Darwin's new clothes: the Neo-Darwinian meta-logic of cultural evolution

Abstract

This thesis examines the current impasse in cultural evolutionary theory, in which the insertion of morality into cultural evolution has compromised the discontinuous, multiscalar principles of neo-Darwinism, creating a moral-evolutionary continuum. I draw on post-structuralist criticality to displace the exclusionary implications of the anthropocentric explanatory continuum, and on the flaws of post—structuralism to clarify the logical necessity of discontinuous, multiscalarity for a neo-Darwinian conception of cultural evolution.

In the biological sciences, the principles of Darwinism remain undisputed even though the explanatory scalar scope of neo-Darwinism has ‘expanded’ at least since the 1950s. In the humanities, there is no agreement either upon a set of workable concepts of evolution, or a concept of multiple, discontinuous explanatory scales. Discussions tend to focus on the extent to which Darwinism can account for familiar ‘social conditions’: moral practices and issues; the complex web of information ‘replicated’ through peoples’ actions; the ‘evolved’ mind and our capacity for verbal language and reflexive behaviour as the basis for explaining the products and outcomes of culture. A plastic ‘feedback’ dynamic is posited between bio—genetic fundamentals or analogies and differential cultural expression; between the syncretism of biogenetic—Darwinian operations and active Lamarkian principles of cultural change.

The default on to a social position is inadequate because it privileges a short time-span perspective for explaining the longer time—span processes of culture. It neglects an examination of the friction inherent to the spatial-material context within which variation is produced, and disregards an assessment of the logic of scalar discontinuity in the differential and longer-term workings of culture. The logic of cultural evolutionary theory is persistently vitiated by the supposed necessity of the humanities to create a moral perspective which inserts a reductive scalar continuum in the study of cultural evolution.