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the outside’ (p. 252). In ‘Limited world, limited rights’, the author contends that mankind has no inherent right, to food, shelter, medical care, to free movement (i.e. internal and external migration), or to breed. To be fair, Mr Hardin does not insist these claims are unreasonable but, rather, that they cannot be viewed as inherent rights and that they must be weighed in terms of their social cost.

What can a reviewer say? Mr Hardin writes well and many of his ideas are interesting, although they may not be quite as original as he believes. He has, furthermore, a touching faith in the belief that ‘science’ offers a reliable, if not infallible guide, to public policy. Mr Hardin may be correct in saying that the emperor is naked. Possibly so. Regrettably, he seems unaware of the risk that those who raise this cry may also be no less bare-bottomed.

Albert Somit An tony Hall,

Southern Inninios University, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA

The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution. By Peter Corning.

Peter Corning has written a work that deserves to be read by anyone concerned with human affairs. It is an imposing, ambitious effort the text of which runs to 400 pages, after having already been reduced in size by half, and the notes extend another 80 pages. The scope and the wide ranging and painstaking scholarship of the book are only suggested by the fact that there are some 1200 footnotes (not counting the numerous notes that can be found within the text proper) and that one footnote along (on mental disorders) extends nearly two full pages and contains almost a hundred citations to the relevant literature. For a work that often touches on matters of a technical and advanced nature, the style is clear and happily free of unnecessary jargon.

As the title suggests, Corning emphasizes the significance of the ‘synergism hypothesis’, which he formulates as ‘the selective advantages that arise from various synergistic effects that constitute the underlying cause of the apparently orthogenetic (or directional) aspect of evolutionary history, that is, the progressive emergence of complex, hierarchially organized systems’ (p. 5 emphasis in the original; unless otherwise specified all page references are to The Synergism Hypothesis). Corning proceeds to elaborate this hypothesis within an evolutionary context and to apply it to human evolution and politics. In the process he develops a broad theoretical approach that is (1) interactional; (2) evolutionary; (3) tele- onomic and of course (4) synergistic. When so much of the life and especially the social sciences continue, by contrast, to be (1) unileveled, (2) ahistorical (the social sciences in particular), (3) mechanistic and (4) reductive in character, Corning’s work provides a useful antidote.

It also provides valuable insights. The life scientist will discover here an unconventional view of evolution in which the force of natural selection no longer operates in a wholly blind and mechanistic way; rather by a process of ‘teleonomic selection’ organisms will through their own purposive actions importantly influence the course of evolution.

Social scientists in turn will come to realize in a similar way that the political process is not wholly and blindly determined by external forces but rather, as a synergistic product, takes on an autonomomy and casusal potency of its own in accord with Corning’s more general insight that synergistic effects proceed to act as causal forces in their own right. Indeed, the evolutionary process that has produced human self-awareness and politics has in turn come to be increasingly affected by them.

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Corning’s approach carries with it profound implications not only for the life and social sciences but for their philosophic underpinnings as well. For Corning recognizes clearly the complex and indeterminist character of the subject matter of these sciences. He acknowledges that ‘there is no simple, deterministic explanation for the precise patterning’ of human behavior: ‘It involves a specific time-bound configuration of stochastic, teleonomic, and deterministic influences. However messy and complex it may be, this is the model of behavioral and social causation that must be incorporated into our thinking if we are to do justice to the subject matter’ (p. 203).

Scientific prediction of human affairs, therefore, is severely limited: ‘Like Darwin’s theory properly understood, my theory makes only one unequivocal prediction, that the future cannot be predicted with certainty because the process is not linear or deterministic but a highly contingent concatenation of chance, necessity, and teleonomy’ (p. 393). It follows, moreover, that those who utilize ‘simple mathematical models and tidy theoretical analysis with aggregate statistics will necessarily pay a price for such simplifications’ for ‘the of sociocultural evolution will remain intractable to those who aspire to develop predictive models’ (p. 253). Corning appears to echo the observation of Norbert Weiner (whose own cybernetic approach has had a marked impact on Corning’s thought) that ‘the runs of statistics’ that apply to society ‘are excessively short’: ‘There is no great use in lumping under one head the economics of steel industry before and after the introduction of the Bessemer process . . . For a good statistic of society, we need long runs under essentially constant conditons . . . (T)he advantages of long runs of statistics under widely varying conditions is specious and spurious,’ (cited in Cybernetics, pp. 24-25, emphasis in the original). Weiner’s conclusion that ‘the human sciences are a very poor testing-grounds for a new mathematical technique’ based upon cybernetics is surely supported by an analysis such as Corning’s which fully recognized the everchanging and importantly unique configurations inherent in the course of human evolution and history.

Now if I have one major criticism of the work, it is that the author finds it difficult to follow the dictates of his own theory. Corning concludes that (p. 397) ‘Like Darwin’s theory, my theory does not attempt to account in detail for every specific historical event; their cause always involve unique sets of historical factors. Rather, the theory suggest the general form of the explanation for the progressive aspect of the evolutionary process’. But is not by Corning’s own account the general form dependent precisely upon the synergistic products of ‘unique sets of historical factors’? Corning’s approach indeed allows us better to understand the larger historical picture, including the necessary reasons for our inability to predict it-except insofar as we can politically control it. In the words of Garret Hardin, which Corning cites (p. 396) (emphasis apparently in the original), ‘We cannot predict history but we can make it’.

Corning’s position is analogous (but only analogous) to that of Lumsden and Wilson’s in their Genes, Mind and Culture, which Corning properly criticizes: ‘While their models are mathematically sophisticated, they are psychologically and culturally naive’ (p. 123). It is precisely because of the sophistication of the mathematical model that their picture of social and psychological reality remains simple-despite, as Corning points out, their many disclaimers. Similarly, Corning, for all his own disclaimers, insists in his ‘general theory of politics’ on the ‘development of a series of predictions or logically derived inferences that can be related to real-world political phenomena’ (p. 323). Is Corning consistent?

Corning appears to be in a quandary. At the same time that he desires to develop a theory which offers a more profound insight into the complexity of social reality than do other theories-an effort I find wholly commendable, he is genuinely reluctant to relinguish the claims to precise statistical analysis and scientific prediction that are the hallmark, however

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speciously, of more mechanistic and reductive approaches. Corning simply cannot resist the siren call of a much harder science that his own theoretical position will allow him to embrace. It is a siren call that has led in the past, in Ernst Mayr’s phrase, to ‘retarding concepts’ that have gotten in the way of the formulation and acceptance of Darwinian evolutionary theory in the first place and continues now to get in the way of a full recog- nition of what Corning terms ‘one of Darwin’s greatest and least appreciated contributions to science’: ‘that a special kind of explanation is required for historical processes’ (p. 9).

The problem is a familiar one. Social scientists, including Corning, continue to be mesmerised by Lord Kevin’s dictum that ‘When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory’. Unfortunately, as the Chicago economist Frank Knight (cited in Thomas Kuhn, ‘The function of measurement in modern physical science’ in Harry Woolf (ed.) Quantification: A History of the Meaning of Measurement in the Natural and Social Sciences, p. 34) has pointed out, this dictum too often becomes transformed within the social sciences to read ‘If you cannot measure, measure anyhow’. One can add or substitute the word ‘predict’ in both dicta with equal effect. Corning’s desire to measure and to predict would be entirely understandable were it not for the realization that-in his case especially-he knows better.

Elliott White Department of Political Science,

Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA

Sociobiology: The Debate Evolves.

This book is a collection of thirteen articles that, with several exceptions, are highly critical of sociobiological methods and theory. The contributors, who all have interdisciplinary interests, include anthropologists, a biologist, a chemist, molecular biologists, philosophers and a sociologist. A number of the contributors are members of Science for the People, an organization which has been outspoken in its criticism of sociobiology, and, expecially, of Edward 0. Wilson, sociobiology’s best known defender and proponent.

Anthony Leeds and Valentine Dusek begin the volume, in an editors’ note, by giving a detailed account of the controversy that surrounded sociobiology in the aftermath of the publication of Wison’s book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. The response of the academic community was mixed, but that of the popular media was mostly enthusiastic. The editors make the intriguing observation that sociobiological ideas received a sympathetic audience among right-wing political movements in France and England but were anathema to right- wing groups in the United States with ties to fundamentalist religions, which are anti- evolutionist.

The first article, by Marc Edelman, is appropriately placed since it introduces the reader to a number of important sociobiological theories such as Hamilton’s kin selection, Trivers’ reciprocal altruism, and Alexander’s parental manipulation of progeny. The author identifies various problems with these theories and the sometimes ambiguous observations used in support of them. He argues that sociobiology reflects the prejudices of a capitalist society and fails to recognize the importance of culture in radically altering the determinants of evolution.

Richard Burian looks at the issue of genetic determinism. He argues that many sociobio- logical concepts, borrowed from common language, are virtually useless because current