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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
As a theory, sociobiology is opposed to socio-ecology, a discipline hampered since its birth. The indictment of the ideological intentions of the first has obscured the notion that the growing domination of the image of the “selfish gene” has obstructed the necessary rise of the second.
For 40 years, a terrible force of inertia has thus frozen the global analysis of socio-ecological interactions outside the theoretical bias externally imposed on social sciences by so-called “behavioral ecology”, which amounts to a simple emanation of sociobiology. This book summarizes the methodological abuses and the illusory legitimations of a school whose sterility can no longer be concealed, but which is preparing to reinvent itself by cynically replacing its faltering laws by hijacking the recent advances in epigenetics. The authors shed light on unjustly sacrificed paths in the study of socio-ecological interactions.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Introduction
1 From Altruism to Sociobiology: Historical and Epistemological Summary
1.1. Introduction
1.2. The “social Darwinism” of the 19th Century
1.3. Reconquest of the quest: 20th Century social neo-Darwinism
1.4. Expansion, disintegration signs and recent defections
1.5. Missing or extra squares on the chessboard
1.6. Temporary theory and permanent fantasy: will sociobiology soon be superseded?
2 The Illusory Endorsement of Insects: Omissions and Arbitrary Choices
2.1. Entomologic stronghold and the place of social insects
2.2. Organicism, superorganism and monospecific society
2.3. The beacon built by Wilson
2.4. Missing questions
2.5. Stigmergy
versus
haplodiploidy: a “choice of society”?
2.6. Subsequently emerged information
2.7. Polyethism, polyphenism and monomania
3 Gray Langur Society and Chimpanzee Culture
3.1. Gray langur society shrunk to infanticide
3.2. Culture and chimpanzees
3.3. Non-natural selection of comparisons
4 On the Specificity of Human Sociality
4.1. Logic of inbreeding avoidance in non-human primates
4.2. Logic of the incest prohibition in humans
4.3. Regarding sexual division of labor and food sharing
4.4. Outline of a socioecological explanation
5 The Sociobiological Force of Inertia and Socioecology Challenges: Conclusion
5.1. The meltdown of the debate
5.2. The epistemological obstacle behind the force of inertia
5.3. Interaction, ecology and social sciences
5.4. Mutual respect, a condition of interdisciplinarity
5.5. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
4 On the Specificity of Human Sociality
Figure 4.1.
Articulations between the key elements of the hunting-gathering regime
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Interdisciplinarity between Biological Sciences and Social Sciences: Methodology and Theoretical Pitfalls Set
coordinated byGeorges Guille-Escuret
Volume 1
Sociobiology vs Socioecology
Consequences of an Unraveling Debate
Sejin Park
Georges Guille-Escuret
First published 2017 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
27-37 St George’s Road
London SW19 4EU
UK
www.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA
www.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2017
The rights of Sejin Park and Georges Guille-Escuret to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935628
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-78630-135-2
Introduction
Scientific disciplines are used to regularly submitting their unrefuted theses for a detailed review in order to reassess their relevance in the light of ex post facto data. However, when it comes to multidisciplinary theories, it is already a less regular practice. Furthermore, researchers often seem to ignore that assertions, argumentations and constructions are not the only ones requiring such reviews: protracted controversies should likewise encourage questioning by re-examining the same field where the contradictions appeared. Yet, such re-examination is very rare: disputes are put in the past as soon as possible, and then entrusted to the care of science history, whose intervention will highlight the past nature – or else solved nature – of the disagreement: a misunderstanding, a mistake, a quarrel based on pride.
Sometimes, science finds it difficult to resist the temptation of “jumping forward”, and its representatives are rushing to forget embarrassing shortcomings, as if the will to go forward should make these weaknesses disappear. It can certainly happen sometimes in connection with an unexpected epiphany. However, this wager remains uncertain, and its daring increases with the extent of bypassed opacity: in the “case” that will mobilize us here, we will see that this protracted avoidance has literally already produced disastrous effects.
In 1975, the Harvard publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis [WIL 75] triggered a massive international and multidisciplinary controversy, enraging the biology, humanities and philosophy communities. Fever increased through political and ideological implications which, whether asserted or rejected, landed at the forefront of the controversy. Sociobiology promised a reorganization of social sciences in the medium term on the basis of the speculative game of genes in support of their proliferation in future generations. Organism itself was reduced to the necessary intermediary role of strategies: determined through an unwavering ambition of its components to increase their representation within the population.
For almost 15 years, from one country to the other, and on both sides of the Atlantic, we assisted the awakening of dormant convictions and the revival of former antagonisms, to whom flashy technical changes offered the appeal of something new. If we take a closer look, this was the last major university unrest of the 20th Century, which faded bit by bit with the rapid growth of a lethargy of commitments: students and researchers have indeed shifted toward a principled mistrust regarding conflicts, partisan attitudes and, more generally, too strong convictions. The fall of the Berlin Wall facilitated the rise of a horde of relativisms, whose varied ironies quickly reduced any contradiction to overweening verbosity, so that, in the end, the naivety of the aspirations of science itself was snubbed as a whole.
However, the stream of invectives dwindled without any dialogue taking place, without any debate being organized, and without identifying, classifying or weighing the disputed issues. No one ever started to solve any of the numerous problems then outlined in bulk and, worse, no one even thinks of complaining about it. Arguments were given to the public, but never exchanged between researchers: so they did not make any progress. Sociobiologists were in a good position: they simply rejected any objection by condemning them as philosophical or ideological imputing motives. This position of offended dignity helped them to elude purely scientific contestations, even if their phrasing did not allow any criticism. Antagonism was used as an excuse to avoid debate, and we witnessed a controversy without any discussion!
In practice, arrangements between the humanities have varied according to sectors and countries. In France, for example, we have completely ignored that ethologists, after a period of intense criticism, has joined the main stream, and that sociobiology has progressively monopolized university education on animal behavior. Likewise, we pretended not to see its infiltration within the craze of “cognitive sciences”. In the United States, the rise of postmodernism, during the last decade of the 20th Century, drove a nearly insuperable wedge between “scientists” and “relativists”: a nearly silent divide that led to the complete division of some departments of anthropology. Sociobiology used this opportunity to comfortably deploy itself within the strongholds of functionalism.
The last breath of confrontation became a yawn, without, moreover, eroding the gigantic strength of the challenges raised. A strange burn out seems to be passing through the scholarly community, but is it really tiredness? All in all, the general resignation, in which this observation of failure is immersed, threatens much more the credibility of contemporary science than the denials uttered by any relativist thinker, however inspired. If scientificity is not reduced to a decoy or arrogance, this collective resignation is partly catastrophic and partly unforgivable.
In such a context, the objective of this book goes further than a desire to reopen the debate by bringing it back to its legitimate form. We certainly present a criticism of essential arguments of sociobiology, with clear rebuttals and, for each of them, an assessment of its scope. Nevertheless, it is no longer sufficient. We must ask ourselves how and why a theory managed to adorn itself with the attire of a discipline, including the proven existence that it entails and despite blatant abuse. We should also ask ourselves how and why a discussion, whose challenges were not minimized by anyone, managed to unravel up to the point of ending in an exchange of non-receiving purposes. And finally, we should ask ourselves what means would allow us to guarantee a durable debate that does not mask its momentary insufficiencies or its illicit prevarications. Some sociobiologists blame their adversaries for behaving like “epistemological policemen”: an acknowledgment of weakness bearing something symptomatic. Our statement will indeed aim to improve multidisciplinary communication. There is nothing shocking about the implementation of an epistemological police “fining” the methodological improprieties, on which all the sciences concerned should in principle agree, even though they are not always used to uncover them.
The content of this book will progress accordingly from the exercise of strict refutation (Chapters 1–3) to the exercise of counterproposition, with this secondary divergence that the critical phase will focus on the assertions of sociobiology, while the positive part will focus on essential method points: Chapter 4 does not intend to give an idea of multidisciplinary socioecology, but rather an illustration of the way anthropology could take part in it, outside the effective control of sociobiologists on this field of investigation, and also without biology feeling irremediably “polluted”.
In fact, our will is not directed toward the elaboration of a competing theory, or even a draft: as it would come to confirm the potential relevance of the adverse construction. One of the most serious mistakes committed by the scientific contestation of sociobiology was to restrict controversy by attacking such or such explanation supported by such or such author in order to ridicule its content. In the long run, the perverse effect of this repeated strategy imperceptibly amplified: we lost sight that the greatest danger of sociobiology resided in the idea that a general understanding of the relations between societies and their environment was already accessible. Research on the subject was barely starting, and lo and behold a miraculous key from elsewhere, an authentic deus ex machina, was giving the big picture in order to take control of the program of future analyses.
The main thesis that this book will defend, must then appear straight away, so that the reader keeps it in mind through all the pages to come: beyond their subconscious or non-subconscious ideological purposes, sociobiology represents before all an extraordinary inertial force against an authentic scientific project dedicated to socioecological interactions in nature, including human species. Through a clandestine creation, “behavioral ecology”, it involves a will that is indeed ideological and that curiously remains unnoticed: preventing the installation and progress of a priority sector of research, despite the numerous adjoining emergencies, under the pretext of the dazzling promises of a brilliant intuition.
In order to prevent our words from being misused, we should clarify two points. By ideology, we mean here a pattern of thought external (or anterior) to a scientific ambition, which is attacked head-on (denial of existence), or which is surreptitiously infiltrated in order to parasitize it. The rejection of Darwinism by creationism illustrates this first way: denial. The preorientated transformation of species, with the hunch of a hierarchy guiding the action of natural selection via a hidden constant, represents the second way. As to the possibility of scientific revolutions and surprising discoveries that unexpectedly disrupt the state of knowledge, we by no means dismiss them. In the case we are dealing with, reluctance is developed at another level: a conjecture, which was legitimate as an assumption to be assessed through different angles, was honored as a theory, and then crowned as a discipline through secular conviction, which had yet been destroyed at the end of the 19th Century.
This arbitrary transformation of a speculation into a “law” ruined the rise of the field of socioecology, which could have claimed to be a scientific necessity, but which, unfortunately, did not yet rely on any founding vision: only on a need. An a priori stifled this research.
This is why our first chapters will deal with emblematic cases put forward by sociobiology, 40 years ago: bypassing and accepting voids would come to endorse the vice of a credibility built on nothing: the harmfulness of non-revealed faults increases with time and they, so to speak, “reproduce”. What would be the point of scrutinizing the details of an entomologic or primatological article in this wake, if it relies on triggers whose questionable making was not consolidated, nor disqualified? We refuse resignation in the face of abuse from the beginning, since the sophistications of the present depend on it. Before starting this re-examination, we glanced through the recent bibliography – starting with a key journal, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology – and we found that the contemporary works that are clearly affiliated to sociobiology make progress only by specializing past significant “blows”. Therefore, if a current author is criticized, they can simply transfer the responsibility on its predecessors, whose contributions were approved by the whole community: they themselves, in most cases, did not add any additional error. Sociobiology remains then under the protection of native faults that escaped discredit. The current followers will accuse us of fighting in the past and of ignoring the progress accumulated over 40 years, but we will see that these achievements come down to a decoy: in its refreshing naivety, the brief and fierce sparring of 2012 that we will mention in the following chapter between the emblematic figures, Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, utterly confirmed it.
Moreover, it is a symptomatic dispute, in that it seems to spell the end of an era. Not only did lassitude increase before the tremendous breakthrough promised by sociobiology was put off, but a fearsome competition is waking, which would quickly render the allegory of the Selfish Gene obsolete: the results obtained by epigenetics attract more and more supporters of biological determinism, with possibly, a much larger range of action. And some sociologists already find the perspective exciting [MEL 14, MEL 16]. In 1977, when the anthropologist Marhall Sahlins published his brief diatribe against the new version of the biological reductionism produced by Harvard [SAH 77], he mocked his own speed to react in fear of seeing the incriminated theory deflating like a balloon in the near future: premonition obviously misguided. Today, the concern of ethologists in this respect would be more justified, because their ambitions are running the risk of passing under the control of an authoritative and fastidious technoscience: molecular biology.
Yet, contrary to what the reader will sense, the likely redistribution of cards that would marginalize “classic” sociobiology does not in any way reduce the interest of our work: it reinforces it. The theory here incriminated once caught off guard, a socioecology willing to incorporate, as of right, social sciences: the lessons to be drawn from it in connection with the technical and tactical recombination that is looming on the horizon will allow us to firmly grasp an opportunity to bring to light the vital challenges that targeted the smothered field. First, it implies to not make the same mistakes with geneticists today as with ethologists yesterday. It then implies an ability to clearly and shamelessly denounce the distortions of the scientific method that determinism “temporarily” legitimizes “because of practical constraints”: the medium is going to change, phrasing too, but not the way of acting of sophisms. Finally, it implies becoming aware of what our society can lose and what it can gain in this “case”. Who will dare to publicly wish that ecology and sociology refrain forever from cooperating in order to jointly understand countless interactions associating societies and environments, which are both equally fragile structures? Probably, no one. But, on the contrary, who will have the patience that will require to overcome the obstacles?
Re-examining the past and non-disqualified faults of the sociobiology established for 40 years is a crucial condition in order to prevent a neo-sociobiology in the making – which is discreetly developed from new “laws” devoid of any link with the former ones – from benefitting from the institutional achievements of the version in distress in order to uphold without any resistance the favorable situation of biological reductionism. Throughout the coming pages, we will therefore insist, when we get the opportunity, on the contradictions regarding the inspiration in place of the “Selfish Gene” and the one of a possible social Lamarckism revitalized by epigenetics. It would be sinister and indecent to see biological determinism shape shifting, while keeping the property of the “sociobiology” mark, for the sole purpose of inheriting the university powers reaped because of the victorious sophisms of a past idea.
1From Altruism to Sociobiology: Historical and Epistemological Summary
1.1. Introduction
As a whole, biology, which seems to oscillate between superbly “hard” sciences (mathematics, physics, etc.) and sadly “soft” rationalizations (psychology, sociology, etc.), represents a minor, and even marginal, source of inspiration for the formal schools of epistemology. The fact that Darwinism does not comply with the famous criterion of refutability laid down by Karl Popper as a dividing line separating accomplished scientificity from less rigorous approaches probably increased the temptation for a certain avoidance. On the other hand, after the mid-20th Century, the prominent culture of naturalists attaches little importance to a regular exercise of epistemological discussion. However, especially in comparison with their colleagues attached to others fields, researchers committed to the study of living things tend to demonstrate a strange recklessness before the history of their own knowledge. Apart from a small handful of clan ancestors, such as Linné, Darwin and Mendel, common references quickly disappear, and a blatant absence of curiosity is apparent in respect of the former masters of the discipline next to it.
Yet, sociobiology represents, at first sight, an exception. It is true that the legitimacy of its problem was immediately strongly disputed from a necessarily “meta-scientific” point of view, but, even before these attacks, it had unusually taken care of justifying its program by incorporating it to the logics of a slow progression of ideas. Nevertheless, the reader will soon find that undeclared tactical calculations presided over these “pedagogic” operations, blurring here and there an influence, or a major participation, and masking, as a result, embarrassing questions.
A commented historical summary should then allow the reader to understand, as the dates unraveled, the series of events that led to the powerful comeback of a secular conviction, as well as the decisive links between these episodes. A long technical restructuring was obstructed in order to reinforce the image of an unexpected discovery and hide what we must call the persistence of an ideological obsession. The assimilation of this sequence will greatly facilitate the reading of the following chapters.
1.2. The “social Darwinism” of the 19th Century
Our journey starts with the appearance of a category brutally adding itself to the one of naturalists: biologists, who rely on an additional skill. If an observation method is sufficient to describe things of nature, it is no longer the case from the moment we pretend to deal with living things: a theory is required explicitly or not.
– 1802: Lamarck and the invention of biology
The word biology was independently coined several times, in Germany and France, but the initiative of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck in Research on the Organization of Living Bodies was the most retained, probably because of the prestige he earned through his book. Except that in this case, posterity was not duped: Lamarck insisted straight away on the double mission of the field supposed to contain botany and zoology, that is to say the complementary quest for unity and diversity of living things. Connecting both aspirations came to inscribe in science a reflection up to now reserved to theology: God no longer monopolized the responsibility of constants, and biology would work to identify them outside the initial laws of creation. The result was that “biology” implied an evolution that was likely to link unity and diversity.
Behind this attitude, which was beyond reproach in approach, the risk of a manipulation playing on ambiguity incidentally crept in: pretending that a phenomenon was biological came to put it under the authority of a unifying base, whereas the field of investigation of biology referred in priority to diversity. Thus, practical projects preferably relied on heterogeneity, while theoretical ambitions claimed to have a common nature, and the discreet reciprocation between both levels was open to numerous tactical tricks. Sociobiology used trickery even better than other schools of thought before they did, by using diversity as a shield to justify its efforts, although the proclamation of its “unifying” law clearly preceded control by comparing the validity of its statement. We should remember this point when we focus on the “thunderbolt” of 1975: the voluminous “synthesis” published by Edward O. Wilson.
– 1809: Lamarck, evolution and inheritance
With his Zoological Philosophy, which brilliantly finalized his work, Lamarck imposed the first full theory of evolution: marked, among other things, by the idea of a general direction going from simple to complex. One of the “laws” included in it primarily concerned here is the inheritance of acquired characteristics, according to which the action of “circumstances” can develop, or reduce, a trait from generation to generation. To some, even very reduced, extent, parents could then transmit something from the experience they lived to their descendants. Lamarck, according to some commentators, developed a widespread intuition among his contemporaries, who sensed the existence of evolution. In addition, the originality of his contribution was certainly not limited to this speculation. This door left ajar in the face of an inheritance bequeathed by ascendants through the fortunes and misfortunes experienced during their life would, nonetheless, represent the core of “social Darwinism” during the second half of the century: simply through an extrapolation of behavioral dispositions.
– 1830 (?1): Comte and “altruism”
Auguste Comte, the inventor of “sociology”, also introduced the idea of altruism, outside an evolutionary perspective. It was still unclear when it came about: probably coined in the 1930s, the word was however certified in 1852, within the “positivist catechism”. Although it was found that some representatives of “social Darwinism”, starting with Spencer, whom we will talk about in the following, read Comte, we ignore in which way and at what speed this notion spread.
– 1855: Spencer and evolutionism
According to Spencer [SPE 87], his understanding of a general doctrine of evolution was essentially built in 1855, when he was working on The Principles of Psychology: built and unfinished, because he worked on it until his death. The significance of this landmark in time came from the fact that we would then remember evolutionism2 (or, from the outside and pejoratively, “social Darwinism”) as clearly preceding the hatching of Darwinian science. The parasitic influence that it will have on it, will then prove even more swift and efficient as, far from being reduced to a subservient extrapolation of the bulk, the metaphysical theory infiltrated in it an interpretation previously instructed: we are dealing with an impregnation here, not an addition.
The double conviction of an underlying progression from simple to complex, and from homogeneous to heterogeneous, highlighted the hierarchical orientation of this thought. We must add to it organicism, that is to say the double assimilation from society to organism, and from organism to society: in the 20th Century, even though it was devalued everywhere else, this inspiration would remain prominent among entomologists, who would indentify hives, anthills and termite mounds as “superorganisms”, with individuals instead of cells.
– 1859: Darwin and natural selection
The nearly simultaneous and, nevertheless, independent revelations of natural selection by Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin made quite an impression, and the publication of On the Origin of Species [DAR 59] had an immediate impact, which spread throughout Western Europe. Two types of debate lied ahead. The first one dominated the following decades, and concerned the unavoidable challenge of the creationist dogma of the Christian religion (and then, of the whole monotheism). The second one fell beyond this outlet: in a perspective excluding religious authority, all the thinkers understood that, from now on, a human theory claimed to be in continuity with a nature theory, and vice versa. Spencer was not the only one to consider things from this point of view: less than a month after the publication of his book, Friedrich Engels, in a letter to Karl Marx, showed his enthusiasm about the “historical development in nature” highlighted by the English naturalist [MAR 73, p. 19].
The main theory of Darwin relied on three main concepts. Each gave rise to numerous deformations: natural selection performed a synthesis of the struggle for existence, which a given species within a given natural environment faced (so identified in space and time), and it resulted from a place in nature. In contemporary vocabulary, this last notion is perfectly reflected by the notion of “ecological niche”, in which the struggle for existence represents “dimensions” [HUT 65]. The innovative power of Darwinism resided, in fact, in its capacity to reflect processes of evolution through ecology (which it creates) and ecological situations through the solidarity of evolutions (see [HAE 66, HAE 84], further in the book). On the other hand, “social Darwinism” would play on two levels:
– Darwin did not deny the possibility of a Lamarckian inheritance, which allows us to think that his contribution can be added to without being harmed.
– The struggle for existence that was formed between organisms and all the environmental factors to which they were exposed (climate, predators, parasites, etc.) was tacitly curtailed: reduced to the sole competitions between individuals of the same species. It only expressed social competitions and economic competitions. Consequently, nature suggested a metaphor of the capitalist market: an image, which was particularly obsessive in North America in the 20th Century.
– 1865: Mendel and genes
Everybody knows that Gregor Mendel’s experiments went unheeded for 35 years. Apart from the relatively confidential support for their publication, a probable pattern of indifference arose from the confidence granted to the Lamarckian inheritance, which was attractive and suitable to mask the challenge of the discoveries made by the botanist.
– 1866 and 1868: Haeckel and oecology
If Spencer is the undeniable master of “social Darwinism” in philosophy, Ernst Haeckel can claim the title for being the prominent figure among biologists. As he quickly understood that the quite original method presiding over the conception of natural selection requested a reorganization of life sciences, he deducted the need for a new discipline, responsible for studying the relationships between organisms and all the components (biotic or non-biotic) of their environment: oecology, simplified later as ecology. The two definitions he gave for it in 1866 and 1868 are remarkable as, despite hundreds of subsequent attempts from every horizon, they maintain the highest authority [HAE 66, HAE 84].
Yet, in the second occurrence, after having perfectly well defined the field of ecology because of a lucid reading of Darwin, Haeckel allowed himself to inaugurate the travesty by including, a few pages further, a particular case: humankind. The comparisons he outlined brutally left the ecological field to restrict themselves to the behavioral register: this characteristic narrowing would even lead the biologists from the beginning of the 20th Century to wonder about his real objective: ecology or ethology? In reality, far from being confused, he was modifying the aim in order to deduct a “place for humankind in nature”, under the flag of Darwinian ecology, but with the tools of racial, or even openly racist, psychology, since it was true that the influence of Haeckel on biological anthropology in Germany was significant. After 1975, this reminiscence triggered hasty or basic suspicions, when sociobiology found itself in the hot seat. Racist convictions can indeed draw a certain benefit from such a revival: this does not instantly mean that sociobiology defines them by itself.
– 1871 a: Darwin and the Descent of Man
Twelve years after On the Origin of Species…, Darwin published The Descent of Man [DAR 71], an event that was lastingly experienced by the public as the expected crossing of a threshold: the admission of the human branch within the whole of the beings likely to “experience” evolution. It seemed only appropriate, but, within the turmoil of the debates, protagonists expected from “the inventor” an official commitment and the open selection of a party. Unfortunately, this point eclipsed the content of the book in other respects, except for a large part dedicated to sexual selection (“social Darwinism” made haste to sever this aspect from natural selection, artificially giving it an unseemly autonomy).
However, the worst was that the finally stated theory did not attract any interest in any way, and the author was allocated with a grossly reductionist, and even “racist”, mindset, which was eager to turn humankind into a beast and humiliate its originality in the history of nature. In addition, this lasted for more than a century; since it is in 1983 that the epistemologist Patrick Tort, relying on the argumentative logics of the text, unearthed the unnoticed conclusion, which is now concentrated in one phrase: “the reverse effect of evolution” [TOR 83]. In short, Tort clarified that natural selection, which is the guiding principle of evolution implying the elimination of the less able individuals in the struggle for existence, selects within humankind a form of social life whose progress toward civilization tends to exclude more and more qualifying behaviors through the joint use of ethics and institutions.3Thus, natural selection selects civilization, which is against natural selection, which results in protecting the weak instead of eliminating them. When a disability or crisis, which “should” put an end to a life that has become incapable of self-protection on its own, assistance, care and help are regularly provided by the members of the group, who compensate for the infirmity.
– 1871 b: Tylor and culture
The anthropologic idea of culture appeared the same year with the definition given by Edward B. Tylor in the very first sentence of Primitive Culture: “culture or civilization understood in its broad sense is a complex set composed of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and all other skills and habits acquired by a human as a member of a society” [TYL 71]. In fact, Tylor used the proposition of a German author.
During the following decades, “culture” and “civilization” were more or less dissociated according to countries and sciences; the first finally revolving around the differences between ways of life, and the second aiming at connoting a level of cultural complexity. This contributed to marginalize the remote perspective defended by Darwin from “social instincts”.
– 1879: Spencer and the ethics of altruism
The publication of The Data of Ethics by Spencer showed that, now, evolutionism had a perfectly clear vision of the image to be presented regarding the duo egoism/altruism. A few sections are enough to show why sociobiology would have trouble to deny this inheritance:
– “the efforts to the benefit of the race really represent a part of the substance of parents” [SPE 80, p. 175];
– “there is a gradual progress from altruism in the family to social altruism”
4
[SPE 80, p. 176];
– “since the origin of life, egoism has depended on altruism, as altruism has depended on egoism, and in the course of evolution, the reciprocal services of one and the other increased”
3
[SPE 80, p. 185].
For his part, Haeckel wrote, during the following years, equivalent convictions, praising the exact equilibrium between egoism and altruism.
– 1883: Weismann and neo-Darwinism
Suddenly, August Weismann published a text about the continuity of the germ plasm, where he categorically denied the conjecture on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Natural selection, freed from any competition, irresistibly monopolized the interpretation of an irreversible transformation of organisms. Neo-Darwinism is not an extended or complemented Darwinism: it is, on the contrary, a Darwinism from which Lamarckism was removed. The new situation tends to require a restructuring of life sciences, which would take several decades.
Although, in practice, ecology was barely starting, it theoretically had to endorse the status of an essential field of research, since the environment constantly sorted, with each generation, the “acceptable” and “unacceptable” individual variations. Lamarckism had implied that environmental variables acted on an ad hoc basis. Neo-Darwinism would have to break away from this intuition, and develop an external structure within which natural selection produced its syntheses. Another German scientist, Karl Möbius, had started to prepare this reflection by proposing, as early as 1877, the notion of biocoenosis.
As for “social Darwinism”, it obviously received a crippling blow there: the authority of biology no longer guaranteed that the development of altruism, or of other social instincts, benefited from the relay of an inheritance.
– From 1890 to WWI: reorganizations
Spencer and Haeckel, among many others, resisted this adversity, questioning inch by inch the validity of the limit indicated by Weismann. In vain: confirmations prevailed and caused various restructuring of the intellectual scene. Of course, in various Western societies, starting with the United States, the denial was ignored and the ideological conviction kept spreading a homology between the natural struggle for existence and the fierce competition in a market economy. This representation still remains nowadays widely prominent, under hardly watered down forms, and seeks to legitimize economic liberalism on a global scale.
However, at a university level, the protection of this scheme proved to be harder. Thus, in France, the eminent organicist and evolutionist power of “biological sociology” crumbled under the attacks of Gabriel de Tarde, and then Émile Durkheim. The latter created a French influential sociology, which admitted the autonomy of the social fact in the face of both the biological fact and the psychological fact. Other oppositions arose, with less elaborated academic strategies: for example, that of Franz Boas, a German geographer, who, after staying with Eskimos, turned against the environmental determinism of his teachers, and created a cultural anthropology, which would become in the United States the main accuser against the divagations of biologism.
As for life sciences, naturally, Weismann’s verdict influenced research more directly. Protected from the speculative hubbub on inneism and the origins of humankind, botanists methodologically took advantage of their flexibility to significantly get ahead and prepare the reorganization of a biology compliant with neo-Darwinian times: Mendel’s laws were exhumed, when the independent works of three of them faltered at the dawn of the 20th Century. At the same time, they opened the field of a clearly imperial phytoecology, which would show for a long time some kind of condescension toward other districts, which were outrageously infected by the disorderliness of animals.
1.3. Reconquest of the quest: 20th Century social neo-Darwinism
The first third of the 20th Century was globally dedicated to these sectorial restructurings, up to the development, during the decade prior to WWII, of a “synthetic theory of evolution”, at the instigation of a dozen researchers attached to genetics, population dynamics and systematics. Around it, a mental map of zoology was reformed, where three thematic disciplines were constantly intercrossing: ethology, which is concerned with reintegrating the issue of behavior in natural environments, was later added to genetics and ecology. Yet, on closer examination, this triptych reproduced in the animal that which now dominates human sciences: genetics overlaps biological anthropology, ethology takes over the role of psychology, and ecology, which deals with a patchwork of interactions, ultimately takes the place of sociology. In fact, the ideological tensions that would disrupt one of the two triangles would loyally have an impact on the other [GUI 94], starting with the famous quarrel over what is innate and what is acquired.
– 1932: Haldane and altruism. The return of aporia
Among the founders of the synthetic theory, the charismatic British figure John B. S. Haldane stood firm on his rather “strong” positions, which were marked by his endless trust in the intrinsic power of genes. Symptomatically, from 1932, in The Causes of Evolution, he again expressed doubt about altruism: how could the kingdom of competition governed by natural selection have promoted attitudes who benefit counterparts? According to him, the selective advantages of behaviors falling in this category would prove commendable if a significant portion of the tribe members had the disposition. As Ernst Mayr (another eminent contributor of the synthetic theory) tactfully indicated, the question remains as to how an altruist trait could raise at the level of expected frequency [MAY 74].
Up to now, the suggestion probably did not contain anything revolutionary, but the precocity of the reflection in itself, in an article by one of the movement leaders, brilliantly illustrated the untouched desire to bring back the logic of welfare under the umbrella of the biological cause. The dread of altruism remained because it contained the ultimate challenge: overcoming this obstacle meant defeating the greatest difficulty, thus taking over the challenge as a whole. In short, as the old proverb says: he who can do more, can do less.
– 1955 a: Haldane and altruism. The real discovery
Twenty years later, Haldane came back to the subject with a vision that was a complete game changer:
“Let us suppose that you carry a rare gene which affects your behaviour so that you jump into a river and save a child, but you have one chance in ten of being drowned, while I do not possess the gene, and stand on the bank and watch the child drown. If the child is your own child or your brother or sister, there is an even chance that the child will also have the gene, so five such genes will be saved in children for one lost in an adult. If you save a grandchild or nephew, the advantage is only two and half to one. If you only save a first cousin, the effect is very slight. If you try to save your first cousin once removed the population is more likely to lose this valuable gene than to gain it” [HAL 55, p. 44].
The author continued by referring to two types of conditions that would be favorable to this basic scenario: small populations, such as the ones of Paleolithic humans, where children are nearly all close relatives of the one helping them, but also hives and anthills, whose members are literally brothers and sisters. William D. Hamilton, a few years later, would loyally follow this second “lead”.
A hole was open in the rampart raised by Weismann in the face of a selection of altruism. Here, we undoubtedly leave the social Lamarckism of Spencer and Haeckel to enter into an authentic social Neo-Darwinism. We will see by concluding this chapter that the geneticist discreetly made an unjustifiable choice within the core of his reasoning, under the form of a “deadlock”, and that his followers have absolutely never questioned this initial amputation of the reflection. Nevertheless, it has to be granted that this subtle and brilliant conjecture is enough to ensure the hoped reopening of the field: it makes the ungratefulness of those who will take the path thus revealed, even stranger. As, although that key moment has not completely fallen into oblivion at the end of the 20th Century, and that today we rather regularly quote his contribution, the geneticist owes it to the critics of sociobiology and not in any way to its followers5: what biologists call in unison the “Hamilton’s law” and should, by rights, be called the “Haldane’s conjecture”.
Of course, it was pointed out among the creators of the synthetic theory that this researcher embodied a strong determinist tendency, to which was wrongly or rightly opposed the wiser and more cautious position of Theodosius Dobzhansky. Furthermore, without dwelling on this point, Haldane was characterized as both a British geneticist and a communist, which, at this time more than nowadays, was a lot for a single man (especially because Stalinism rather disliked Darwinism and Mendel’s discipline). Thus, Richard Dawkins mentioned to any who would listen this contribution, indicating that it “preceded Hamilton” [DAW 76], whose merit would later be enhanced by a second exclusion, because Wilson’s rash declarations – “genes hold culture on a leash”, for example – suceeded to undermine the reputation of scientific neutrality, which was eagerly desired by sociobiology. Haldane was not a precursor: he did not anticipate the solution, which was to be reviewed; he invented it.
– 1955 b: Julian H. Steward and cultural ecology
Far from this event, in anthropology, one of the overseas masters of anthropology, Julian H. Steward, published an essay entitled Theory of Culture Change [STE 55], in which he encouraged the creation a new field: cultural ecology. The desire to do so was not his as such, but its expression growed significantly and spread, and part of ethnology joined him in order to maintain interdisciplinary discussions with primatology, prehistory, paleontology and ecology. In 1966, the symposium, Man the Hunter, raised optimism to its climax by dismissing numerous prejudices about the primitive hunters [LEE 68].
Two reasons require us to insert this offset in our summary. The first one withered away in a short time: Steward defended the theory of a multilinear evolution, by branching out social organization forms on the model of classical Darwinian trees. The label of “neo-evolutionism” highlighted the perspective. The second one concerned practical consequences: the initial unanimity was disintegrated when finding contradictions: holism (or structuralism) versus functionalism, to name but one. Some saw the register of initial causes in ecology; others refused to a priori prioritize the diversity of facts to be put together. Under these conditions, sociobiology charmed a significant part of the cultural ecology supporters, including Irven DeVore.
– 1962: Vero C. Wynne-Edwards and group selection
Animal dispersion in relation to social behaviour [WYN 62], written by the naturalist V. C. Wynne-Edwards, gave a warning shot, with a theory uniting the social behaviors of a species with a control of its environment tenure. Even though it was noticed and greatly discussed, the book did not convince anyone: the author argued in it the existence of a group selection (i.e. directly operating on communities), which did not have unanimous support, far from it, among geneticists or even among future sociobiologists. Especially since the mechanisms assessed in the book seemed sometimes unnecessary (because individual selection could lead to similar results) and sometimes insufficient. A minority of researchers would however continue in this direction, in numbers inversely proportional to the power of the “Selfish Gene” among biologists.
In fact, some kind of underlying competition crept within biological determinism between group selection and the leading role of altruism, for which it was difficult to find reasons: when confronted about the social organization target, one of the two concepts inevitably managed to plunge the other one to a lower level by absorbing it as a secondary aspect. From this point of view, it is not absurd to wonder – provided the answer is not established in advance – whether the success of sociobiology does not maintain a discrete relationship with the fact that the lack of knowledge in demography would be enough for a non-biologist to challenge a theory on social relationships relying on group selection, while this lack would straight away inhibit it in the face of the problem revealed by Haldane.
– 1964: William D. Hamilton, John Maynard Smith and parental selection
It is precisely a criticism of Wynne-Edwards that led John Maynard Smith (a student of Haldane) to invent, contrary to the notion of group selection, the concept that stirred up a hornet’s nest at short notice: kin selection, that is to say parental selection, where the chances of survival of an individual are reviewed with those of his/her parents, thus a direct follow-up of the conjecture issued in 1955 by his master [MAY 64]. The same year, an article in two parts by William D. Hamilton offered, for his part, the concept of global selective value (inclusive fitness), which expressed the same problem from a different angle [HAM 64]. Posterity will praise Hamilton’s genius, while preferring to adopt Maynard Smith’s denomination, who was not offended by it.
Why did Hamilton’s contribution play the role of a beacon? No one remembers for certain that, in the end, he discussed the processing of “abnormalities” and the habits of emperor penguins. In addition, numerous other illustrations were similarly forgotten. Such as the introduction of a sort of “malevolent” action, on the same level as egoism and altruism, which was attractive at first and then gradually fell into abeyance. However, the echo of the excerpt on bees never declined: Haldane had suggested, at the end of his reflection, to look closer at social hymenoptera, and Hamilton followed his advice by remembering a detail characterizing their reproduction mode. In fact, hives and anthills operate under the mixed regime of haplodiploidy: males are born from unfertilized eggs and are said to be haploid, since they only have half as many chromosomes as diploid females (resulting from fertilization).
Hamilton then calculated the genetic proximity of the members of the “society”: a female generally equally shares her genes between her father and mother, but haplodiploidy results in her having three-quarters of her genes in common with her sisters “compared to” only one-quarter with her brothers. To increase the amount of elementary components in the next generation, it is then in her best “interest” to cooperate to the best of her ability with her sisters, even more than with her daughters (with whom the degree of relatedness “remains” 1/2). A correlation emerges, which, for some minds duly prepared by a unique scientific culture, suddenly falls within a brilliant and exciting, even obsessive, obvious fact: haplodiploidy would encourage altruism, which would itself facilitate sociality. In the previous sentence, we can replace the verbs “encouraging” and “facilitating” with another less modest one: “determining”. Anyhow, this time, the door was wide open for a biological evolution, where altruism would assume the role of a drive belt toward society: there certainly were many enthusiasts to rush into the hoped-for opening.
– 1966: John H. Crook and socioecology
