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Biol Philos (2012) 27:745–753
DOI 10.1007/s10539-011-9306-y
The Darwinian view of culture
Alex Mesoudi: Cultural evolution: how Darwinian theory can
explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences.
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Tim Lewens
Received: 12 December 2011 / Accepted: 14 December 2011 / Published online: 6 January 2012
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract Alex Mesoudi’s book shows cultural evolution to be a mature field,
which has already illuminated many instances of cultural change. Mesoudi’s presentation of the discipline nonetheless invites three objections. First, the culture
concept it makes use of is not clearly defined; second, Mesoudi’s historical argument which looks back to the modern synthesis in order to predict an analogous
synthesis in the social sciences is flawed; third, Mesoudi’s understanding of the
positions held by leading figures within social science is shaky.
Keywords
Cultural evolution Darwinism Modern synthesis
Alex Mesoudi has written a valuable book. It offers a broad and accessible overview
of modern cultural evolutionary theory, while containing enough by way of
provocation and elaboration to keep specialists interested. In addition to providing
introductory discussions of such well-trodden topics as the general Darwinian nature
of cultural change and the role of formal models in exploring it, Mesoudi also pays
welcome attention to empirical and experimental work on cultural evolution, and to
less mature fields such as the evolutionary study of economics. The chapters on
phylogenetic methods (applied both to the reconstruction of cultural history and to
the testing of functional hypotheses) are especially detailed and provide a
convincing case for the value of this sort of approach. In sum, this book elegantly
encapsulates the state of the art in what is shown to be a mature field of enquiry.
This essay focuses in a more critical manner on three themes that are prominent in
Mesoudi’s book, and which characterise much work in cultural evolutionary studies
T. Lewens (&)
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge,
Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
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more generally. I begin with cultural evolutionary theory’s understanding of what
culture is, I move on to address the place cultural evolutionists give to themselves in
the history of science, and I close with some remarks about relations between
cultural evolutionists and the mainstream of social science.
Cultural evolution’s culture concept
Mesoudi begins with a brief statement of how culture is to be understood: ‘culture is
information that is acquired from other individuals via social transmission mechanisms such as imitation, teaching or language’ (pp. 2–3).1 This immediately raises a
number of questions: how are we to understand ‘information’, is there some general
way of characterising ‘social transmission’, and what rationale do we have for
restricting our understanding of culture in these ways? ‘Information’ is never given a
formal definition, but we do get a list of examples. It is ‘intended as a broad term to
refer to what social scientists and lay people might call knowledge, beliefs, attitudes,
norms, preferences, and skills, all of which may be acquired from other individuals via
social transmission and consequently shared across social groups’ (p. 3).
Here, as elsewhere, Mesoudi is following Boyd and Richerson. Unfortunately,
their work provides little by way of further elaboration of this informational culture
concept. They, too, define culture as ‘information capable of affecting individuals’
behaviour that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching,
imitation, and other forms of social learning’ (Richerson and Boyd 2005, p. 5). They
go on to say that ‘By information we mean any kind of mental state, conscious or
not, that is acquired or modified by social learning and affects behaviour’ (ibid).
This sounds like a stipulative definition, but in fact it is an expression of
their empirical claim that ‘cultural is (mostly) information stored in human brains’
(p. 61). As they acknowledge, ‘some cultural information is stored in artefacts’
(2005 p. 61). So whatever they mean by ‘information’, they don’t really mean to
equate it with ‘mental state’. If artefacts such as traditional pots can ‘store’ cultural
information in the sense that their features sometimes help to explain (perhaps
through intentional copying) their own reproduction, can other elements of human
niches that causally explain the reliable reproduction of cultural phenotypes be said
to store information? In which case, might one reasonably regard some elements of
the biotic environment, which have also been affected by generations of humans,
and which affect the development of future generations, as repositories of cultural
information, too? Without further discussion of the nature of information, the
extension of the evolutionary culture concept is unclear.
The lack of an explicit definition of culture further troubles Mesoudi’s own
discussion of the Darwinian programme. He is keen to stress that culture is
‘information rather than behaviour’ (p. 3). But without a definition it is unclear why
behaviour can’t be a type of information: after all, Mesoudi thinks skills can be
information. Skills should not be identified with the knowledge-how that one might
think resides exclusively in the brain: a long-retired rugby player may know how to
1
All references are to Cultural Evolution, unless otherwise indicated.
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take a penalty kick even though he has lost his place-kicking skills (see Stanley and
Williamson (2001) for similar examples). Skills instead involve practised embodied
behaviours. Moreover, behaviours can spread from person to person, and in this
sense they appear to be the sorts of things that can be acquired via social
transmission.
Mesoudi insists on separating culture from behaviour because he has been
convinced by two arguments that he attributes to Cronk (1999). First, Mesoudi says
that since we want culture to explain behaviour, we should not make behaviour part
of culture. If we took this argument seriously it would also show that culture cannot
explain knowledge, norms and so forth, for these are elements of culture on
Mesoudi’s account. His second reason for separation is that ‘there are other causes
of behaviour besides culture’ (p. 4), for behaviours may be caused genetically or by
individual learning. So we want to define culture in a way that allows us to conceive
of it as one among many potential causes of behaviour, and that, Mesoudi thinks,
means we should not make behaviour part of culture. But again, one might just as
well argue that there are other causes of skills, knowledge, norms and so forth
besides culture, with the result that these phenomena should be excluded from the
definition of culture, too. Mesoudi’s solution in these latter cases is to insist that not
just any skill, and more generally not any bit of information, is culture, just the
socially transmitted bits. There is no obvious reason why this solution cannot be
adopted by someone who wants to count behaviour as part of culture, too.
We have just seen that on Mesoudi’s account the mere fact that some item of
knowledge (for example) is widely shared in, and peculiar to, a community does not
suffice for that knowledge to count as part of the community’s culture; perhaps each
member has acquired the same piece of local knowledge through individual learning
rather than social transmission. This alerts us to a minor worry with Mesoudi’s definition
of culture: if Fred figures out how to make fire on his own, and he tells Fiona, and then she
tells Francis who has already figured it out for himself, then is only Fiona’s
representation of how to make fire part of culture, because only it has been acquired by
social transmission? Or is every representation of how to make fire part of culture, on the
grounds that this type of information ‘may be acquired…via social tranmission’?
Let us set this rather fiddly problem aside, for it has little impact on the general
theoretical stance of cultural evolutionary theory. It is more important to get clear on
what social transmission is. Near the end of the book Mesoudi says that ‘social
learning’ (here he does not use the more generic-sounding ‘social transmission’) refers
to situations ‘where one individual acquires information from a second individual nongenetically, as a result of exposure to the second individual’s behaviour’ (p. 192).
Consider how this definition might play out in the context of the acquisition of food
preferences. We can imagine cases of extreme individual learning: members of a
population rarely encounter each other except when mating, and they develop food
preferences solely through their own trial and error efforts. And we can imagine cases
at the opposite extreme: juveniles are exposed to repeated and explicit teaching from
expert adults regarding which foods to eat, and which to avoid. Many real-life cases
will lie in between these extremes. Psychologists think of ‘stimulus enhancement’ as a
process in which (roughly speaking) a learner’s attention is drawn to the object or site
of the demonstrator’s activity, and they think of ‘local enhancement’ as a process in
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which the learner is attracted to the individual demonstrator. These forms of sociallymediated attraction can then direct the focus of subsequent individual learning (for
discussion see Heyes 1994, inter alia).
In both stimulus enhancement and local enhancement the presence of the
demonstrator is required for their action. Here is a different (and imaginary) case,
inspired by discussions of developmental ‘scaffolding’ (e.g. Sterelny 2003) and
ecological inheritance (e.g. Odling-Smee et al. 2003), that is even closer to the
individual-learning end of the continuum. Suppose adults have cultivated a fairly large
area close to a village, and cleared it of poisonous vegetation. As in the case of extreme
individual learning, juveniles are again left to find foods for themselves, with no
instruction. Because their local environment is fairly safe, this ‘fending for oneself’
may also be fairly safe. Perhaps they develop tastes for the plants they find close by,
and when adult they cultivate the same plants again, and remove others. Is this a case of
social transmission? In terms of the intrinsic cognitive mechanism used by learning
juveniles there is no difference between this and the extreme case of individual
learning; at the same time, the collective efforts of a previous generation have clearly
made a difference to what the younger individuals have learned, by affecting the
environment in which they learn. If we focus on the cognitive level, then, we may
characterise this as individual learning. If we focus on the role played by social
organisation in ensuring inheritance of adaptive food preferences we may describe this
as a form of social inheritance, or even social transmission, while denying that it is
social learning. In any case, it is hard to see why we wouldn’t want to describe these
inherited food preferences as part of the community’s culture.
I dwell on this case because it raises the possibility that individual learning may be
partly—or even largely—responsible for some real-life phenomena appropriately
viewed as cultural. The case also puts pressure on Mesoudi’s claim that ‘If individual
learning were responsible for variation in human behaviour, then we would expect to see
a close match between a person’s behaviour and the non-social ecological conditions
in which that person lives, such as climate, terrain, or local animal and plant species’
(p. 12). The strength of this sort of argument depends in part on what we understand by
‘individual learning’. In the imaginary case I just described, the socially-mediated
maintenance of a local environment could conceivably allow populations to maintain
considerable cultural inertia in the face of alterations to their physical surroundings, even
when the population’s members are characterised at the cognitive level only by
individual learning. Mesoudi has little time for the elaborate discussions of the nature of
culture that characterise social anthropology; however, it is at least partly in order to
make room for the possibility that socially structured environments contribute to cultural
reproduction that this discipline has been influenced by, among other things, Bourdieu’s
notion of ‘habitus’ (e.g. Bourdieu 1977), and Vygotskyan (although not yet Sterelnyan)
concepts of scaffolding (e.g. Vygotsky 1986).
The argument from history
It is to Mesoudi’s credit that he makes efforts to set his own position in a historical
context. He develops the interesting and original position that cultural evolutionary
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theory should not be ‘neo-Darwinian’, but instead should be simply ‘Darwinian’
(p. 46). Mesoudi’s argument for this view is partly historical, partly conceptual. He
takes it that neo-Darwinism is committed to a series of views about the nondirectedness of mutation, the lack of inheritance of acquired characteristics, the
particulate nature of inheritance, and so forth. He argues that all of these conditions
fail for cultural evolution, at least some of the time. Instead, he takes Darwin’s own
view of evolutionary change to provide a more ecumenical model, for it remains
open to what Darwin called ‘use inheritance’, blending and so forth. Mesoudi also
claims that since ‘the basics of Darwin’s argument have not considerably changed’
(p. 26), there remains space for a view of culture that is recognisably Darwinian
even while repudiating the claims of neo-Darwinism.
One problem with this view is that Darwin’s argument was rather more specific
than Mesoudi recognises. I have argued in detail elsewhere (Lewens 2010) that
Darwin took the problem of blending seriously, and thought he had a solution to it
even in the Origin’s first edition. Darwin thought it a matter of observable fact that
since animal breeders could improve domesticated races in spite of blending,
blending need not be fatal to incremental adaptive improvement. His view was that
because breeders only allowed the very best animals to breed with each other,
blending would not return the population to the mean. Similarly, Darwin insisted on
exceptionally strong struggle in nature, whereby only the very best adapted survive,
in an effort to show that the discerning eye of the breeder was replicated in nature.
The result of struggle is that even slightly disadvantaged specimens do not survive
to breed, and once again blending poses no threat to the gradual improvement of the
population mean. It is misleading to suggest that the basics of Darwin’s argument
have not changed: Darwin himself felt that the ability of natural selection to explain
adaptation depended essentially on these rather fine-grained, and eminently
contestable, assumptions about blending, the availability of copious variation, and
the severity of selection.
There is no particular need for Mesoudi to affiliate his view to Darwin’s: it would
not matter much if modern cultural evolutionary theory had little in common either
with neo-Darwinism or with Darwin’s Darwinism. And yet, Mesoudi attempts to
acquit Darwin of a series of unpleasant views. He regards Darwin’s own stance
regarding evolution as unprogressive and anti-racist, while Spencer gets the blame
for progressivist and racist mis-statements of Darwin’s theory. This is an oversimplification. Darwin often presents evolution by natural selection as a process
with a reliable, although not perfect, tendency to bring about improvements. More
specifically, Darwin’s evolutionary account of the gradual refinement of moral
intuition in the Descent of Man owes a lot to Spencer, and it is progressive. Spencer
cannot here be accused of distorting Darwin; rather, Darwin borrows from Spencer.
Darwin remarks in the same book on the current gap in development between the
highest ape, which he takes to be the gorilla, and the lowest human race, which he
takes to be the Australian, and he expresses the view that in the future the lowest
human may well be higher in civilisation even than the Caucasian (for further
discussion see Lewens 2007).
Mesoudi’s historical argument is most important to the book’s overall strategy
when he describes a united set of biological sciences which ‘for decades have been
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unified under a single theoretical framework: Darwinian evolutionary theory’
(see also Mesoudi et al. 2006). Progress in these sciences ‘would not have been
possible in the absence of a common, unifying framework’ (p. 22). By showing
progress in biology to be attributable to a Darwinian synthesis, Mesoudi tries to
build an inductive basis for thinking that a similar Darwinian synthesis will unite the
social sciences and bring similar progress to them.
How should we evaluate this historical argument? Molecular biology continues
to be practised largely independently of evolutionary concerns: one can hardly say,
then, that all of biology is united around a key Darwinian insight, nor can one say
that a Darwinian stance is a necessary condition for progress in biology. If any
biological science has made progress in the last 60 years, it is molecular biology.
The question of exactly what the synthesis consisted in is also a difficult one. One
problem Mesoudi faces comes from his wish to affiliate his own synthetic view to
Darwin, while distancing himself from neo-Darwinism. This is awkward, because
what Mesoudi means by ‘neo-Darwinism’ seems more or less synonymous with the
evolutionary outlook of the modern synthesis. When Simpson introduced the phrase
‘the synthetic theory’ he described it thus:
The synthetic theory has no Darwin, being in its nature the work of many
different hands. To mention any of these is to be culpable of important
omissions, but if only to indicate the breadth of the synthesis it may be noted
that among the many contributors have been: in England, Fisher, Haldane,
Huxley, Waddington, and Ford; in the United States, Wright, Muller,
Dobzhansky, Mayr, and Stebbins; in Germany, Timofeeff-Ressovsky and
Rensch; in the Soviet Union, Chetverikov and Dubinin; in France, Teissier; in
Italy, Buzzati-Traverso. I do not, of course, mean to say that these students all
hold opinions identical in detail. Their field of work, not to mention other
personal variables, are so diverse that this would be a miracle. All, however,
have made outstanding contributions to the modern synthesis and all seem to
be agreed as its most essential features (Simpson 1949, pp. 277–278).
For Simpson, the synthesis was a coming together of many different ideas, from
many different fields, which gave rise to a consensus on the causes of biological
change. Darwin’s own discussion of cultural change was also synthetic in the very
general sense of bringing together very different research and very different
concepts from many different fields: much of Darwin’s discussion of human cultural
change in Descent and Expression, for example, makes little use of the notion of
natural selection, although it does draw on physiology, anatomy, history,
anthropological interviews and so forth. A ‘synthesis’ might be understood as any
collaborative multi-disciplinary research effort, or it might be understood as a
specifically neo-Darwinian set of views about evolutionary change. Mesoudi does
not want to aim at the latter. Aiming at the former is eminently sensible, but leaves
underdetermined which ideas would be central, and which peripheral, in a social
scientific synthesis.
Let me raise one final problem for the historical argument. A good case can be
made for thinking that agreement on the overwhelming importance of natural
selection formed part of the theoretical foundations of the ‘modern synthesis’: that is
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why some biologists want to move beyond the modern synthesis (see Pigliucci and
Müller 2010 for discussion). Perhaps for Mesoudi a ‘synthesis’ is just any view of
culture that has selection at its core. There is, however, very little agreement, even
within cultural evolutionary theory, regarding the explanatory pre-eminence of
(cultural) natural selection. Consider, for example, that while Mesoudi counts the
phenomena of content-bias (whereby cultural variants are chosen based on utility,
attractiveness and so forth) as forms of cultural natural selection (p. 65), Richerson
and Boyd (2005, p. 79) instead think of them as forms of biased transmission, more
closely analogous to meiotic drive. If Boyd and Richerson turn out to be right, then
to the extent that content bias is important, natural selection is not.
Darwin may serve as a good model for a broad synthesis in the social sciences,
although not for the reasons Mesoudi imagines. When Darwin discussed cultural
change he merely made the case for the positive benefits of a natural historical
standpoint: he did not try to claim that selection must lie at the heart of an account
of cultural change. Likewise, it is enough for cultural evolutionists to argue (as do
Boyd and Richerson, and as Mesoudi does in his more modest modes) that their
various mathematical models bring a valuable set of tools to the social sciences,
without taking the further step of arguing that an underlying set of Darwinian
concepts is likely to unify these sciences in a synthesis that parallels biology’s own.
Knowing your enemy
Mesoudi makes a convincing case for the importance of a variety of evolutionary
tools in the study of culture; however, there are a number of features of the book that
damage its chances of persuading more traditionally-minded social scientists of the
value of the evolutionary perspective. We have just encountered one of these
problems: Mesoudi is more bullish than he needs to be regarding the nature of a
Darwinian ‘synthesis’. There are also a number of points at which Mesoudi
demonstrates shaky knowledge of the positions he wishes to undermine.
He notes quite correctly, for example, that some social scientists have been
unwilling to explain socio-cultural phenomena in ways that reduce the macro-level
features of societies to micro-level descriptions referring to psychological states.
Mesoudi tries to explain the sources of this resistance by briefly citing Durkheim,
and then suggesting that, ‘this reluctance to reduce cultural phenomena to individual
psychological processes may have its roots in the mind body dualism inherent in
many of the nonscientific approaches to culture such as social constructionism
that were discussed in chapter 1’, (p. 52). Looking back to chapter one, we see
that Mesoudi was discussing the work of Bruno Latour. Unfortunately no work
by Latour is cited: this is a shame, because Latour’s positions have not been stable
(see, e.g. Latour 2004).
Latour and Durkheim have very little in common: indeed, Latour has become
known in recent years as a defender of Gabriel Tarde (whom Latour (2004, p. 245)
describes as ‘the real founder of French sociology’) against Durkheim (e.g. Latour
2002). It is intriguing to note that Layton (2010) shows how similar Tarde’s ideas
were to those of some modern cultural evolutionists. Moreover, while it is
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sometimes a challenge to say what Latour’s views are, it seems particularly difficult
to cast him as a mind/body dualist. It may well be correct to say that Latour’s
approach to culture is ‘nonscientific’; it is much less clear that one can make this
accusation against social constructivists in general, especially those of the
Edinburgh School (see Lewens 2005). Durkheim is not helpfully regarded as a
social constructivist, of course, and he based his anti-reductionism on something
akin to a scientifically respectable emergentism, which regarded the behaviour of
wholes as more than the mere aggregated sum of their parts. This was not an
expression of mind–body dualism: for Durkheim, the putting together of tissues to
produce an organ, organs to produce an organism, or organisms to produce a
society, could all manifest unanticipated macro-level properties (Durkheim 2006,
p. 42). Needless to say, many have disagreed with Durkheim: such arguments have
constituted much of the ground on which debates regarding methodological
individualism have been conducted. I do not wish to defend Durkheim or Latour
here, but regardless of where one stands in these debates, one is unlikely to convert
seasoned social scientists by linking Durkheim to constructivists like Latour, and
then claiming that in both cases anti-reductionism is based on mind/body dualism.
Let me say again that Mesoudi makes compelling cases for the value of
quantitative modeling and phylogenetic reconstruction in the cultural domain. But
the overly hasty nature of some of his claims about mainstream social science is
likely to deafen many potential readers to the significance of these cases. If cultural
evolutionists are to win their battles against more traditional social scientific
approaches, they need to know their enemies better.
Acknowledgments The research leading to these results has received funding from the European
Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC
Grant agreement no. 284123. I am grateful to the IHPST, Paris, where this work was undertaken, and to
Jean Gayon and Philippe Huneman for valuable advice.
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