CRASSH

Gillian Bentley (University of Durham, g.r.bentley@durham.ac.uk)
The adoption of evolutionary theory in medical and health-related research

Although the medical profession has been criticised for lack of an evolutionary paradigm that could inform its research, the past ten years has witnessed huge strides in the impact of Darwinian approaches to health-related research, and real growth in the field of Evolutionary Medicine.  What remains to be done, perhaps, is an explicit change in the curricula in medical schools whereby the importance of evolutionary approaches are recognised and adopted in clinical teaching.  How this might impact the delivery of health care to patients is an unknown since the practical benefit of this approach for some clinical areas is not always clear.   Areas where evolutionary theory is explicit and uncontroversial in medicine include the co-evolution of host and parasites and the related area of vaccine and drug development.  The development of more personalised medicine and genomic approaches to healthcare is another.   A third area covers recognition of diseases that have a clear genetic origin whether population or individually-based.  More controversial areas include pediatrics, metabolic diseases and psychiatric disorders among others.  This paper will chart the development of evolutionary theory within medicine, will cover some of the more contentious health areas where Darwinian approaches have been adopted, and will discuss the prognosis for future progress in "(r)evolutionising" medicine and health-related research.


William Brown (Brunel University, William.Brown@brunel.ac.uk)

Darwinian Aesthetics and the Unity of Knowledge

There are seemingly insurmountable odds against genuine synthesis between the arts, humanities, social and natural sciences. I present several conceptual and methodological differences between disciplines preventing consilience (i.e., the unity of knowledge across the great branches of learning). Despite these hurdles, the study of aesthetics could be a subject capable of interdisciplinary unity. Over the last few years a growing body of research has accumulated on the evolutionary basis of creative performance and aesthetic preference - a field called Darwinian or Evolutionary Aesthetics. My recent empirical work on the biological correlates of dance and song attractiveness will be presented in an attempt to reconcile differences between disciplines interested in human variation, creative performance and the perception of quality.


Raymond Corbey (Leiden University, R.H.A.Corbey@arch.leidenuniv.nl)

Hobbes, Kant and the disciplinary identity of ethnology

In present-day philosophy there is a sharp divide between Darwinist and Kantian views of human nature. Darwinist views see humans as just another, albeit somewhat special, species, while Kantian views situate humans apart from the rest of nature, as self-conscious, free-willing, morally responsible beings. The latter view has fed into the disciplinary identity of human-sciences approaches, as will be shown in detail for ethnological research on reciprocity and exchange. That disciplinary identity is thus the exact opposite of life-sciences approaches to human behaviour and sociality. This field of contention will be situated against the background of Thomas Hobbes', Darwinist avant-la-lettre, grim view, unpalatable to many if not most human scientists as well as philosophers,  that "man is wolf unto man" and human existence basically warre.


Tom Dickins (University of East London, T.Dickins@uel.ac.uk)

Mother Nature's Tolerant Ways: Why non-genetic inheritance has nothing to do with evolution

Recently a number of theorists have suggested that evolution can use non-genetic or environmental inheritance to pass on adaptations (e.g. [Mameli, M. (2004). Nongenetic selection and nongenetic inheritance. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 55, 35-71]). Furthermore, it has been suggested that non-genetic, or environmental factors, can play a central role in the process of evolution that is not captured by the neo-Darwinian view which places natural selection centre stage (e.g. [Odling-Smee, J. J., Laland, K. N., & Feldman, M. W. (2003). Niche construction: The neglected process in evolution. New Jersey: Princeton University Press]). In this paper we present and clarify neo-Darwinian theory and then take issue with the notions of contemporary gene-centred selection and inheritance that non-genetic inheritance theorists have used. We claim that they have misunderstood the distinction and relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic inheritance and we clarify this with a number of examples from the behavioural and biological sciences. According to this analysis there is no such thing as biologically independent non-genetic inheritance, all extrinsic inheritance is a consequence of traits and dispositions that are intrinsic to an organism and intrinsic design can only be explained through neo-Darwinism. We point to the implications this view has for current conceptions of cultural evolution.


Robin Dunbar (University of Oxford, robin.dunbar@anthro.ox.ac.uk)

Putting evolution back into the social sciences

Although both sociology and anthropology developed strong evolutionary themes during the C19th and early C20th, their collective eschewing of ‘origin stories’ and anything biological during the first decades of the C20th meant that they parted company with evolutionary biology at a time when evolutionary ideas had not yet been fully worked out. So long as evolutionary thinking confined itself to species and anatomy, this allowed the social sciences to operate in an evolutionary vacuum. However, from the 1970s onwards, evolutionary biologists and evolutionary anthropologists have increasingly encroached into areas that previously were the exclusive domain of the social sciences. Human behaviour and cultural evolution represent two major areas of development in this respect.  I shall argue that social scientists’ concerns in this respect are in part due to misunderstandings about the agenda involved. I will illustrate how we might approach a more useful integration of the two paradigms with some of my own work on the structure and dynamics of social groups, and the study of historical and modern ethnographic populations.


Robert Foley (University of Cambridge, raf10@cam.ac.uk)

Unknown boundaries: human evolution and the social sciences

Why should anyone outside biology, let alone in the social sciences, take any notice of Darwinian theory? History, it could be argued, shows the weaknesses and dangers. Equally, it can be argued that evolutionary thinking is itself non-adaptive, and therefore a poor candidate for successful cultural transmission. There must be particularly strong reasons for employing evolutionary models in human behaviour and affairs. In this talk I shall explore a number of themes which might make evolutionary thinking and analysis more attractive to the social sciences today. These include the underlying continuity of the evolutionary process, the scientific problems of the unknown boundaries of evolutionary thinking, the potential for human sciences to contribute to evolutionary theory, and the need for evolutionary models which open up rather than close off research in the social sciences. It will also be discussed whether the rapid growth of genomics makes a closer bond between evolutionary biology and social sciences not just desirable, but essential.


Geoffrey Hodgson (University of Hertfordshire, g.m.hodgson@herts.ac.uk)

Generalizing Darwinism to Social Evolution: Some Early Attempts

This paper shows that the idea that Darwinian principles apply to the evolution of social as well as biological entities is over a century old. As well as reviewing these early contributions, it considers what that application means. It is not equivalent to the view that social phenomena can be partly or wholly explained in genetic terms. On the contrary, it must presume that there are additional replicators at the social level, which reflect social relations as well as the properties of individuals.


Simon Kirby (University of Edinburgh, simon@ling.ed.ac.uk)

Language as an Evolutionary System

Over the last decade there has been a growing appreciation of the importance of taking an evolutionary perspective in order to solve the fundamental explanatory challenges of linguistics. Linguists are beginning to attempt to answer the question of why language is the way it is by asking how it came to be that way. Initially, the argument has been that language shows the "appearance of design" for the function of communication, and the only explanation for such design is biological evolution of an innate faculty for language by natural selection. More recently, however, we have argued that there is an alternative source of apparent design in language. This is because language itself is an evolutionary system but on a cultural rather than biological timescale. Language adapts to us rather than the other way around. In this talk, I will briefly survey how we are beginning to understand this new evolutionary system using a combination of computer simulations and laboratory experiments in which we can observe languages evolve.


Robert Layton (University of Durham, r.h.layton@durham.ac.uk)

Co-evolution: a means to reconcile the social and natural sciences?

There are three reasons why social scientists have not readily accepted a Darwinian perspective:
1. Social scientists consider the comparative study of social and cultural systems to be a vital importance to their research, whereas hard-line evolutionary biologists (EO Wilson, Tooby and Cosmides) regard culture as marginal and insignificant.
2. Some social scientists still understand ‘social evolution’ to mean progressive evolution, from simple to complex societies (although probably no longer from irrationality to rationality), whereas Darwinian evolution concerns adaptation to specific environments.
3. Social scientists are interested in the emergent properties of social interaction, whereas classic Darwinian theory takes the individual as the unit of selection.
In this paper, I will discuss applications of the theory of co-evolution that may help to reconcile these apparently opposed intellectual stances:
Co-evolution between different organisms:
1. Co-evolution of individual strategies with those of other members of the species
2. Niche construction – classically (Odling-Smee) modification of the natural environment – but also modification of social environment, transforming the ecology toward which genetic adaptation takes place.
Co-evolution as different levels of evolution taking place within the same organisms:
3. Co-evolution of genes and culture, and the application of evolutionary models to culture change


Stephen Levinson (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Stephen.Levinson@mpi.nl)

Rethinking the language sciences

The language sciences are currently non-Darwinian for a range of historical reasons, but the most important is that theory has been dominated by the paradigm inherited from the birth of the Cognitive Sciences in the 1950s. In that paradigm, language is viewed as largely invariant algebraic system running on an innate symbol manipulation machine, whose origin is (more or less) an evolutionary freak. This paradigm ignores a key property of human language: it is the only known animal communication system that varies in form and meaning across social groups. Meanwhile empirical work on the languages of the world has accumulated to a point where a paradigm change is clearly necessary. The recent work points to linguistic diversity at every level, with family resemblances largely accounted for by common cultural descent. Exceptionless universals of language now seem vanishingly rare. If cultural evolution accounts for language diversity, what accounts for the common core and the universal use of language across the species? I'll argue that humans are endowed with an 'interaction engine', a shared foundation for communicative interaction which bootstraps infants into the local language tradition, and which no doubt has deep phylogenetic roots.


Tim Lewens (University of Cambridge)

Darwinizing History: What are the payoffs?

There are two reasons why one might oppose applying a Darwinian framework to the study of history. One might think that historical processes are non-Darwinian. Alternatively, one might think that even though they are Darwinian, this doesn’t provide the historian with any especially valuable insights. We might agree that ideas, tools, religions, scientific theories and so forth, show plentiful variation, they are passed on more or less intact in cultural transmission, and their tendencies to multiply differ. If this is correct, then we can describe the spread of, say, Darwin’s theory of evolution across Europe, in evolutionary terms. But how would this improve the study of the reception of Darwinian ideas in, for example, nineteenth century France? What, if anything, should historians studying these phenomena do differently, once they realise that cultural change is Darwinian? In this talk, I begin by exposing the reasons for some historians’ resistance to evolutionary approaches, before moving on to suggest areas in which evolutionary tools may offer some form of insight. The primary tools of interest are likely to come from methods of reconstructing phylogenies, and from what Boyd and Richerson term ‘population thinking’.


Ruth Mace and George Perry (University College London, r.mace@ucl.ac.uk)

Human Behaviour: Why is an Evolutionary Perspective Often Rejected?

We report the results of an online survey for over 7000 university staff and students, asking them questions about science, religious belief, and evolutionary theory.  Factor analysis was used to identify groups of questions associated positively or negatively with the view that evolutionary theory was useful in helping us to understand human behaviour.  We find that a factor relating to acceptance of evolution in relation to human behaviour was most strongly negatively associated with religiosity and being associated with social sciences departments.


Alex Mesoudi (Queen Mary, University of London, a.mesoudi@qmul.ac.uk)

Towards an Evolutionary Synthesis for the Social Sciences

The biological sciences were unified in the 1930s and 1940s when it was finally accepted that microevolutionary processes (e.g. selection, drift, mutation) were consistent with observed macroevolutionary patterns (e.g. speciation, adaptive radiation). Although scholars going back to Darwin (1871) have argued that culture evolves according to similar principles as do species, an evolutionary synthesis for the social sciences has yet to occur. I will examine the reasons for this failure, arguing that until the 1980s the requisite cultural microevolutionary processes had not been sufficiently delineated, thus preventing any cross-disciplinary synthesis. Indeed, it is only in the last 10-15 years that cultural evolution researchers have begun to integrate theoretical, experimental, observational and historical methods, suggesting an emerging evolutionary synthesis for the social sciences. I will illustrate this nascent synthesis with three examples: patterns of prehistoric arrowhead variation in the Great Basin; random copying models of popular culture change; and debates over the transmission mechanisms underlying cultural phylogenies.


Daniel Nettle (University of Newcastle, daniel.nettle@newcastle.ac.uk)

Perhaps the social sciences are Darwinian, but haven't realised it yet

This conference is premised on a number of assumptions, for example that it is possible to divide research into that which is Darwinian and that which is not, that when such a division is made, the social sciences are less Darwinian than the biological sciences, and that becoming Darwinian necessarily leads to better research. Whilst I support sophisticated attempts to bring evolutionary  thinking into the social sciences, I feel it would be useful to question these assumptions in the spirit of constructive critique. Most research in biology is not Darwinian in any particularly strong sense - many molecular biologists, for example, go from one year's end to the next without ever thinking about evolution - and there is no reason the social sciences should be any different.  Moreover, where explicit Darwinian ideas have been brought in, the research accompanying them has often been poor by the standards of both biology and of social science.  I will argue that the onus is on evolutionists - myself included - to make their rhetoric more modest and their results more compelling if they are to have greater influence in the social sciences.


Felix Riede (University College London, f.riede@ucl.ac.uk)

Why isn’t archaeology (more) Darwinian? A historical perspective

At the time when archaeology emerged as a distinct academic discipline, references to Darwin’s notions of descent with modification and natural selection were relatively common, especially amongst Scandinavian scholars. These references were, at times, remarkably explicit and became more regular following the publication of Darwin’s key works – the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man – in translation. Drawing on biographic and archival sources as well as on an analysis of the reception and development of these ideas this papers attempts to tease out the (historical, contingent, and intellectual) factors that led, ultimately, to a more or less wholesale rejection of Darwinism in archaeology. It is argued that rather than being intrinsically incompatible, archaeology and evolution have much to offer to each other, as is attested by a recent renaissance of Darwinian approaches to the deep past.


Jamie Tehrani (University of Durham, jamie.tehrani@durham.ac.uk)

The past and future of anthropology as an evolutionary science

Anthropology was originally conceived as a bridge between the natural and social sciences. Its remit was to fill in the gaps in knowledge about human history between the emergence of our species and the appearance of the first civilisations in written history. However, this project soon became embroiled in a destructive debate between "evolutionists" and "diffusionists" from which the discipline has never fully recovered. The evolutionists believed that cross-cultural similarities in social organisation, subsistence technology, religious ideology, etc. were independently discovered by societies as they progressed toward higher stages of civilisation. The diffusionists, on the other hand, argued that most cultural innovations were invented only once and spread from their point of origin through migration or cultural contact. While the diffusionists ultimately won that debate, I will show that their critique of classical social evolutionism is irrelevant to Darwinian models of cultural evolution, which explicitly recognise the roles of both independent evolution and shared origins. Modern biological phylogenetic analysis provides us with powerful techniques to investigate the relative contributions of these processes to cultural diversity, enabling modern day anthropologists to achieve the still unfulfilled goals of their nineteenth century forbearers.


Michael Tomasello (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, tomasello@eva.mpg.de)

The Human Adaptation for Culture

Human beings are biologically adapted for cultural life in ways that other primates are not.  Humans have unique motivations and cognitive skills for understanding other persons as cooperative agents with whom one can share emotions, experience, and collaborative actions (shared intentionality).  The motivations and skills involved emerge in human ontogeny at around one year of age, as infants begin to participate with other persons in various kinds of collaborative and joint attentional activities (cultural practices), including linguistic communication.  Chimpanzees understand important aspects of intentional action - specifically that others pursue goals and perceive things relevant to those goals - especially in competitive situations.  But our nearest primate relatives do not seem to have the motivations and cognitive skills necessary to engage in activities involving collaboration, shared intentionality, and, in general, things cultural.


David S. Wilson (Binghamton University, dwilson@binghamton.edu)

Evolution and human affairs at the level of research, higher education, and public policy

For complex reasons, evolutionary theory was largely restricted to the biological sciences and avoided for most human-related subjects for most of the 20th century. That is now rapidly changing at the level of scientific research but is not yet reflected at the level of higher education, still less at the level of public policy. I will review these trends and what can be done to accelerate them. In the future, evolutionary theory will be as essential for the formulation of public policy as physics and chemistry are essential for technology.


Lewis Wolpert FRS (University College London, profwolpert@yahoo.com)

Evolution of causal beliefs and religion

Humans may be distinguished from all other animals in having beliefs about the causal interactions of physical objects. The origin of human causal beliefs comes from the evolutionary advantage it gave in relation to complex tool-making and use which drove human evolution.  Causal beliefs probably gave rise to  religion and mystical thinking as our ancestors wanted to know the causes of events that affected their lives. Human–like gods provided an explanation. The advantage this gave our ancestors may have led to mystical beliefs being genetically programmed in our brains.


John van Wyhe (CRASSH, jmv21@cam.ac.uk)

Two cultures to two families - a social approach to why the social sciences are not Darwinian

To answer a question about why the social sciences are they way they are we need to consider their origins and their history. Where did the social sciences come from? How have they developed? Not only are their roots for the most part not in the Darwinian life sciences, but their diversification and increasing specialization continues- leaving us with a confusing array of fields and sub fields- many of which can no longer communicate effectively. Hence C. P. Snow's famous two-cultures hypothesis is far less applicable now than it was in 1959. There are not two cultures but rather two large families or genera - many of whom are as different from each other as one from the other 'family'. The social sciences are not Darwinian (for the most part) because of their history, not necessarily because of their subject matter.