notone of heritable variation and competitive selection. It is rathera study of the complex and distinctive patterns of relationships within and between the Nuer and Dinkasocieties; it is the coherently structured story of the internal logic, the systemic relations linking anddefining the properties (practices and memes) of two fairly equally well-functioning social sys-

tems, one of which produced for consumption and was homeostatic, and the other exchange-dominat-ed and expansionist (see Kelly, The Nuer Conquest, 197, 247-248). There are several reasons why


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tional.25 The key issue is not the terminology, but whether the meme-sets orbundles and complexes are treated populationallywhich is determined byhow 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 selec-tion as do genes in the theory of natural selection. Therefore, an account strict-ly in terms of the theory of social selection should be purged of any reference toeither societies or states as such since societies are no more than sets of insti-tutionally connected roles whose catchment area in social space may or may notcoincide 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 notbe coterminous with those catchment areas.27 But this is only another way ofsaying that societies and states have no systemic logic, that they consist onlyof populations of individual units whose relation to one another is the merelyexternal one of competitive selection; the fitness of a practice or meme is a func-tion solely of its own attributes and has no direct relation to the fitness of its com-petitors.

Methodological individualism makes possible too the methodological ran-

domness that is required to uphold the inheritance system metaphor betweensocial/cultural and biological replicators. Runciman insists that variation in theunits of selection must be treated as random. This does not mean that varia-tions are uncaused and therefore inexplicable, only that they are independentlycaused and therefore explicable only at a different level. But it does entail theirrelevance of the cause of a variation to its fate.28 While this may be true in bio-logical 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 ofrandom initial conditions.29 It includes precisely that systemic logic thatRunciman paradigmatically excludes with his metaphorical transference of theattributes of genes to the elements of society. He dismisses the systemic sociallogic that establishes the relations among the practicesrelations that are consti-tutive of the individual practices or memes themselves and not at all unrelated totheir 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


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of a solution, whether it will be short- or long-lived, depends not just on its fit-ness in regard to specific problems, but also and crucially on the amount ofpower 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 dowith their fitness. This raises a question pertaining to an essential attribute ofsocial and cultural, but not of biological evolution, namely the systematic repro-duction of unfit memeswhich is a matter of internal systemic relations.

Runciman insists that [m]emes are often replicated only within a culturalminority and practices only within one of a societys several institutions.30 Butthis disanalogy, he concludes, means no more than that the relevant popula-tion is not the culture or society in the way that, in natural as opposed to cultur-

al or social selection, it is the species. It follows, accordingly, not just thatinfluence rather than frequency is the appropriate criterion of success; it is prac-tices which are the units of selection, not the roles which carry them, just as incultural selection it is memes, not the minds which carry them. And he offersthe apparent coup de grce by referring to Hallpikes taking the argument adabsurdum with the comment that Generals are much rarer than privates, butwhat would it mean to say that they had less fitness? Aside from the fact thatthis attribution of the replication of thefitunits of social/cultural selection to a

social/cultural minority ignores an immense historical literature on popular cul-ture, it also represents a categorical dismissal of any relation between practicesand memes other than that of individual entities engaged in competitive selec-tion. Those not in that replicating minority are unintentionally condemned bysocial/cultural evolutionists to social deathunintentionally, because Runcimancould rightly reply that there is no reason why the selectionist paradigm cannotanalyze the practices and memes of popular culture. But this is where method-ological individualism traps the selectionist paradigm.

By analyzing what memes and practices were selected for among those sys-tacts (Runcimans term for social group) that make up the non-replicating cul-tural majority, we end up in the terminological muddle of talking about selectionof fit practices and memes, but for a socially/culturally unfit group. This muddle,however, can sensibly be explained through a systemic analysis of the internalrelations between social groupsone that begins with the understanding thatthere are no generals without privates. The key issue here is that the logic ofsocial and cultural systems is fundamentally different from that of biological

populations, that survival and selection mean something quite different inhuman history than in biological evolution. In biological evolution, the unfit die


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outtheir survival and replication are absolutely essential in order to ensure thesurvival and replication of the selected, fittest, hegemonic memes and prac-tices.32 As Marx so clearly explained, capitalism reproduces the unfit practiceof wage labor and of the reserve army of the unemployedthe latter substan-

tiated by economists who euphemistically refer to optimal rate of unemploy-ment (an optimal rate of unfitness???) hovering around six percent, whichcapital must replicate in order to function optimally.

Because of its inescapable methodological individualism and the methodolog-ical randomness it spawns, the selectionist paradigm produces a massive blindspot toward the logic of social relations and socially-structured antagonisms; itreduces the social conflict produced by those antagonisms to the indifferent dif-ference 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 rela-tions of inequality and of the social reproduction of the fittest. This is not justan idiosyncrasy of, a disanalogy between, social and cultural as opposed tobiological evolution. The active reproduction of unfit practices and memes israther constitutive of the entire process of social reproduction.

V. EVOLUTION AND HISTORY

In order to justify selectionist explanations of history, cultural selectionists spec-ify what is evolutionarily significant about it. According to Boyd and Richerson,the two requirements [that] capture much of what is meant by history are: his-tory is more than just changeit is change that doesnt repeat itself; and his-torical change is strongly influenced by happenstanceit is path dependent.33

Similarly, Runciman maintains that selectionism seeks to explain social/culturalhistory not as one thing afteranother but one thing insteadof another.34 We do

not dispute the obvious point that historical change is non-repetitive and path-

other modes of production, succeeds when collectivities such as farms, plantations, mines, ship-yards, building or transport firms, manufactories, and commercial enterprises which carry the prac-tice and the roles defined by it take market share away from those which do not (HVCS, 17). Whiletrue, this is an abstract description that explains nothing of the process by which wage-labor becamethe dominant practice: Of course wage-labor requires employers and employees, but who becamewhich was not at all random. This is not just a matter of some practices being selected for over oth-ers. It is about the conscious and forced restructuring of social relations by those who had the prop-erty to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the expanding market economy, and the dis-

placement of those who did not. It is about the reproduction of the unfit practice of pauperhood soextensively that it provoked Elizabeth I to cry Pauper ubique jacet, and about crimes against prop-erty leading to a prison population so high that it was used to spread English memes and practices to


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dependent, nor even that an analysis of historical change must explain theinstead of. We do question, however, the general reduction of history to change,its specific reduction to evolutionary change explicable only by the one forceof selection, and the exclusion of causal factors that fall outside the field of selec-

tionist vision. We shall first consider overlooked issues in one of Runcimansevolutionary 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 sufficientconditions of the evolution of strong monarchical statesspecifically the dif-ference between the weak absolutism and early constitutionalism in England asopposed to the stronger, more durable absolutism in France. Because of the strik-ing similarities between the twoboth had their strong and weak monarchs and

in both the great conflict was over control of the means of coercion betweenmagnates (and lesser nobility or gentry) and kingsthe answer must be soughtin the competitive advantage attaching . . . to mutant or recombinant prac-tices.35 Runciman offers the practice of venality in France as that which createda new set of roles which linked the interests of their upwardly mobile incum-bents to the fiscal system of the central state.36 In England, however, the almostaccidental37 division of Parliament into Lords and Commons created a situationin which Commons could eventually, but early compared to France, exercise sig-

nificant control over the means of coercion. We can easily agree with this sketchas far as it goes, but nevertheless find it woefully inadequate as an explanation.Runcimans categorial blurring of the lines between nobles and wealthy com-moners under the rubric of magnates, combined with his neglect of crucialpolicies, especially those of the Tudors, under the platitude that both nations hadtheir good and bad monarchs, leads him into analytical shortcuts that produceexplanatory abstractions.

First of all, the division of Parliament into Lords and Commons is not a histor-

ical accident. The French Estates-General after all had its Third Estate; and in bothcases the division can be traced to the notion that the monarch is the nation andthat representative bodies represent all the monarchs subjects organized accord-ing to their station. What needs to be explained, then, is why the EnglishCommons was able effectively to oppose the monarchy while the French ThirdEstate could not. Or did not. Or did, only a century later. Crucial here is that thestruggle over the means of coercion was not a two-way struggle betweenmonarch and magnates, but a struggle involving three forces: monarch, nobles,

and an increasingly influential group of commoners whose wealth, gained throughthe developing competitive market economy, enabled them to contend for power.


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by attaching significant numbers of those upwardly mobile incumbents to thecentral statemore precisely: the monarchical stateeither directly through theoffices themselves, or indirectly through the aspiration to office. In England, how-ever, in the wake of the War of the Roses, the victorious Tudor, Henry VII, imple-

mented a policy (continued by his descendants Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) con-sciously designed to suppress potential rebellions by the (weakened) nobility. Notonly did Tudor economic decision generally favor the upwardly mobile com-moners; more importantly the Tudors used Commons as a counter-balance to theHouse of Lords and in so doing granted Commons representation in the mostimportant economic (taxation) and most important cultural (the Reformation)decisions of the periodthereby generally making it part of the governingprocess. After more than a century of Tudor policies favoring Commons, the

Stuarts had little real chance of realizing their absolutist pretensions that weredefeated temporarily in the Civil War and decisively in the Glorious Revolution.Tudor policies were contingent in the sense of not inevitable, but they were nei-ther random nor accidental; they were conscious responses of astute monarchs tothe combination of systemic logic and historical process that characterizedEngland during this period; and though they preserved the power of the Tudorsvis--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 processthat gave the French monarchy greater stability and a longer life by a century. Butthat longer life meant that the problems the monarchy temporarily avoided by hav-ing selected venality as a safety-valve (though not a solution) became that muchmore severe, as did the imbalance between the social and political structures, thecrisis that threatened it, and the process that toppled itwhich historians call theFrench Revolution, but what in Runcimans selectionist vocabulary iseuphemistically called cultural evolution with a vengeance.38 Runciman could

certainly frame this entire analysis selectionistically. But our query is: why werethese issues not addressed in the first place?The selectionist paradigm not only overlooks such microexplanatory fac-

tors, but also excludes the often monumental evolutionary consequences of whatRunciman terms historical accidents (for example, plagues and natural disas-ters). Such accidents are external to the sequence of mutations and their pheno-typic effects by which the competitive advantage (or disadvantage) of the . . . cul-ture would otherwise have been determined and therefore can be invoked nei-

ther in support nor in criticism of the selectionist paradigm itself.39

Perhapsthough it is rather suspect to preclude from the evaluation of a paradigms ade-


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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 onething happened insteadof another, then it seems that the historical accident ofthe diseases that killed possibly ninety percent of the indigenous American pop-

ulations is crucial to understanding why the dominant culture of the Americas isessentially European. That is not to say that Europeans would never have con-quered the Americas; but the genocidal number of deaths of the indigenous peo-ples not only made for the relative ease of the selectionwhat historians callconquestbut also for the thoroughness and overwhelming hegemony ofEuropean cultural values. Had the demographics of Native America not been sig-nificantly altered by this historical accident, it is highly likely that the conquestwould have taken much longer; and demographics alone may have made the cul-

tural evolution of North America more like that of South Africa or India insteadofa majority white population bearing an almost pure derivative of Europeanculture. As causal factors in the logic of instead of, the historical accidentsthat are external to the selectionist paradigm give shape to the contours of histo-ry and are therefore crucial to explanations of historical change.

A second exclusionary tendency of selectionist theorists is, as Mary Midgelynotes,40 that the focus on adaptive behavior tends toward myopia concerning theevolution of non-adaptive or destructive behaviors. Midgely mentions individual

behaviors such as alcoholism. However atavistic or short-lived destructivebehaviors sometimes are, they can have profound consequences for the directionof microevolutionary social/cultural process and the instead of that selection-ists seek to explainespecially in the realm of politics. In order to see how selec-tionist hindsight fares in this context, we might return to an example we used inour original article against predictionist claims and ask: How should we addressthe destructive and self-destructive behavior advocated and produced by Nazism(which is not at all uncommon, even if unusual in this magnitude) as an evolu-

tionary process?Runciman might reply with the example he cites of the culture of honor andviolence among young-adult Southern males. Framing the conclusions of RichardNisbett and Dov Cohen (non-selectionists allegedly producing selectionist expla-nations by another name) with the selectionist paradigm, Runciman explains thisviolence as once adaptive, that is, positive, but now lingering under changed con-ditions as a result of cultural inertia.41 So should we view the immense popularsupport 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 inRuncimans nice turn of self-contradictory phrase encountered above, as cultur-


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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 particularsocial problems that must be understood in order to grasp the violent melding ofinherited memes and newly (but not at all randomly) emergent ones.

And what of the bearer and propagator of Nazi memes? We have already seenfrom Runcimans definitions of the units of social and cultural selection that evo-lutionary theory depopulates history by considering people only as bearers ofpractices or memes. This reification of society and culture allows their fetishizedunits to be treated as entities of inheritance systems, but it also raises some ratherserious problems in understanding why one thing happened instead ofanother.Does one neglect the historical accident that none of Hitlers wounds duringWorld 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 inGermany was uniquely Hitlers. Clearly Nazi-like memes were in existence inGermanyand elsewhere in Europe and the U.S.; but the particular formselected in Germany is unthinkable without Hitler. Hitlers early death, or theemergence of Ernst Rhm or Gregor Strasser insteadas the leader of the Naziparty would have given much different form and content to this microevolu-tionary process. The selectionist insistence that only practices and memes countas 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 acciden-tal, the merely historical, does matter precisely because subsequent evolutionproceeds from those points where history turned one way instead ofanother.

And how do we explain selectionistically Nazisms historical meaning andeffects? Do we view Nazism as a suboptimal adaptive solution? Runcimanacknowledges that not every observed characteristic must have a selectionvalue and that solutions are often suboptimal.43 But once suboptimal solutions

are admitted (as they must be), the selectionist paradigm again traps itself in con-ceptual confusion. If selection is to have any meaning at all beyond the survivalof this unit instead ofothers, then the suboptimal solution that asserts itself mustbe 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 inthe early 1930s; or as an unfit suboptimal alternative that was temporarily

42. Other striking examples of individuals significantly affecting what would evolve instead ofother alternatives include: Emperor Constantines conversion to Christianity (if the story isntapocryphal, on a superstitious wager); if Christianity had had to continue to evolve for another two


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selected for, that was adaptive for a twelve-year period until the liberal-demo-cratic memes that produced the Federal Republic and ultimately a unitedGermany were selected. But the first answer is incorrect and ignores the verycrucial and complex historical question of why masses of people selected such

counter-productive and self-destructive memes and practices over better, andavailable, alternatives; and the second offers the self-contradictory explanationof Nazi success as the selection of unfit memeswhich doesnt inspire confi-dence in selectionist explanation. A third possibility would be to conclude that itsbrief lifespan proved Nazism an aberrant historical accident without selectivevalue; and thus outside the selectionist paradigm, it can conveniently be ignoredas evolutionarily insignificantbut that would also ignore its lingering causalefficacy 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 mur-der caused by political decisions as selection is a horribly inaccurate (not tomention insensitive) euphemism that anesthetizes history.

VI. CONCLUSION

Seeing only the evolutionary survival or demise of practices or memes, selec-tionist hindsight starts with the selected outcome and seeks the random muta-

tion that produced itand finding everywhere the selectionism already positedas the only meaningful cause of evolutionary change. And through regressiveand derivative responses, selectionism can (as Runciman did with Kelly andcould with our objections) backpedal into historyexpropriating and incorpo-rating insights overlooked by its own paradigmatic myopia. Though selectionistexplanations can always be made to work, they are circular, redundant, and notin the least parsimonious. The only work they accomplish is to satisfy a mis-placed 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 thatis requisite to historical understanding, selectionists are doing mere history.But they do so with what is essentially a scientific skyhook that overlooksmuch while explaining everything and nothingand in a euphemistic vocabu-lary that anesthetizes history.

History is much less systematic than Runciman wants it to be and much moresystematic 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 coveringthe facts with a general explanatory law explains why he finds our mention of C. P. Snows essayunhelpful and Snows essay itself intellectually crass, politically nave, historically short-sighted,


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to it than fits into his paradigm. It is the existence of real people acting withindiscrete social relations governed by a systemic logic and whose contingentactions are efficacious in creating, preserving, varying, and destroying memesand practices. It is precisely the combination of discrete systemic logic and con-

tingent actions that shape the texture and contours of history and that therefore isessential to any adequate explanation of why one thing happened instead ofanother. By reducing historically significant accidents to initial conditions, dis-solving systemic social and cultural logic into populations of random memes andpractices, and by reifying culture and society as disembodied memes and depop-ulated social practices, selectionism produces history without texture. Thoughclaiming to take historical analysis to a more general level, the selectionist para-digm flattens the contours of history to a linear sequence of initial conditions and

selective (even if suboptimal) adaptations. Cumulatively, selectionist explana-tions amount to a collection of tangents that momentarily touch the contours ofhistory before heading off into empty abstract time.

University of Oregon (Fracchia)Harvard University (Lewontin)


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22228249 price of metaphor

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