An Evolutionary Social Science? a Skeptic's Brief, Theoretical And

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10.1177/0048393104269196PHILOSOPHYBryantARTICLE / AN EVOLUTIONARY OF THE SOCIAL SOCIAL SCIENCES SCIENCE? / December 2004 An Evolutionary Social Science? A Skeptic’s Brief, Theoretical and Substantive

JOSEPH M. BRYANT University of Toronto

So-called grand or paradigmatic theories—structural functionalism, psycho- analysis, Marxism, rational-choice theory—provide their proponents with a conceptual vocabulary and syntax that allows for the classification and configuring of wide ranges of phenomena. Advocates for any particular “analytical grammar” are accordingly prone to conflating the internal coherence of their paradigm—its integrated complex of definitions, axioms, and inferences—with a corresponding capacity for representational verisimilitude. The distinction between Theory-as-heuristic and Theory-as-imposition is of course difficult to negotiate in practice, given that empirical observation and measurement are not entirely “theory neutral” or independent of prior analytical conceptualization. Nonetheless, the scientific cogency of any theory is ultimately evaluated by the substantive realism of its foundational assumptions and categorical designa- tions; that is, the accuracy with which it identifies and tracks the determinant properties and processes of the phenomena to be explicated. The paradigm of sociocultural evolutionism—despite extensive revamping by contemporary proponents—does not carry warrant in this regard, as its recourse to an analytical grammar fashioned and derived from another discipline raises doubts about its empirical veridicality.This article revisits the contentious issue of remodeling social phenomena in accordance with biological categories and offers both a theoretical and a substantive critique of the “selectionist” paradigm. The transdisciplinary program of historical social science is affirmed by wayof counterpoint.

Keywords: sociocultural evolutionism; historical social science; explanatory logic; mimesis; warfare; ancient Greece; early Christianity

Received 20 August 2001 I would like to thank Rod Nelson, Irving Zeitlin, Jack Veugelers, Robin Griller, John Hall, Jim DiCenso, Bernd Baldus, Rosaire Langlois, Russ McCutcheon, Michael Schiffer, Raymond Martin, Paul Cartledge, and the three readers for this journal for their helpful commentary on draft versions of this article. I also gratefully acknowledge fellowship support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

All metaphorical expression is unclear (asaphes). Aristotle, Topics, 139b34-35

Not everything that is conceived of also partakes of reality. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists, I.49

Do the categories and theorems of evolutionary biology hold the key to resolving the fractious Methodenstreite that have for so long polarized inquiry within the social sciences? Can the “thick descriptive” accounts favored by the historically and ethnographically oriented be integrated with the “grand theorizing” projects of the deduc- tively and mathematically inclined, through the mediating links afforded by biological analytics? Such is the view of a significant and growing number of social scientists, whose ambitious claims receive a concise summary in Marion Blute’s (1997) “History versus Science: The Evolutionary Solution.” Offering a commentary on recent contro- versies regarding the status of historical sociology and a compen- dium on developments in sociocultural evolutionary theory, Blute’s diagnosis and prescriptive raises several interesting questions that require consideration. As a torrent of similar programmatic statements regarding the alleged merits of a neo-Darwinian “selectionist paradigm” have found prominent expression in recent years—particularly in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, developmental psy- chology,and sociology—it is clear there are important issues at stake.1 In the partial assessment that follows, I endeavor to establish two points. First, any “history versus science” antinomy is predicated on a logically untenable and methodologically impracticable idiographic-

1. The internal diversity that characterizes the evolutionary program in the social sciences—ranging from hardcore sociobiological efforts to more accommodative gene- culture interdependency modeling—presents some difficulty of “targeting” for critics. I address here what I take to be a syndrome of assumptions and principles that guide the current “selectionist” or “neo-Darwinian” project. For representative statements from sociological advocates, see Runciman (1998b), and more polemically, Lopreato and Crippen (1999). On evolutionary archaeology, see the debate between Boone and Smith (1998) and Lyman and O’Brien (1998). A representative package of substantive and speculative applications is offered in Betzig (1997), and one can turn to the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems for other examples of evolution-inspired research. For the gene-culture coevolutionary program, consult Laland, Kumm, and Feldman (1995). A recent special issue in History and Theory is devoted to assessing the relevance of evolutionary modeling for practicing historians, the critical contribution by Fracchia and Lewontin (1999) being most relevant to the concerns of this article. Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 453 nomothetic distinction. Prejudicially slanted to privilege nomothetic notions of explanation, such a bipolar orientation misleadingly implies that historical social science is confined to an atheoretical detailing of particular cases and their idiosyncratic developments. Descriptive narrational accounts, on this view,must find their explanatory formulation and integration within the universal or lawlike parameters specified by a general deductivist theory or algorithm. The scientifically central and primary epistemic issue—which concerns the appropriate scope or level of abstraction to be adopted for any particular set of explananda—is thereby fundamentally misrepresented. Second, the claim that sociocultural evolutionism can or does provide a nomological ordering for the “idiographic yields” of historical social science remains unproven and unconvincing, as proponents of the systematic transfer of categories from biology have, to date, failed to establish any genuine homologies or isomorphisms between biological and social phenomena. To the extent that sociocultural evolutionism anchors its accounts in ecological or “contextual” analysis and in the tracing of genealogical or “path-dependent” relations, it follows an explanatory logic similar to that used within historical sociology. To the extent that sociocultural evolutionism invokes the nomothetic axioms of natural selection to account for what transpires in social contexts and processes, it engages in a metaphorical deductivism that risks occluding, or distorting, the determinant causal relations that can be identified through a sociologically informed ecological-genealogical analytics.

I. TRANSCENDING THE IDIOGRAPHIC-NOMOTHETIC POLARITY: THE PROMISE AND PRACTICE OF HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE

Blute’s article opens with a restatement of opposing positions that derive their credence from the old epistemological orthodoxy. Two styles of research are seen to have contended in the study of human affairs: an inductive mode, which provides descriptive accounts of constellations of phenomena examined in their full or intensive sin- gularity; and a deductive mode, which provides generalizing explanations of recurring patterns among extensive ranges of related and homogeneous phenomena. The former yields idiographic insight, an understanding of concrete events and processes, as situated in their 454 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 particular spatiotemporal contexts; the latter yields nomothetic knowledge, an explanatory specification of the laws that govern phenomena in necessary and so invariant fashion, as subject to ceteris paribus qualifications. Whence the “history versus science” divide of which Blute speaks, and the division within the social sciences between those who ground their analyses in close attention to origins, contexts, and trajectories, and those who seek to identify processes and relations that are alleged to be determinant regardless of time, irre- spective of place.2 The epistemic landscape thus mapped, Blute turns to the ongoing debate within the social sciences over the proper balance between “history” and “theory” in the explication of social life. Arrayed on one side of the schism are the historical sociologists, who insist that because “time and place matter,” and because social processes are path dependent, “only idiographic (or particular) and not nomothetic (or law-like) statements are possible about human affairs” (1997, 347). Ranged against them are the more conventional scientifically oriented sociologists, who assail their rivals with charges of having “for- saken theory,”and thus of having “abandoned science.” With this traditional bisection of the field of contention reaffirmed, Blute proceeds to herald “evolutionary theory” as the via media that does full justice to, and so integrates, the focus on specific contexts and trajectories that is the hallmark of historical-sociological analysis, and the generalizing or deductive logic commonly employed in positivistic social science. In “understanding the role of both history and necessity,” Blute maintains, “evolutionary theory has solved this problem” (1997, 345). The logic of this thesis-antithesis-synthesis argument is formally elegant and rhetorically appealing; several of the claims that inform it, I submit, require questioning. The first point to be noted is that Blute’s characterization of the “history versus theory” problematic has implicitly credited the positivistic understanding of the debate: whereas “scientifically- oriented sociologists [sic]” remain committed to the search for nomothetic explanations that will specify the universal mechanisms of change and variation, their historically-oriented peers are depicted as rallying to an “only idiographic” banner, regressively fixated on an

2. The key points of contention in the “historical sociology debate” are featured in the British Journal of Sociology, with contributions by Goldthorpe (1991, 1994), Bryant (1994), Hart (1994), Mouzelis (1994), and Mann (1994). Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 455 atheoretical detailing of “historical uniqueness.” This peculiar delin- eation of the controversy is likely to strike most historical sociologists and anthropologists as puzzling, given that the synthesizing project they are attempting to advance seeks to transcend, rather than uphold, the traditional idiographic-nomothetic, description-explanation polarities. That reformist ambition should be manifest from the com- pound nomenclature used in characterizing the nascent program. After all, it would not be styled historical social science,orsocial science history, if the aim was to preserve an artificial and dissipative division of analytical labor, with historians remaining responsible for the delivery of narrational transcriptions of spatiotemporal singulari- ties, whereas social scientists, appropriating and integrating the putatively discrete “facts” produced through these empiricist prelim- inaries, are licensed to soar to lofty heights of deductive theorizing. Historical social science, in actuality, is founded on the premise that neither history nor sociology can proceed to full explication independently, inasmuch as human actions and the relations they collectively create, reproduce, and transform are, essentially and simultaneously, historical and social. An abbreviated articulation of that position would emphasize the following points: given that the reflexive intentionality of human agents is temporally informed and ordered (“timing” being an intrinsically meaningful frame or dimension in social action), and also structurally dependent on the historically fashioned and transmitted institutional and cultural endowments that actors draw on in their performances, it follows that both of these “logics” of situated agency—the diachronic and the synchronic—must be incorporated in any proper scientific accounting.3 Assigning separate and distinct epistemic responsibilities to different disciplines—a descriptive-narrational set for the “temporal” side of human affairs, and an explanatory-theoretical responsibility for the “structural” side—is to rend aspects of social life that are mutually implicated and which, ipso facto, can be understood and explained only in their relational immanence. The historical and the sociological are ontological correlates, in that any particular nexus or ligature of history is nothing other than an interdependent unfolding of the ensembles pratiques of

3. The necessary interconnectedness of the historical and the sociological is well brought out by Bourdieu (1989, 37): “We cannot grasp the dynamics of a field if not by a synchronic analysis of its structure and, simultaneously,we cannot grasp this structure without a historical, or genetic, analysis of its constitution.” Extended reflections on this issue by Sewell (1992, 1997) are particularly informative. 456 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 social life—economic, political, religious, artistic, and so on—as these are transacted both in situ and in tempore by reflexive agents whose identities, capacities, and projects are conditioned by the historically instituted rules and relations that govern their interactions.4 In addition to marginalizing the causally salient dimensions of temporality in the ontology of social life, the idiographic-nomothetic dualism has fostered a debilitating measure of epistemological inco- herence in our reflections on theory and method. That disorder is glaringly manifest in those standard practices and models that view the relationship between history and social science as “external” and mutually supplementary, rather than “internal” and concurrently necessary. Commonplace distinctions between the historian’s partic- ularizing focus and the sociologist’s generalizing gaze cannot, however, underwrite any fundamental bifurcation in analytical proce- dure, given that all scientific knowledge—from the most detailed to the most generic—is unavoidably mediated by concepts and classifi- catory schemes, the formulation of which is dependent on periodic engagement with ever-widening ranges of concrete particulars. Con- cept-formation and theoretical elaboration alike proceed on the basis of a continuous “tacking” between finely grained accounts of singu- larities, their taxonomic ordering, the specification of such differences and similarities as disclose structure, process, and cause; and the analytical extrapolations and integrative modeling that ensue. The unique and the generic form logically complementary, contrastive categories, neither of which can find autonomous descriptive predi- cation. Just as no historian can proceed to the task of composing nar- ratives without a significant degree of interpretive guidance from theoretical knowledge, so no social scientist can hope to produce viable models and explanations of generic processes without extensive immersion in the realia of particular case histories. Sharing the same subject matter—the mutually constitutive relationships of culture, social structure, and agency in the making of human history—histori- ography and social science must proceed to a shared logic of explanation, one in which the ineluctable ordinances of time and place find substantive integration in the theories and categories we develop in

4. While unsuccessful in its attempted substantive application, Sartre’s insistence on the need to develop a fully historical, structural anthropology—a “diachronic totalization” of the ensembles pratiques of social life—remains cogent as a regulative principle of theoretical logic, and serviceable as an ideal “yardstick” with which to eval- uate our invariably partial and incomplete efforts at historical-sociological explanation. See his introduction to the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960/1976). Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 457 our joint effort to render intelligible that distinctively emergent and variegated ontic plane: the “social-historical.”5 Historical social science seeks to transcend the artificial idiographic-nomothetic, description-explanation antinomies through the adoption of a contextual-genealogical logic of analysis, which proceeds by situating phenomena within their determinant fields of origin and function, and charts the course of their alteration and development, as those trajectories are conditioned by other mediating structures and processes within specific sociohistorical constellations. In this effort to comprehend the relational interdependence of diachronic movement and synchronic order, generalized sociological knowledge regarding trends, recurrent tendencies, and the patterned interplay of types of roles, institutions, and cultural forms is brought to bear on the analysis of specific sites of social praxis. But in accordance with the locally diverse manifestations and transformative pro- pensities of the phenomena investigated, the categories and theories that are deployed do not—and logically cannot—take the form of unrestricted universals or of deductive axioms unqualified by considerations of time and place. Indeed, if we are to avoid adding to an already large corpus of tautologies, truisms, and pseudouniversals that is the legacy of a failed “social physics” project, social scientists are enjoined to develop and apply interpretive frameworks that carry a high level of historical and cultural specificity, and that are braced by conceptual and ideal-type heuristics that secure their bounded cogency and incisiveness on the basis of extensive and intensive comparative study of particular case histories. Our long-standing interpretive conundrum accordingly requires reformulation: the issue that divides historical anthropologists and sociologists from their nomologically inclined peers is not a “history versus theory” or a “history versus science” dilemma. The question, rather, is What type of theorizing is viable for a science that investigates the meaningful and reflexive agency of acculturated actors, whose identities, capacities, and practices are historically and socially situated, and thus

5. For an extended discussion, see Castoriadis (1975/1987). To clarify a point fre- quently misunderstood, the program of historical social science does not rule out or ban differing epistemic interests, which can range legitmately from the more general and comparative to the highly particular. By insisting on a “shared logic of explanation,” integratively historical and sociological, we are simply arguing that diverse research foci cannot be allowed to conjure or presuppose distinct ontologies: one for the temporal realities that historians have traditionally been assigned to explicate, and another for the structural or institutional domains conventionally explored by social scientists. 458 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004

“internal” to diverse and dynamic structural contexts? In rejecting the ambition to formulate laws and theories of social life that are universal in scope and nomologically deductive—an ambition that has been imported from select domains within the natural sciences, rather than developed on the basis of an informed specification of the ontological traits and properties of the phenomena in question—historical social scientists are neither “forsaking theory” nor “abandoning science.” They are simply rejecting, as unscientific, an analytical strategy that systematically overrides those mutable complexities of history and culture that impart to social life its distinctive and determinant features and that render imitative modeling after the natural sciences epistemologically suspect. To conflate generality per se with explanatory power is to miscon- ceive the function of abstraction, wherein gains in extensional coverage are obtainable only through losses in intensional detail. Ascend- ing to higher levels of abstraction requires a corresponding depletion of the object’s predicative content, as concrete attributes are jettisoned in the quest for greater generality. Where the most generic features of phenomena are, objectively, also their most essential—that is, are either constitutionally foundational or causally determinant—there abstraction provides a commensurate explanatory capacity. It is thus conventional in physics and chemistry to set aside as secondary many of the qualitative features of entities and processes, and to focus exclusively on such quantifiable aspects as temperature, mass, or velocity, and so provide deductions of comprehensive explanatory power. But where, as in social-cultural life, the most essential features and causal properties of phenomena are constituted by subjective acts of meaning or interpretation, and so reside in their concrete manifestations and varied contextual interdependencies, there the scope for abstraction is correspondingly reduced. Since generalizations devoid of essential specificities are vacuous, not explanatory, it follows that the proper range or scope for abstraction is delimited by the need to retain intensional coherence and accuracy as regards all properties of causal or constitutive salience. Herein lies the gravamen of the long-standing criticism of the posi- tivist project in the social sciences, as the ambition to formulate “laws” of social life has repeatedly entailed the sacrifice of empirical content for the illusory gains of formal parsimony and general scope. Two major analytical failings have plagued the “grand theory” enter- prise from the outset: the posited universals that have been advanced as such are revealed either to be too capacious and indiscriminate, hav- Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 459 ing been formulated on the basis of distortive “homogeneity assumptions” and artificial assimilations of disparate phenomena; or, alter- natively, to be too narrow and constrictive, and so fracture under an accumulating weight of deviations and counterexamples that can be drawn, almost at random, from the unfinished tapestry of innovative diversity on display in the ethnographic and historical records. In reg- istering the epistemic fact that social phenomena have not—after more than a century of sustained interpretive effort—proved amena- ble either to (1) revelatory universal specification or (2) reliable deductive encasement, historical social scientists have adopted an alternative analytical strategy, one that restores to local contexts and temporal processes their determinant influences on meaningful social interaction, while still maintaining a focus on those regularities (transitory) and patterns (contingent) that objectively structure the lifeworlds of socially constituted agents.

II. SOCIOCULTURAL EVOLUTIONISM: AUTHENTIC ALGORITHM OR MISLEADING METAPHOR?

Having affirmed that a viable social science is dependent upon making historical process and mutability internal to its analytical operations, we can now proceed to an appraisal of the claims of sociocultural evolutionism. To formulate matters succinctly, can a social science paradigm based on “selectionist” principles retain the proven strengths of historical sociology—its capacity to explicate the reflexive logic of situated human agency, through an integrative attentive- ness to culturally codified and institutionally structured contexts and processes—while also offering that algorithmic rigor and nomological sweep that has distinguished select achievements within the natural sciences? Though not a new paradigm—cultural evolutionist concepts and axioms have been in circulation since the time of Spencer and Tylor— contemporary advocacy of a proposed neo-Darwinian synthesis has gained momentum from the recent advances that have taken place in molecular biology, population genetics, ecological modeling, cladistics, and zoological research more generally. Buoyed by the progress that has occurred in these biology-based disciplines, proponents of the “selectionist” paradigm now herald the dawn of comparable breakthroughs in the study of sociocultural phenomena. Is this enthusiasm warranted?6 460 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004

Notwithstanding the importance of a growing corpus of studies that explore domains where the biological and the cultural are directly entwined, as with, for example, the “coevolution” of dairy farming and genes for lactose absorption (Feldman and Cavalli- Sforza 1989; see also Durham 1991), sociocultural evolutionists have yet to establish that a borrowed theory of “natural selection” provides genuine explanatory insight into the most fundamental and determinant of social processes. Continued skepticism here can no longer be dismissed as the partisan expression of a dated Boasian “antibiology” bias, for there are few today who would dispute that research on the varied interfaces between the cultural and the biological is necessary for the advancement of social science. What is resisted is something more ambitious and problematic; namely, the subrogating biological colonization of the sociological disciplines, as this is pursued through efforts to remodel cultural developments in accordance with the logic of natural selection, and through reductionist accounts that seek to explicate social phenomena as direct phenotypical expressions of underly- ing biological or genetic factors. Many of the objections that undermined the credibility of the old cultural evolutionism, in other words, still confront the new,as the proposed biology-to-sociology conceptual transfer logically requires that relevant entities and processes in the two ontological domains exhibit homologies, isomorphisms, and analogues that are systemic and substantial, as well as specifiable with theoretical precision. Even a cursory glance at the inventory of alleged “correlates and par- allels” discloses that no such correspondence has been established, and that, in consequence, evolutionary theory in the social sciences continues to operate in a largely metaphorical idiom.7

6. Among the available criticisms of sociocultural evolutionism, I have benefitted most from the following: Anderson (1992), Bhaskar (1981), Giddens (1984), Hallpike (1986), Trigger (1998), and Dupré (2001). 7. Anyone who samples the advocacy literature for sociocultural evolutionism will be struck by how consistently loose the justificatory claims are. The following quotes, with italics added to highlight the question-begging locutions, are representative of a chronic failure to provide the requisite detailing of the alleged homologies. Thus, Tschauner (1994, 89) informs us that social behavior should be “viewed as the result of cultural stimuli subject to evolutionary processes that closely parallel those of organic evolution”; “the relation between archaeological systems and cultural evolution,” moreover, “does not necessarily differ from that between systematics and evolution in biology.” Blute (1997, 348, 352) alleges that social learning is “a form of sociocultural heredity analogous to a gene-based system of biological heredity,” and that “the relative Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 461

A. The Biological and the Social-Historical as Distinctive Ontological Realms The modern biological theory of evolution offers an extensively verified nomological explanation for how genes, organisms, species, and environments interact—creatively and destructively—to yield evolutionary modifications in all organic life-forms. This theory elu- cidates the following: living organisms are engaged in an ongoing intra- and interspecific competition for existence within local ecologies, such that any adaptive advantages conferred by differentially distributed traits—initially created by random genetic mutations and recombinations—will favor the organisms so endowed with greater survival and reproductive success. Over time, competition will thus “naturally select” those gene-based traits for progressive replication in the carrying species or breeding population. Any effort to trans- pose this integrated “selectionist” framework to the study of sociocultural life accordingly presupposes that parallel or comparable entities, processes, and relations can therein be identified; that is, that there are true social analogues—and no fundamental differences—to the specific gene-organism-species-environment interdependencies that govern the processual dynamics of biological evolution. What, then, are the professed commonalities? Setting aside termi- nological variance and the unnerving disagreements amongst proponents themselves over the nature and identity of the posited homomorphisms, most theories of sociocultural evolutionism feature the following set of postulates: (1) replicating cultural units called “memes” or “culturgens” are analogous to genes; (2) affiliated indi- viduals and their social practices correspond to organisms that compete for survival and reproductive success; (3) groups, societies, and civilizations are, much like species, self-reproducing phylogenic orders; (4) human inventiveness and creativity produce “trait novelty” in a manner similar to that occasioned by random genetic mutation and recombination; (5) the transmission of memes or culturgens frequency of cultural alternatives being transmitted by social learning in a population will not change through time unless some force like sociocultural selection acts to change it.” Runciman (1998b, 166) writes of “bundles of instructions” diffusing among “adja- cent or successive populations in a manner immediately reminiscent of the replication and diffusion of genes under natural selection.” How can proponents complain of the resistance they encounter, when they themselves refrain from providing a scientifically pre- cise accounting of the alleged isomorphisms, which is foundationally necessary to legitimize their project of theoretical transfer? 462 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 by means of social learning is analogous to the hereditary transmission of genetic materials by means of biochemical processes of reproduction; (6) socially constructed worlds function as quasi-natural environments of selection, with “fitness” requirements likewise serv- ing to favor the differential survival of adaptive traits; and so (7) not only is sociocultural history “the extended phenotypical realization” of our genetic development and endowment, it is also regulated by selectionist principles similar to those that direct the wider course of biotic evolution. How securely grounded are these alleged correspondences? Founded on a synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Men- delian genetics, the modern theory of biological evolution turns on a distinction between genotype (germinal systems of nucleic acids and proteins carried by chromosomes and set in a zygote or spore, which undergo multiplication through self-copying during mitotic cell division) and phenotype (the anatomical structures and biochemical processes of an organism that have been made possible by the morphogenic action of the genes, in conjunction with enabling and constraining environmental circumstances). Genes are thus the hereditary generative materials of organic life, with the realization of inherited traits and capabilities interactively conditioned by the met- abolic processes within which the pleiotropic gene-strands function and by the exogenetic factors (diet, disease, climate) that affect the organism throughout its course of ontogeny.8 Advocates of sociocultural evolutionism require a corresponding germ-to-soma arrangement, and have proposed the “meme” or “culturgen” as the locus of trait mutations and as the functioning unit for social replication. Characterized as coded bits of discrete information—Dawkins (1976, 206) offers “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” as typi- cal examples of memes, while Lumsden and Wilson (1981, 27) define culturgens as “artifacts, behaviors, or mentifacts” that feature attributes selected for their functional importance—memes or culturgens are said to bestow upon the social organisms that carry them specific plans or capacities for action. The imprecision that marks these defini-

8. Within biology itself, the “gene paradigm” is now widely regarded as a reductionist simplification, inadequate in accounting for the emergent and dynamic processes that genomics research is currently detecting. For an informed multidisciplinary discussion, see the recent volume edited by Grunwald, Gutmann, and Neumann-Held (2002), On Human Nature. Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 463 tions is not surprising, given that the meme-culturgen set comprises a highly varied assortment: ideas, techniques, behaviors, tools, customs, fads—in short, virtually anything and everything cultural or social that human beings do, say, think, use, or create is subsumed under an arching conceptual construct.9 Categories so capacious in their empirical reference are readily susceptible to the abuses of anec- dotal, impressionistic reasoning—a criticism that has been leveled repeatedly against the proponents of social evolutionism, whose inability to specify the properties and boundaries of their central concept gives ground to charges that preconceived theoretical requirements have overridden concerns with substantive realism and precision. An equally troubling complication arises from the fact that the meme-culturgen posit fatally ruptures the genotype-phenotype distinction, given that the beliefs, routines, and technologies that indi- viduals and groups fashion, act out, and use simply is their culture, which cannot be divided—either ontically or causally—into a regulative string of “germinal” entities and a developing corpus of “somatic” structures and processes.10 Even on the assumption that some form of gene-organism modeling could be extended to the social realm, any proposed “memetic determination of the cultural

9. For an advocacy overview, see Blackmore (2000), and the offerings conveyed in the electronic Journal of Memetics. Aunger’s (2000) multiauthored volume provides an instructive survey of the professed advantages and difficulties of “Darwinizing culture” along memetic lines. 10. This point was made long ago by the biologist Julian Huxley,who noted that culture is, metaphorically speaking, both soma and germplasm, at once a system of main- tenance and a system of reproduction. Because of this “radical difference” between the organization of the psychosocial and the biological, the mechanisms, processes, and rates of change within these distinct domains will differ accordingly,thus requiring the development of “anthropological concepts and principles which are specific and restricted to man in their application” (Huxley 1955, 3, 9-10). Wimsatt (1999, 284) draws out the pertinent analytical dilemmas with the following query: How do we know whether the things so confidently identified as memes or cultural replicators are better described as genetic analogues or as phenotype or phenetic analogues? In biology, we have prior conceptions of organisms, cells, cell organelles, populations, and communities. Together with our conceptions of the appropriate modes of reproduction for each, and with a conception of the relation between genotype and phenotype, these play cru- cial roles in individuating the relevant boundaries. But how can we do so for ideas? Practices? Norms? Beliefs? Institutions? . . . And if we can’t tell what the appropriate boundaries are, how can we tell when it has replicated? Or failed to do so? 464 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 phenotype” will be dependent on decisional choices made by the carrying host or organism, an immensely complicating degree of subjective involvement not to be found in the general course of biotic evolution, wherein organisms “have no say” in the selection of the genes that will structure and regulate their existence.11 Correspondingly suspect is the suggestion that cultures can be modeled as aggregative assemblages of discrete traits, which are carried by the memes- culturgens in much the same fashion as particulate genes are conveyed by the chromosomes. This reductive notion is difficult to recon- cile with the fundamental thrust of anthropological research, which consistently discloses that functioning cultures are sustained by integrated complexes of beliefs, practices, and techniques, such that patterns of cultural change and development are best explained in terms of system-level transformations involving interdependent institutional and symbolic domains, rather than as a consequence of micro- level shifts in the frequencies of randomly produced trait variants. Lacking the particulate ontology, isolable locus, and true morphogenic powers of genes, the meme-culturgen posit bears the trademarks of a concept that has been forged out of a pressing need to find an entity that would legitimize translations from the theoretical lexicon of another discipline, rather than on the basis of meticulous study of the phenomena under investigation.12

11. Particularly decisive for the noncomparability of “breeding” and “socialization” is the fact that “transmission lines” for the latter are not restricted to a parent-to- offspring downward vector but are complexly interactive and multidirectional (hori- zontal, oblique, recursive) as well as cross-generational and cross-lineal. Moreover, it is the cumulative preservation of “social memory,”as codified in textual and audiovisual media, that presents wide-ranging options for the syncretic fusing of historically and culturally diverse traditions and practices. Biotic evolution—with its ongoing elimination of “failed traits” from the gene pool—displays no analogue to the creative revivals of, or deliberative regressions to, earlier social practices that is a common feature in the dynamics of cultural and institutional change. 12. Though supportive of the use of evolutionary principles in the social sciences, Baldus (1996, 88) offers the following critique on this issue: “Culture does not come in discrete, finite bits, and is therefore not easily understood in particulate terms. The boundaries of cultural concepts are fluid and hard to pin down, negotiated between messenger and recipient, and interwoven with other cultural components. . . . None of the many proposals for cultural equivalents of genes, such as ‘culturgens,’ ‘memes,’ or ‘concepts,’ have therefore found lasting acceptance.” Consider also Wimsatt’s (1999, 284) rather pointed observation: “Cultural inheritance has lots of problems with units and boundaries. How would we know when a meme corresponded to a gene? a chromo- some? a gamete? a genotype? or the gene pool or pools of a family? Or even of a whole ecosystem? Togive up these distinctions is to forego most of the structure one can find in an evolutionary genetic formulation of a problem.” Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 465

Incapable of providing the requisite Mendelian functions of genes—that is, the hereditary conveyance of dominant and recessive traits as produced by the combination of germ cells during fertiliza- tion—it follows that the meme-culturgen construct will display corresponding analytical slippage with regard to the dynamics of trait novelty and transmission. In biological evolution, new traits arise through genetic mutations and recombinations that occur randomly; that is, independently of any “design control” by either the carrying organism or the environment. This “random variation” postulate is one of the keys that distinguishes Darwinian natural selection from Lamarck’s teleological evolutionism, wherein “the races of animals” strive to adapt to changes in their environments through a selective use and disuse of their organic parts, adjustively developing “new habits” and passing these “acquisitions and losses” on to their offspring through reproduction. Against the seemingly formidable objection that developments in human culture are largely teleological or Lamarckian in form, and result from problem solving and creative intentional choice on the part of reflexive agents, evolutionary advocates insist that “Darwinian” mechanisms are operative here as well. There are two lines of counterargument against the teleological difficulty.The first line radically curtails the role of rational agency in the creation of sociocultural novelties, emphasizing instead the “unintended mutations” that arise from “random errors, individual idio- syncrasies, and chance transmission” (Boyd and Richerson 1992, 182). Unfortunately, no effort is usually made to place serendipitous discoveries and accidents in any comparative scale with the mani- festly staggering record of deliberative human ingenuity, and so the argument reads as little more than a rhetorical bid to preserve the “randomness” required of Darwinian evolution.13 The second line of defense grants that human beings are reflective in their pragmatic pursuits, but it downplays the consequences by insisting that the intentional causes of variation do not determine the grounds for trait retention and diffusion. As Runciman (1998b, 170) puts it, “The cause

13. Ironically,the effort to salvage “trait randomness” through a radical discounting of human rationality actually cuts against the sociological importance of Darwin’s theory. For it is our evolved cognitive abilities—made possible by an enlarged brain and sophisticated neurology—that have enabled us to become culture inventors of the highest order. Homo sapiens is a species that has been naturally selected to live as a cultural animal, capable of immense behavioral plasticity and of innovative responses to stimuli. 466 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 of the mutation cannot furnish the explanation of its function, and only its function can account for the competitive advantage which the carrier of the mutant consequently enjoys” (see also Rindos 1985, 84- 87; Lyman and O’Brien 1998, 644). Human inventiveness may display a goal-oriented practicality, but since even the best laid plans oft go awry, “many innovations, however purposeful and intelligent they may seem to their proponents and first adopters, may not turn out to be highly adaptive” (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, 66). Whether mutant variants are random or purposive is thus irrelevant, for it is their differential adaptability within specific selection environments that will prove decisive. By so separating “proximate” from “ultimate” causes, evolutionists believe they have preserved the requisite Darwinian immunity from teleological considerations. This proposed “fire wall” between variation and selection fails to hold, however, given that the socially constructed worlds of human agents constitute “environments” of a rather different order than the physical- natural world that serves as the arena for biological struggle and evolution.A society or social order is not reducible to an association of ecologically situated bioforms, whose mode of existence is objectively determined by climate, terrain, available natural resources, cohabiting species, and so on; societies are also, and in large measure, cultural constructs. Being symbolically mediated and defined, social formations are organized and operate in accordance with the norms, values, and beliefs of their socialized members; the practices and customs that find institutionalized expression are suffused with cultural signification and evaluations that determine their meaning and purpose. The “social environment” for any particular human community or group is— unlike the ecological habitats of flora and fauna—what its carriers “culturally make of it,” for the time being, be they freebooting Viking warriors, Renaissance merchant princes, mendicant monastics, or inner-city youth gangs. Whatever intentional or goal-oriented innovations they introduce will be dependent on their cultural inheritance, such that “trait variation” will, on the whole, be designed to comport with prevailing normative standards and address the “perceived needs” of their particular social situations. Not only will variation be socially conditioned rather than random, but operative standards of “fitness” and “adaptability” will likewise display a pronounced cultural specification and actor-based relativity. More- over, as socialized agents engage in cultural reproduction and innovative change, their “social environments” will be modified correspondingly, such that “variation and selection” will form an internal Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 467 relation of teleological patterning—what in sociological parlance is styled a culturally mediated dialectic of structure and agency. Here there is no Darwinian “arbitrator environment” at work, objectively testing the fitness of randomly generated organic traits; rather, sociocultural domains are subject to our own changing values, worldviews, and practices, such that it is human intentionality and creativity that effectively determines what passes for fitness in matters cultural. Both the “mutation rates” and their “selection pressures” are “up to us,” as conditioned by our symbolically constructed “definitions of the situation” and the technological and organiza- tional resources available (Williams 1995). For whether we accumu- late material riches or renounce them in favor of ascetic devotions, whether we uphold the divine right of kings or promote sovereignty of the nation, whether we believe in one god, many gods, or none at all, these kinds of concerns are subjectively appraised in terms of value and utility by the agents involved, as they compete and cooper- ate within the constructed “subuniverses of meaning” that historically order their modes of existence. As cultural traits are, in the main, neither randomly produced nor naturally selected, but are fashioned by reflexive actors who, in “defining” what their social reality is to them, likewise establish the preferences that measure fitness and functionality, it follows that we have no true “Darwinian” evolutionary process at work in the sociocultural realm. Where natural selection operates through a rather obdurate and objective testing of fitness—organisms must be endowed with such traits as enable them to differentially survive and reproduce—adaptation in social life is multidimensional and involves not only the challenges of physical survival and procreation (and these are culturally appraised values as well) but also a host of ideological, expressive, and aesthetic concerns that vary and change according to time and place and, most important, with the social identities of the agents concerned. The determinant and discriminating relevance that “fitness” holds for biological processes consequently fails to manifest in the sociocultural arena, where stratified hierar- chies and diverse subcultures will establish their own criteria of functionality and fulfillment. As the situations to which socialized actors respond are laced with their own symbolic projections, the “logic of adaptation” is radically different from strictly organic adaptations to natural environments, which “select” on a uniform and compulsory biophysical plane. All talk about the “evolution” of musical styles, religious beliefs, political practices, moral codes, and the like is thus 468 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 strictly metaphorical, given that these phenomena are not “naturally selected” but change and develop in accordance with an unfolding cultural dynamic, as institutionally sustained and organized.14 The case for an “evolutionary” social science does not carry prima facie analytical warrant: the proposed paradigm lacks a true morphogenic and regulatory analogue to the gene, and so is incapable of modeling or explicating any parallel genotype-phenotype dynamic; the introduction of sociocultural trait novelties does not typically follow a “mutation” pattern but is cognitively, emotively, and aesthetically guided by existing normative traditions and institutional arrangements; the multidirectional transmission and selective reception of information through social learning is not truly comparable to the direct hereditary bestowal of traits and capacities through biochemical processes of reproduction; and, not least, the entire project is based on a faulty assimilation of two ontologically distinct realities—the natural-physical and the social-symbolic—for owing to the mutual and ongoing constitution of acculturated agents and their social worlds, there is no “arbitrator” environment that neutrally or objectively functions to cull the unfit and so channel the transmission of adaptive traits. These and related differences are such that it cannot plausibly be held that sociocultural history is a process that unfolds in much the same way as the general course of biotic evolution, with its recurring pattern of blind variation, forced natural selection, and gene-based reproduction and transmission of objectively adaptive traits. Though eternally dependent on a biological base, the social realm remains, in Durkheim’s classic formulation, a reality sui generis, a distinctive and emergent ontic plane that requires its own indigenous categories and principles of explanation.

B. Of Giraffes, Hoplites, and Christians: Fitness, Competition, and Selection in Evolution and History Having affirmed that the biological and the social-historical are distinctive ontological domains, I now draw out the disabling

14. Note that Darwinian natural selection turns decisively on the prevention of replication; that is, an “environmentally forced” failure of organisms to survive and reproduce, an eventuality that leads to the elimination of traits from the gene pool. Sociocultural selection, in contrast, typically entails the active promotion of new practices, beliefs, institutions, and so on; a form of reflexive agency that concurrently remakes the social environments within which traits are evaluated and selected, and so recursively reconstitutes the agents themselves. Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 469 research implications this holds for the selectionist program. I do so by assessing the empirical plausibility of evolutionary explanations for two standard kinds of sociocultural phenomena: one militaristic and political, the other religious and social psychological. To establish a baseline for comparison, we consider how the giraffe became the tallest of existing quadrupeds. A ruminant mammal, Giraffa camelopardalis is a species whose distinguishing features evolved over many millennia in the course of intra- and interspecific struggle on the savannah plains of east-central and southern Africa. Obtaining nutrition from the leaves of tall acacia trees, ancestral organisms that were endowed with marginally longer necks and legs—traits introduced by random genetic mutations and recombinations—will have enjoyed advantages in accessing the food supply, allowing them to grow larger and more powerful, and so less vulnerable to predators. This combination of enhanced physical prowess and survival chances will have favored the organisms so endowed with greater reproductive successes, leading to a gradual and cumulative shift in the gene pool toward the prevalence of those fitness-bearing traits. This evolutionary reconstruction is supported by evidence drawn from a wide range of sources—the fossil record, embryology, biogeography, anatomical and taxonomical research, zoology—and it is theoretically explicable in accordance with the Darwin-Mendel synthesis, which relates each specific genotype- phenotype dynamic to the local ecologies that naturally select the traits that prove adaptive for survival and procreative capacity. The core theory of biological evolution—its postulated operations observed in the lab and in the field—possesses such nomological sweep that even nonspecialists are able to broadly reconstruct, say, how the polar bear acquired its thick insulating fur, or how an enlarged brain became one of the salient endowments of our own species. Given the gene-organism-environment interdependencies established by the theory, a preliminary account can be worked up on the basis of (1) an examination of the anatomical and physiological features of a species; (2) an identification of the selective forces— climate, terrain, predators and competitors, nutritional sources, and so on—at work in the relevant habitat and time frame for phylogenesis; and (3) a determination of the fitness-enhancing traits passed on through biological reproduction. Can this algorithm be transferred to the sociocultural realm if, as we documented previously, the corresponding interdependencies and entities are either lacking or fundamentally different? 470 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004

1. Natural Selection in the Domain of War and Politics?

Our first test case concerns the developmental history of a particular type of social formation in the ancient Mediterranean, the Greek polis: an agrarian-based, urbanized community of landholding citizens, whose political freedoms and economic security was safe- guarded by their willingness and capacity to serve as heavily-armed infantry in the civic militia. One of the most accomplished of sociologists, W. G. Runciman (1989, 1990, 1998a), has sought to explicate the fate of these hoplites and their city-states through a direct application of “selectionist” modeling. His account, informed by decades of research on classical antiquity, turns on the argument that the institutions and cultural practices of the polis were so overspecialized that, with the intrusion of superior predators—freebooting mercenaries and, more decisively, the conscripted professionals commanded by the Macedonian kings Philip II and his son Alexander—the Greeks were incapable of “adapting” to a suddenly changed “environment.” Runciman relates that the conventional mode of Greek warfare—a routinized engagement between compacted phalanxes on level terrain, which typically culminated in a disciplined yet tactically simple clash of spear- and sword-wielding citizens encased in body armor— was highly adaptive in a world of small communities tied to the sea- sonal rhythms of agricultural production. Founded on principles of civic self-governance and landownership, these city-states were structurally incapable of developing a full professionalism in warfare, as standing armies would have strained the limited fiscal resources of an economy centered on yeoman-farmers, while also posing a threat to the political autonomy of the citizenry. High levels of cultural creativity and participatory politics were the prized correlates of city-state independence, but a failure to secure more encompassing imperial or confederal associations left the Greeks incapable of curtailing an escalating spiral of inter-polis conflict—a maladaption that rendered them increasingly vulnerable to threats from external military powers. The Macedonian patrimonial monarchy, capable of year-round campaigning with a tactically diversified army of aristocratic cavalry and conscripted infantry, would eventu- ally deploy its superior forces to drive the citizen-soldier from the field of battle, thereby bringing to an end his sovereignty in the assemblies and councils that had freely governed the Greek cities for centuries. Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 471

In broad outline, the preceding account of the “eclipse” of polis society is the standard one in the history books. Our question, accordingly,is whether Runciman’s use of an evolutionary framework offers insights into specific details of the process, or whether the transfer of biological categories results in a schematic “repackaging” fundamentally distortive of what actually transpired. Runciman begins by identifying the four authoritative memes that provided the citizen-warriors with “bundles of instructions” requisite to sustaining the hoplite mode of warfare. These he styled a be ready to go to war meme, a commemorate the fallen meme, a dedicate the spoils to the gods meme, and an avoid shame and guilt meme. Runciman argues that so long as the “environment” rendered these memetic ideals and practices functional or adaptive—by bringing prestige and power to those in compliance—they were replicated and diffused among successive generations of Greek males. Once changes to the environment began robbing those memes of their fitness, however, the polis and the style of warfare that had preserved it were “doomed to extinction.” For Runciman, environmental destabilization was brought on by an explosive rise in the numbers of professional mercenaries, a development that followed in the wake of the ruinous intra-Hellenic struggle between the Athenian and Spartan coalitions, the so-called Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). Not only were these warriors-for- hire unbound by ties of civic identity and loyalty, their superior martial skills soon exposed the limited capabilities of the traditional hoplite militias. Various intensifying innovations in the conduct of war eroded the strategic importance of the spring or summer “encounter in the plain,” and placed increasing importance on foray and ambush, flanking maneuvers, siege operations, and extended campaigning. For these specialized tasks, recourse to mercenary forces became all but mandatory. Soldiers less burdened with armor and formations less compacted and uniform gained a tactical edge, seriously compro- mising the competitiveness of the conventional hoplite phalanx. Runciman infers that with the rising martial prominence of the mercenary, a broad “demilitarization” among the citizenry ensued, as young males became increasingly reluctant to serve in circumstances where professional skills and pecuniary incentives overrode the contributions of valor and patriotism. This “changed environment,” he concludes, “deprived of their cultural function all four of the ‘memes’ which had sustained traditional hoplite warfare,” resulting in a 472 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004

“rapid decline of the hitherto unquestioned warrior culture” (1998a, 744). By the mid-fourth century, when Philip of Macedon began making aggressive inroads against his southern neighbors, the Greeks were so demilitarized and dependent on unreliable mercenaries that they were unable to mount the ideological and armed resistance necessary for the preservation of their ancestral freedoms. The “evolutionary” logic of Runciman’s interpretation is clear and explicit: a specific mode of warfare evolves under the selective pressures of inter-polis competition, which remains culturally viable up to the point where the ambient environment is altered by the appear- ance of a “mutant” strain possessed of superior martial prowess; as this new mercenary competitor prompts intensifying adjustments in the conduct of war, the capacity of citizen militias to reproduce their traditional social practices is progressively compromised. This Dar- winian account of the “extinction” of a social formation is internally consistent and algorithmic, but it obtains that seeming rigor only through a misconceived transfiguration of the phenomena under investigation. I concentrate on two interrelated difficulties: one concerns the causal arguments advanced, the other touches on the untenable ontological characterizations that are required if the explication is to comply with the dictates of evolutionary modeling. In Runciman’s view, it was the violent intrusion of the mercenary that fatefully altered the environment within which the citizen- hoplite had previously prevailed. As freebooting professionals revo- lutionized the modalities of war making, those memes that had for- merly sustained the replication of the hoplite’s warrior culture lost their adaptiveness; civic demilitarization (a new meme?) spreads and replicates, and the Polis falls victim to the advancing forces of Empire. An ecology in balance, a destabilizing intruder, rapid environmental change, sudden maladaption of previously selected but overspecialized traits, extinction of the unfit: such is the causal sequence Runciman proposes. While there is much that is broadly valid to this account—it is not uncommon for social change to be propelled by competition between groups armed with differing resources and ani- mated by conflicting interests—closer sociological attention to the plane of action discloses that the phases and processes identified are not “evolutionary” in the sense theoretically postulated. Runciman’s causal claim that civic demilitarization was a direct by-product of the ascendancy of mercenaries certainly oversimpli- fies, if it does not misrepresent, the actual processes at work, wherein the erosion of civic patriotism and the rise of military professionalism Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 473 constituted an interrelated dynamic. In Runciman’s evolutionary narrative, the mercenary erupts onto the scene in the fourth century as a superior and rapidly replicating mutant strain. Against this new species of highly trained and flexible warrior, the hoplite amateur finds it increasingly difficult to contend. As the citizenry lose control over the field of battle, the intergenerational replication of the memes of civic culture suffers rupture, thereby weakening polis society in its struggles against hostile predators. To properly assess this selectionist interpretation, we need answers to the following questions: Where does this mercenary catalyst for change come from, and why is his destabilizing entry onto the stage of history delayed until the opening of the fourth century? As Runciman notes, mercenaries had long been a part of the Greek social scene, even antedating the development of the hoplite mode of warfare. Their marginal presence prior to the fourth century thus requires attention and is to be explained by the overall integration and economic stability the city-states maintained over the course of their classical period (roughly the sixth and fifth centuries). That equi- librium they achieved through a balanced institutional and cultural interlock grounded in the entitlements of citizenship, which connected landownership, militia service, and legal-political participation.15 What was “new” in the fourth century was not the mercenary, but the large numbers of destitute and desperate men increasingly available for such service. For who were these recruits to a rapidly expanding, yet socially stigmatized military professionalism? Over- whelmingly, they were economically displaced and politically dis- franchised ex-citizens, whose former integration within polis society had been shattered by decades of ruinous inter-polis warfare and an attending factionalism between rich and poor. The mercenary is not a random mutant catalyst whose arrival alters an environment in equi- librium—he is himself a product of social disorder and communal breakdown! Driven from his ancestral land by mounting debts and the repeated loss of his crops and farming implements to ravaging armies, or exiled from his city during one of the many armed seizures of power and property that marked the collapse of civic communalism, the mercenary is essentially a “displaced person” whose recourse to the profession of arms represents a survival strategy in a world where law, tradition, and patriotic loyalty were giving way under the violent impress of rampant aggression, both between

15. For a sociological synthesis of this scholarship, see Bryant (1996). 474 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 and within the city-states. Civic demilitarization does not arise in the aftermath of the mercenary’s ascendancy; it actively prepares the ground for the shift to the new forms of warfare, as political leaders and military commanders find it increasingly difficult—from the Peloponnesian War period onward—to muster sufficient citizen involvement for long-distance campaigning and for extended services such as siege operations and garrison duty. Runciman’s selectionist configuring has thus fundamentally obscured and misrepresented the “challenge-and-response” logic that marks the field of social praxis. The changing supply and demand for mercenaries is not an evolutionary process but an historical one, wherein reflexive agents respond and adapt to a series of diverse yet interconnected developments: the loss of livestock and landed wealth to pillaging armies; concern among the wealthy over rising demands by the impoverished strata for debt relief and land redistribution; the banishment or murderous extermination of friends and family during an outbreak of violent struggle between oligarchs and democrats; a deadly hail of javelins that rakes the ranks of a hoplite battalion, caught in ambush by a troop of mobile, lightly armed soldiers; and, not least, the military and political encroach- ments of a foreign power, keen to establish hegemony over a Greece riven by factionalism and ravaged by decades of mutually destructive warfare. By organizing his narrative under the dichotomous rubric of “environmental pressure and cultural change,” Runciman creates the semblance of a selectionist dynamic centered on “mutant superior- ity.” But this is achieved only through an artificial severing and stag- ing of the social-historical processes involved, seeing as the “environment” of war—where Runciman located the key “pressures” for social destabilization and civic “meme extinction”—is fully within the domain of culture; that is, is a sociocultural construct, and so can in no sense be regarded as an “environment” exterior to or independent of the other institutions of polis society. Farming, war making, voting in the assembly,socializing the young, honoring the gods, con- tending over class distinctions and status privileges: these are all institutionally organized and culturally mediated interdependent practices, through which situated actors pursue their interests and fashion and express their identities. Runciman’s selectionist repackaging is thus vitiated from the outset by the fact that the physiochemical and the social-symbolic are bounded and function in ways that are ontologically dissimilar. In Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 475 explicating the causes of change in a social-historical world, it is quite illegitimate to model certain dimensions or constituents as “species” and others as “environments,” given that it is the mutual constitution of institutions, practices, and socialized agents that creates and reproduces the social, as this is accomplished through the symbolic interactions of acculturated, minded selves. In biological evolution, organisms strive and compete in environments that are not “meaningful” or “constructed” in any sense comparable to the social worlds that humans collectively project and internalize. An instance where an environmental change has placed the survival of a species at risk would be if a sustained drought destroyed the vegetation that supplies the giraffe with its primary source of nutrition. But if segments of a civic population begin curtailing their commitments to the military needs of their communities, and if commanders begin experimenting with modified tactical formations and the deployment of lighter-armed troops, and if would-be tyrants and imperial dynasts intensify the practice of war through extended campaigning and the mass recruitment of mercenary professionals . . . all this intentional agency, surely, is not accu- rately conveyed through an invocation of “environmental pressures,” given that these changes in social praxis are nothing other than the culturally mediated actions of the participants involved. Runciman’s memes of the hoplite code—its civic martial ethos, respect for the war dead, reverence for the gods, and zeal for honor through battle—do not cease “replicating” because an external “environmental change” has suddenly rendered them dysfunctional. It is rather that the social actors engaged in this phase and locus of history have been continu- ally and selectively modifying their values, norms, and practices in adjustive response to ongoing changes in the institutional orders of their societies—a reflexivity that alters those institutions, and the agents themselves, in a recursive process that is invariably transacted within, and never outside, the medium of culture.16

16. Note, too, that the military strategists who would revolutionize war-making practices did so with combat-tested and deliberate intent, in pragmatic response to the unfolding tumult of war and civic polarization. Among the more consequential of their innovations are the following: a progressive adjustment of the panoply of arms to promote greater mobility of movement and striking capacity (e.g., a shift to open-faced hel- mets, wicker-framed shields, and leather corslets, and the development of diverse pro- jectile and thrusting instruments), and an increasing use of noncitizen soldiers, whose hired services allowed for both intensified professional drill and extended deployment. Again, no “blind” or “environment-neutral” variations were at work here; only acculturated, reflexive agency, as manifested in a series of calculated enhancements of tactical fighting capability. 476 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004

While the imported language of memes, mutants, and environments does more to occlude than to reveal and track the structurally embedded dialectic of intentional agency, it is in Runciman’s treatment of the polis as a society “doomed to extinction” that his biological reifications find their most problematic expression. Defining as an “evolutionary dead-end” any society that fails to adapt its institutions to a changing environment, Runciman (1990) judges the Greek city-state to have been just such a failure:

The Greek poleis had . . . shown themselves unable to make the evolutionary modifications necessary for their survival as independent societies. (P. 350)

There is not one of the poleis, whether more or less oligarchic or democratic, which did in fact adapt its institutions in the way which, with hindsight, can be seen to have been necessary if they were to survive as a type of independent society. (P. 356)

The interpretive error here, and it is disabling, is the implicit assimilation of a social formation to a biologic organism. Societies, however, have no power to “act” or “adapt” in any fashion, nor do they constitute organically integrated and bounded entities. Like all social formations in history, the Greek polis was a symbolic, idealized construct, and as such it remained open and subject to the changing and contested interpretations of those living under its culturally defined and institutionalized order; not being animate, it did not strive to reproduce itself or its practices. The logic of social integration and coordination—which is precariously maintained by varying degrees of coercive domination and cooperative effort among actors whose practices are informed and facilitated by mutually recognized norms, values, and beliefs—is thus radically different from the biological integration and coordination of cells, tissues, and organs that sustains the integrity of animate life-forms. Being hierarchically ordered and stratified with regard to the distribution of power, wealth, and privilege, societies cannot be modeled as if they were unified, homeostatic entities. The plurality of life situations that is produced by the differ- entials of institutionalized power is such that there can be no uncontested set of goals or adaptations that will orient the actions of all the inequitably placed participants. By framing his analysis in terms of an organism-to-environment adaptation, Runciman displaces the order of causality from the concrete level of collectively organized social actors to a hypostatized Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 477 phantasma of auto-replicating, entelechic societies and institutions. It is this forced theoretical need to preserve an “organism analogue” that presumably accounts for his curious claim that an escalating factionalism (stasis) between rich and poor citizens did not contribute materially to the historic demise of the polis experiment in civic self- governance. While allowing that “the destruction of lives and property resulting from prolonged and severe internal violence makes any society less able to resist an alien predator,” Runciman contends that “it is not stasis which of itself drives any given type of society to extinction.” Alleging that there have been many societies “whose exceptionally high level of internal violence did not prevent their institutions from reproducing themselves [sic] quite stably enough,” Runciman (1990, 349-50) discounts factionalism as a causal factor in the evolutionary process. Whatever one might think of this as a general proposition, it finds no support whatsoever in the evidence per- taining to the Greek case, where all of our contemporary witnesses— Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aristotle— concur that it was an intensifying spiral of civic factionalism that brought unprecedented social disorganization and normative disar- ray in its wake. Note, too, that the rising tide of violence between rich and poor, oligarch and democrat, was internally keyed to the other processes that undermined and transformed the institutional orders of polis society: (1) the ascendancy of the mercenary, as political factions and aspiring tyrants made increasing use of hired warriors as a means of toppling unsteady governments and of holding all internal opposi- tion in check (a practice that would produce still more mercenaries among the ranks of the newly dispossessed and exiled); (2) civic demilitarization, which grew apace with the waning of collective commitments, as class polarization and partisan enmities rendered the old ideals of patriotism and loyalty increasingly hollow; and (3) the hege- monic rise of the Macedonian military monarchy, as Philip astutely exploited and deepened the divisions within Greece—between the city-states and the factions within them—by forging alliances and cabals that would preclude any pan-Hellenic resistance to his advancing imperialism. With its pseudobiological segmentalizing, an evolutionary model of “environmental pressures” and “meme disruption” is incapable of tracking these kinds of ramifying, intermeshing social developments. Even when focusing on the problem of civic demilitarization, Runciman fails to bring out that the growing reluctance to take up arms on behalf of one’s polis was a recognized proclivity of the 478 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 wealthier strata, who were likewise disproportionately drawn to Philip’s promises of a mutually beneficial hegemony, to be founded on a reactionary compact of “security and peace” that would contain the rebellious poor and curtail the scourge of inter-polis warfare. For the affluent and the oligarchically inclined—the “Philippizers” and “traitors” who were repeatedly denounced in the democratic assemblies of Hellas—collusion with and support for the Macedonian king calculatingly served their vested interests, as a constriction in local sovereignty was for many a cheap price to pay for the opportunity to preserve and augment their estates, or to join in the juntas that were imposed under the promptings of Macedonian pikes and garrisons. Would these propertied gentlemen have recognized that their poleis were becoming “extinct”? Most unlikely, given that the arrangements established under Philip’s hegemony were ideologically justified as marking a return to the “ancestral constitutions” of the past, hallowed traditions of order and governance—so it was asserted—that had been “corrupted and perverted” during the unfortunate lapse into “extreme democracy” and “mob rule” by the hoi polloi. The effort to determine or appraise the “evolutionary fitness” of whole societies would thus appear to be a delusive exercise, for where domination and exploitation govern the associational links between classes and strata, the criteria of “adaptiveness” will prove not only internally variable but also contested, as each group contends in a cultural “definition of the situation” pursuant to their respective interests. A final caveat. Critics have noted that the language of evolutionism, when applied to social phenomena, lends itself rather easily to suspect political appropriations: might makes right, competition as a beneficial purging of the mediocre and maladapted. Evolu- tionary discourse carries additional implications, however, that are also likely to divert the course of scientific investigation. Consider phrases and concepts such as “doomed to extinction” and “evolutionary dead end.” Does their application not entail a grave risk that the explanatory effort will succumb to the commonplace error of retro- spective determinism, and so strip from the actors involved the full range of imaginative, reflexive agency of which they were historically capable? In the case under review, the city-states of Greece were forcibly subjected to the imperial sway of Macedonian domination. But was this process truly comparable to the extinction of a biological species? And was the Greek loss of autonomy rendered inevitable by an overspecialization of practices and traits that, once “selected,” were resistant to modification? Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 479

Runciman (1990, 364-65) argued that the poleis failed to make the evolutionary modifications necessary because they were constrained by three inheritances: (1) a political order that confined the privileges of membership to an exclusive and limited body of citizens; (2) a military system archaically reliant on a civic militia that was incapable of significant war-making intensifications; and (3) an ideology that was antimonarchical, anti-imperial, and “far too democratic” to permit the requisite concentration of “economic, ideological, and coercive power in the hands of a compact, self-reproducing elite.” In contrast, Runciman pointed to Rome and Venice as examples of city-states that staged successful transitions to imperial status. This they managed by allowing their “leading families” to secure “large fortunes, undis- puted prestige, and privileged access to high political and military office”; that is, a consolidated base from which they could channel their abilities and ambitions into a “progressive augmentation of the power of their citizen-states as such” (1990, 365). It is perhaps debatable whether power so concentrated is, in general, a fitness- enhancing evolutionary development for entire societies, over and above the manifest interests of the aggrandizing elites themselves. And it is likewise arguable that in making the transition to empire, the institutions and cultural ideals of the Roman and Venetian city-states were rendered no less “extinct” than were those of Athens, Sparta, and Korinth, as they passed within the sphere of Macedonian hegemony. After all, were there not socially specific “winners and losers” in both of these kinds of historical outcomes, one (imperial ascendancy) allegedly adaptive, the other (political subordination) adverse? Did the peasant farmers of republican Rome actually benefit from their forced military professionalization and proletarianization? Was the program of “bread and circuses” an evolutionary boon for the landless poor, their small ancestral holdings now absorbed into the expansive latifundia being accumulated by the super rich, and on which toiled the vast labor teams of those enslaved by Rome’s victori- ous armies? Runciman’s narrative of adaptedness and extinction con- flates the successes of various elite groups and strata in augmenting their powers and privileges with an overall societal advance, a Social Darwinist interpretation that again seems to derive from the society- as-organism fallacy that left him inattentive to the ways in which the fractious class divisions within Greece were keyed to the eventual Macedonian suppression of polis freedoms. As to the Polis having been “doomed to extinction” by a memetically endowed set of overspecialized institutional practices 480 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 and rigid cultural norms, we should note that Runciman fails to consider evidence that attests to a greater capacity for change than he allows. The fifth and fourth centuries witnessed the constitutional reform and new creation of several confederated arrangements among groups of city-states and tribal cantons, such as the Ionian, Euboean, Akarnanian, Aetolian, Boeotian, Achaean, and Chalcidian leagues. Member communities pledged themselves to common defense efforts, participated in shared devotions at regional shrines and sacred festivals, and engaged in periodic political concourse through federated assemblies and councils. A confederal citizenship (sympoliteia) was extended to the civic populations of all member states, which secured political rights in the league assembly and typically bestowed marriage and landownership privileges on those will- ing to relocate within the federation. Another innovation was the practice of shared citizenship (isopoliteia), wherein pacts of friendship and alliance on the state level were symbolically sealed by a mutual bestowal of civic rights between the contracting communities. There were also numerous diplomatic efforts in the early decades of the fourth century to establish a koinê eirêne, a “Common Peace” among the Greeks, as a means of curtailing the fratricidal struggles between the city-states and as a collective deterrence against foreign aggres- sors. Several communities even began experimenting with the development of professional civic militias, through the creation of battal- ions of full-time warriors, with training and provisioning expenses covered by their public treasuries. Examples of these elite corps include the Argive One Thousand, the Sacred Band of Thebes (three hundred strong), the several thousand who comprised the Eparitoi of the Arkadian League, the Elean Three Hundred, and the Phliasian Epilektoi. Modest though these innovations may have been, they all confirm that the “imaginative horizon” of the Greeks—their capacity to reflect on changing circumstances and adjust their practices accordingly—was not as hidebound or exclusive as Runciman contended. Routinely discussed in the standard scholarly treatments of this period, Runciman’s disregard for these “modernizing” experi- ments and developments would seem to bespeak a theoretically induced oversight: though everywhere a decisive factor within the domains of social life, deliberative agency is simply too “Lamarckian” in its implications to permit incorporation within reso- lutely “Darwinian” explanations of sociocultural change. Our critical engagement with Runciman’s cultural-selectionist interpretation of the “extinction” of polis society has uncovered a Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 481 series of systematic analytical failings in the history-as-biology program:

1. Causal mechanisms have been misidentified and artificially sundered from the interdependent processes that determined their actual logic of operation. 2. Ontologically ambiguous and implausible biological hypostatizations of social phenomena—memes, mutants, environmental pressures— have supplanted and effaced the reflexive intentionality of real flesh- and-blood actors and the reciprocal modifications of institutions, cultural patterns, and self-identities that they collectively accomplish. 3. Imported terms such as fitness, adaptation, and extinction are superim- posed over social processes and arrangements that are so internally differentiated as to render these screening abridgments both invalid and obfuscatory. 4. The ideational or symbolically constructed dimensions and character- istics of social life are chronically underplayed or bypassed in a strained effort to reconfigure the field of action along the lines of an organism-environment duality. 5. Having radically curtailed the capacity of socialized actors to modify their practices in accordance with perceived changes in situation and circumstance, selectionist theorizing slips all too easily into a retro- spective determinism, wherein the course of events is forcibly fitted onto a biological pattern that culminates in extinction or marginalization for the overspecialized or maladaptive.

These elisions and distortions are symptomatic, I believe, of the fundamental incapacity of biological categories and postulates to register and track the anfractuous proceedings of acculturated social action. The course of history is propelled not by a confluence of replicating memes, mutant strains, and independently changing social environments, but by the reflexive agency of structurally situated agents, whose performances on the plane of action entail a simulta- neous and reciprocal construction and transformation of their institutions, cultures, and identities. It is that decisively operative “dialectical” dynamic—not to be found among the properties of inert matter or in the workings of the biochemical—that renders sociocultural change a distinctly historical, and not an evolutionary, process.

2. Natural Selection in the Domain of Religion?

If evolutionary modeling failed to identify and comprehend causally determinant processes in the spheres of war and politics—where issues of survival and dominance tend to register in quite decisive 482 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 outcomes—what can be expected when selectionist principles are extended to account for transformations in practices that are predom- inately symbolic and interpretive, or where the adaptive consequences of belief are significantly influenced by subjective appraisals of value by the agents concerned? To explore these questions, we focus our second test case on the rise of a new religion. An evolutionary analysis of Christianity’s advance in the late Roman Empire would undoubtedly focus on the fitness-enhancing traits and selective forces that carried the new religion to its eventual position of social dominance. Locating trait novelty at the level of memes, the teachings and actions of Jesus of Nazareth and his circle of disciples would be scanned for purposes of identifying innovative ideas and practices that might have given the movement superior survival and reproductive capacity. Love for one’s enemies, perhaps? A promise of eternal salvation? Acrucified messiah? Exorcisms? Sexual asceticism and celibacy? A congregational form of worship and in- group solidarity? Bans on abortion and infanticide? Calls to martyrdom? These and other features of the emerging faith could be classi- fied as memetic innovations, pursuant to an examination of their possible ecological adaptiveness. Owing to the encompassing syntax of evolutionist discourse and the pliability of its imported metaphors, a “biological mapping” along this fashion could easily be proposed.17 Consider, however, a few of the major difficulties that would confront any such effort to model religious phenomena in evolutionary terms. Trait variation in biotic evolution is an undirected process: the genetic mechanisms of change within an organism are causally random with respect to the external ecological circumstances that determine whether new traits will prove viable, by enabling the organism

17. Wilson’s (2002) recently published Darwin’s Cathedral offers a general evolutionary treatment of religion, analytically based on “an organismic concept of religious groups.” Select historical cases—including the early Christian Church—are redescribed and reinterpreted in accordance with evolutionary assumptions, and Wil- son tautologically deduces that successful religions are those that develop “function- ally adaptive” beliefs, rituals, and institutions. No real empirical engagement with the complexities of history is attempted, and it is revealing that Wilson’s evolutionary sketch of early Christianity is entirely dependent on Stark’s (1996) rational-choice interpretation! Where Stark imposes economistic axioms and categories, and so deduces that Christianity was a more efficient “firm,” marketing superior “product-line” against a “bankrupt” competition, Wilson describes the same metaphorically transfig- ured phenomena in biological terms. Neither account is genuinely explanatory, and each circularly affirms the a priori postulates and axioms that selectively inform the interpretation and packaging of the evidence. Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 483 to differentially survive and reproduce. Inasmuch as Christianity originates as a reform movement within Judaism, it would be exceed- ingly difficult to maintain that Jesus’s innovations were “blind” or random mutations, rather than acculturated responses to his religious tradition and the specific challenges of his era. A reformist discourse framed by the tropes “It is written, but I say unto you,” or “You have heard it said ...,butthis I say ...,”explicitly reveals the dialogical pattern that imparts to cultural change its largely teleological or pragmatic unfolding. And once the Jesus movement began attracting adherents beyond its original Jewish base, yet another form of social inventiveness would manifest: syncretism, as bicultural mis- sionaries such as Paul of Tarsus and a rising influx of non-Jewish converts would initiate a process of mediating and assimilating diverse traditions and practices, creatively incorporating and transforming Jewish, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and other Mediterranean cultural legacies. From these facts alone, is it not clear that the reflective “making” of a new religion—with its reasoned and principled appropriations of and departures from tradition—involves processes of deliberative innovation and synthesizing accommodation that are altogether different from the organic modalities that propel the undirected drift of biological speciation? The human capacity for reflexive problem solving bridges or com- bines the processes of trait variation and selection, for in proposing and exploring new courses of action or new ways of thinking, the actors involved are simultaneously changing their social worlds and themselves in the process, that is, “(re)defining the situation” in such fashion as to render those intentional adjustments and innovations functional or adaptive, as they are being adopted. Where the “survive and reproduce” criteria of biological fitness remain universal and objective,”fitness” in matters cultural is not only variable and variegated according to time and place but also appraised subjectively by agents whose identities are likewise historically and socially transacted. Lacking the causal determinacy that fitness imperatives exert in channeling the biological flow of genetic materials, social change exhibits a radical openness to the preferential plasticity of culturally inventive agents, whose choices are limited—but not fixed—by existing institutional arrangements and the technologies and natural resources to which they have access. By imaginatively projecting themselves into future states that differ from the past or present, human beings are able to introduce creative tensions between existence and possibility, thus setting to motion courses of future-oriented action that will result in a culturally 484 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 directed transformation of their socially constructed realities. Human intentionality, even when collectively organized, does not ensure the practical realization of our aspirations—a host of unintended consequences and the complications that arise from intergroup competition invariably deflect us from our projected destinies—but the effort to put thought into practice does impart to history a purposeful content and directionality that is entirely lacking in the course of biological evolution. Evolutionary moderates might allow that reform and syncretism constitute modes of trait variation unique to the dynamics of cultural change. They would insist, however, that intentionality has no bearing on selection, a position succinctly expressed by Rindos (1985, 85): “A trait may well have originally arisen by means of planning, intent, problem solving, etc., but so what? It was successful over time, and it became established in a culture not because it was ‘guided’ but because it was fit and hence selected.” For evolutionists, ecological adaptiveness remains the criterion of selection, and this is held to operate independently of the thoughts and wishes of the human agents promoting new practices and norms. Dismissing intentionality as “an irrelevant variable,” Rindos (1985, 86) maintains we “must separate the belief structure from the material consequences of acts generated by that belief structure.” This anticognitivist position—fundamental to the neo-Darwinist paradigm—betrays a blinkered unwillingness to treat social action as a distinctive form of agency, wherein performance and achievement are subject to evaluative criteria of considerable variety and flexibility, ranging from the practical to the aesthetic. It is precisely because humans are symbol-creating, interpretive beings, that we cannot, scientifically, “separate” the belief structures that inform our actions from the consequences of those acts, given that the efficacy and significance of any social act is interpreted and assessed—both by the agents themselves and their interactants—within a larger frame of norms, values, and ideals. This cultural specification of “consequences” and “fitness” is particularly pronounced in the domain of religion, where a diverse array of sacrifices, atonement and penitential practices, and self-denying disciplines and principles “make sense,” and so are approved and deemed efficacious, only within a belief structure that defines them as such. As the widespread and recurrent phe- nomenon of martyrdom rather strikingly confirms, even the biological terminus of a human life can be interpreted as a boon or blessing, a salvific event! Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 485

The effort by evolutionists to locate the testing of fitness outside the organism, within environments that objectively probe each new trait for its contribution to survival and reproductive capability, is thus fundamentally misconceived. As “belief structures” are partially constitutive of the social worlds within which actors operate, it follows that any testing of trait fitness proceeds in accordance with ongoing patterns of cultural and institutional change, as these find psychological mediation within the minds of the human participants. Appraisals of fitness are thus “internal” to socially constructed ways of life, historically contingent on the interactions that make and transform those structures and the actors involved. This human propensity for changing the criteria of value and meaning is well attested in the histories of new religious movements, which call on prospective members to disavow conventional beliefs and practices, in the course of resocializing converts within an alternative symbolic universe. In what sense, then, could an early devotee of Christianity be said to have gained in “fitness” by renouncing her former polytheistic and civic commitments? Risking public hostility and periodic imperial persecution, early Christians labored under a series of worldly disprivileges and dangers, which could and sometimes did culminate in imprisonment or martyrdom. What they gained from membership—a new belief system, a new community, a new moral code, a new identity—was valuable and “fit” not because it gave them any objective competitive edge over their religious rivals (Christianity would remain a marginal, minority movement for some three centuries before its fortunes would be reversed under Constantine’s imperial patronage) but because their participation in the new faith was accompanied by acognitive transvaluation of traditional standards and ideals: the lowly and down- trodden shall be uplifted, the poor will gain treasures in heaven, death can bring eternal life. Religious conversion commonly features a decisional choice on the part of the convert that the new worldview and community on offer are superior and “true,” and that one’s old beliefs and associations were, and are, correspondingly “untrue” and damaging. What we have here—entirely unique to the social life of human beings—is not an “environmental change” but a “shifting of perspectives,” as arises through a culturally mediated reflexivity by agents deliberating over their various projects and changing circumstances. As the reflexive “making” of a new religion entails a concurrent (re)making of the agents involved, and of the symbolic habitus within 486 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 which those agents act, it follows that “fitness” criteria—being culturally specified—will also be subject to deliberative modification over the course of this developmental process. In the case of the early Church, our sources disclose that the establishment of an official “orthodoxy” was a highly contentious affair, as rival factions for- warded proposals for beliefs and practices they sought to legitimize on charismatic, scriptural, and pastoral grounds. To better illustrate how purposive directionality distinguishes cultural change from biotic evolution, let us focus on one of the more divisive of these con- troversies: postbaptismal sin, an offense that not only jeopardized the salvation of each transgressing believer, but also called into scandal- ous public question the sacramental efficacy of baptism, with its promise of spiritual renewal and empowerment. As the crisis of fallen and wavering saints deepened, disciplinary hardliners and laxists clashed over which postconversion sins could be forgiven, by whom and how often. A series of schismatic ruptures in the Church ensued, each occasioned by a reasoned decision by leaders of an emerging Catholic or “universal” mainstream to extend priestly powers of absolution to sins of progressively greater probity: first fornication and adultery, then lay apostasy, and finally even clerical transgres- sions.18 As a more flexible and forgiving penitential system was negotiated, church leaders were engaged in an intensely reflective rethink- ing of what it meant to be a Christian (from redeemed saint to frail sinner), and of the mission of the Church itself (from a sectarian ecclesia pura, a gathering of God’s elect and holy, to a “school for sin- ners,” wherein divine grace would be dispensed for the salvation of those loyal to the clerical order). Those who adhered to the schismatic movements—Montanists, Novatianists, the Egyptian Church of the Martyrs, the Donatists—found these concessionary adjustments inconsistent with their own understandings of the Christian call to purity and to martyrdom in the face of persecution; refusing to coun- tenance any “coddling of the unfaithful,” they clung, defiantly, and for centuries to come, to their own practices and beliefs. What was deemed fitting or adaptive for one group of Christians was thus judged harmful and maladaptive by yet other groups of Christians. Here again one finds no “environmental determination of fitness,” no “belief-free” selection of superior traits, but only a purposeful, reflective effort by situated actors to draw on their cultural resources and so address—to their own subjective satisfaction, and with varying

18. This topic is covered more fully in Bryant (1998). Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 487 degrees of creativity and conservatism—whatever perceived concerns and dilemmas arise in the course of historical change. Evolutionists are insistent that it is the competition between the users of different memes that ultimately governs the selection process. Memetic mutations spread and replicate, Runciman (1998a, 735) informs us, “because of the competitive advantage they confer on their carriers in their given environment.” But just as fitness and adaptiveness lose their conceptual precision and causal determinacy on transfer from the biological to the sociocultural, so it is with competition. For what imparts an algorithmic regularity to Darwin’s theory is the documented fact that the struggle for survival among bioforms reduces to a singular problematic: organisms must be endowed with such traits and abilities as will enable them to complete their reproductive functions prior to death or debilitation. For any particular ecological setting, it is a relatively direct interpretive proce- dure to determine which traits enhance or restrict an organism’s capacities in regard to obtaining nutrition and securing mating opportunities—the paired imperatives of biologic continuity. Inas- much as sociocultural life involves a great many considerations beyond sheer survival and procreation, “competition” will here lack the causal relevance that it holds in channeling the course of biotic evolution. Let us illustrate this by reviewing the basic sociological process by which Christianity gained ascendancy over its religious rivals. In biology, organisms and species that fail in the twin challenges of sustenance and procreation are—along with their genotypes—elimi- nated from the ongoing struggle; extinction befalls the biologically unfit. All existing organisms, moreover, must compete with whatever sets of traits they have inherited through the fixed media of genetic transfer. They have no capacity to alter their biological endowment, nor can they upgrade their natural “panoply” by selectively incorporating the superior traits of their competitors. In the sociocultural realm, however, transformational upgrading is one of the defining and determinant features of the historical process, as groups in competition commonly learn to adopt and integrate the advantageous (or other- wise appealing) practices, beliefs, and technologies of their rivals. In the case of early Christianity, it has been well documented that the social advance of the Church was greatly expedited by considerable reflective “borrowing” or syncretism. Hellenistic philosophy, pagan ceremonial, the Jewish prophetic tradition, the salvific rebirth motif of the mystery cults: all this and much more besides was pressed into 488 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 service in the ongoing creation and consolidation of a new faith, as it engaged in internal struggles over self-identity and purpose and in external competition against existing religious traditions. Christian- ity did not so much eliminate its rivals as selectively incorporate various aspects and components from those sources, obtaining broader ideological appeal and pragmatic flexibility in the process. Still greater transformations would take place in the aftermath of Constantine’s conversion, as the religion assumed an imperial cast and substance, unambiguously disclosed in the new conception of Christ as Pantokrator, the majestic emperor of the cosmos now ruling through the hieratic ministers of his earthly Church. In marked contrast to the genetic pattern of biological change, with its lineal continuities and extinctions, sociocultural competition is a process that typically transforms, in ongoing dialectical fashion, each of the competing parties, as they recipro- cally exchange beliefs, techniques, and practices with one another in their struggles for material advantage and ideational expression and regnancy.A situation where the competitors are able—because of their cultural resourcefulness and cognitive ingenuity—to borrow and adapt the displayed “traits” of their rivals differs radically from the nature of biological competition, where the unfit are culled and removed from the contest, their genetic legacies terminated rather than selectively incorporated by those continuing on in the ceaseless struggle for survival.

III. CONCLUSION: THE AUTONOMY AND AUTHENTICITY OF HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE

The extension of evolutionary categories and principles to the dynamics of sociocultural change has not tested affirmatively in either of our two cases. Whether we consider phenomena such as the military and political transformation of the ancient Greek city-states, or the creation and spread of a new religion such as Christianity, the proposed organism-to-environment modeling artificially separates internally related processes and occludes the recursive constitution of agents and their social worlds. Purposive forms of innovation— through the creative extension or syncretic amalgam of available traditions and techniques—are causally decisive in channeling the course of historical change, and they are unique to social praxis. The human capacity for future-oriented deliberation imparts to acculturated agency a teleological dimension that brings the selection process Bryant / AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL SCIENCE? 489 within the sphere of normative considerations, which results in a directed or “quasi-Lamarckian” pursuit of our projects and aspirations rather than a random generation of traits unconnected with socially defined needs and objectives. Neither “fitness” nor “competition” can be transposed from biology and still retain their lawlike regularities, given that (1) a protean preferential subjectivity, as tied to socially constructed “definitions of the situation,” underpins the decisional choices actors commonly render; and (2) group competition is often marked by an interchange of ideas and practices that is mutually transforming, and so fails to correspond to the lineage- based pattern of extinction and continuity that governs the course of biotic evolution. Because civilizations, societies, cultures, groups, movements, and social movements are connected by informational and associational linkages, their boundaries remain open and perme- able, and so receptive to the transforming accommodation of exoge- nous inputs. This syncretic mixing or crossing of traditions and practices does not yield an evolutionary “descent with modification” pattern, but a socially negotiated historical metamorphosis, as agents remake themselves and their relations in adjustive response to the perceived challenges and opportunities of their milieux. The field of social action is a domain where institutions, practices, cultures, and socialized agents are in a continuous and reciprocal process of historical constitution and transformation. This ongoing dialectic—the logic of agency as mediated by structure and culture— does not display any genuine analogues to the gene-organism-species-environment interdependencies that find nomological specification in the Darwin-Mendelian synthesis. Evolution is one kind of change, history is another. The taut and powerful threads of the theory of biological evolution accordingly slacken, fray, and unravel when they are stretched into providing coverage for phenomena that are governed by significantly different mechanisms of constitution and development. Of the master processes of social change—political revolution and reform, technological innovation and labor and capital intensifications, conquest and colonization, the oscillations between religious radicalism and revivalism, demographic fluctuations and the migrations of peoples, military conflict and the race of armaments—none would appear to operate according to the evolutionary drift of random variation, objective adaptation to external environments, and natural selection through differential reproductive success. As forms of activity mediated by the conscious intentionality of socialized and collectively 490 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2004 organized agents, these kinds of historical processes can be explicated only through a sequentially ordered tracking of agency as it unfolds, reflexively, within the structural and cultural contexts that establish its purpose and meaning. As a research program, sociocultural evolutionism displays a debilitating imbalance between the theoretical and the empirical demands of science. Proceeding on the unsubstantiated premise that there are true equivalences between the biological and the sociological, the analytical cogency of evolutionism is generally pre- sumed rather than tested, as selectionists deploy a borrowed lexicon and grammar to “reconfigure” cases in accordance with a pseudoevolutionary narrative. But redescription is not analysis, and imported categories can provide only a metaphorical or ideological function if the paired realities they reference are not isomorphic or corresponding. A prerequisite for theoretical comprehension in the sciences is descriptive accuracy, a specification of the causally salient and constitutive properties and relations of the phenomena under investigation. Is it surprising, then, that the effort to reconstruct the social sciences on a biological basis should fail most conspicuously in attending to the peculiarities of reflexive agency and the symbolic constitution of social worlds—culturally mediated processes for which the biological sciences, quite legitimately, have little or no interest?

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Joseph M. Bryant teaches in the sociology and religion departments at the University of Toronto. He is currently working on a book on theory and method in historical sociology.