In 1995, I contributed a neo-Darwinian paper to a conference held at the University of Essex to mark the retirement of David Lockwood, the leading British sociologist. The paper, "Social Integration and System Integration in the Theory of Social Selection," was subsequently submitted at the organisers' request to the British Sociological Association's journal Sociology -only to earn me my first rejection from an academic journal for more than 25 years. My immediate reaction was to offer the same journal a carefully revised, unpolemical paper entitled "The Selectionist Paradigm and its Implications for Sociology." This was accepted as "sophisticated" and "challenging." My second reaction was to write a book for the general reader called The Social Animal, which was recently launched at the London School of Economics. Although the response to my talk at the LSE was more sympathetic than the one I had received at the Lockwood conference, I came away feeling that, to sociologists and others, the idea of a neo-Darwinian paradigm for sociology remains unconvincing: not because of the unsolved questions which it raises (as indeed it does), but because they simply don't see how Darwin's insight about "descent with modification" can be applied to human beings as well as animals. Darwin showed that species evolve through mutations which are genetically transmitted from parents to their offspring; but how can the notions of mutation and selection be applied to animals with minds such as ours?
The philosopher Daniel Dennett has called descent with modification the "best idea anyone ever had." This may be a little hard on Einstein, but Darwin solved a problem which goes back to Aristotle: how are we to account for qualitative change without having recourse to teleology? Darwin saw that in order to explain how the world has come to be as it is, including the evolution of social behaviour itself, we don't need to appeal to an antecedent grand design in the form of God, Progress, Destiny or Dialectic. Darwin's ideas of variation, replication and selection provide the model for a general account of evolution, in which mutations succeed or fail in spreading and perpetuating themselves as a result of the advantage which they confer on their carriers in competition with others in the same environment.
How does this apply to sociology? Consider the following three propositions. First, human beings are organisms descended from one male and one female parent from whom they inherit their genes. Second, human beings are organisms with minds who imitate and learn from one another through the transfer of ideas from one mind to another. Third, human beings are organisms with minds who interact with one another in defined social roles, conducting themselves in accordance with specific institutional rules. All three propositions are true to the point of banality. Yet what is going on at each level is a transfer of information guiding behaviour. The information transmitted to us genetically as organisms guides our instinctive behaviour. The information we acquire from one another as organisms with minds guides our cultural behaviour-the tools we make, the clothes we wear, the beliefs we hold. The information contained in the rules of the institutions to which we belong as organisms with minds interacting with one another in our various roles, guides our social behaviour-as wage earners, churchgoers, voters or footballers. This open-ended handing-on of novel instructions to successive carriers of the units of selection gives the neo-Darwinian approach its purchase at all three levels. No doubt there are many disanalogies between biological, cultural and social evolution, but the three exist on a continuum. It therefore makes sense to apply the concepts of variation, replication and selection at all three levels.
But if we are to apply neo-Darwinian theory more than metaphorically, there has to be a satisfactory answer at all three levels to the question: what is being selected for what? At the genetic level, evolution selects genes which compete with each other for the chance to increase their frequency over successive generations. At the cultural level, when instinct is supplemented by imitation and learning, the biologist Richard Dawkins has coined the term "meme" to stand for the units or bundles of information affecting behaviour which are transmitted to successive or adjacent populations. However, none of the behavioural scientists who use the term "meme" pretend that we can understand the process of cultural selection as well as we understand the process of natural selection. Memes mutate not only through random copying error, but through active and complex reinterpretation by the minds to which they are transmitted; and, strictly speaking, there are no lineages of memes as there are of genes. At the social level, the complexities are greater still. We are no longer dealing simply with imitation and learning, but with all the inducements and sanctions which enable people in positions of power to influence the ways in which other people behave.
This is not an argument, however, for saying that talk of variation, replication and selection is therefore metaphorical. New memes win out in competition with old ones every time a new fashion spreads through a subculture, a new doctrine spreads through a community of believers, or a new technique spreads through a network of professional practitioners. New practices win out in competition with old ones every time wage labour displaces slavery or serfdom, election for political office displaces appointment or inheritance, or bureaucracy displaces clientelism. In each case the explanation is in the features of the environment which favour the diffusion and perpetuation of the units of selection-the memes and/or practices as the case may be. Let me give an example from military history. The generals of 17th century Europe who first introduced infantry drill into training their previously undisciplined recruits had a clear idea of what they wished to achieve and how it would serve their interests. But that does not explain why the concept caught on at this time. To explain that, and the consequent transformation of European warfare, involves showing what competitive advantage was conferred on the armies which adopted this novel set of practices and on the states which employed these armies.
the continuing resistance to neo-Darwinian accounts of human behaviour is puzzling. Such accounts have become increasingly influential across the whole range of the behavioural sciences, from economics to linguistics, psychology and even anthropology. I can understand why sociologists who define their subject in terms of philosophical ruminations about the human condition along the lines of Sartre, Foucault or Habermas might not be interested. But sociologists concerned to explain why human communities, institutions and societies are as we find them should welcome an approach which promises to add to the stock of serious Wissenschaft-the German term which rightly ignores our Anglo-Saxon distinction between "science" and "scholarship."
Part of the problem is that to mention Darwin's name is immediately to provoke the suspicion that behaviour is therefore "all in the genes." This is doubly unfounded. First, neither evolutionary psychologists nor even behaviour geneticists claim that there are specific genes for complex behaviour traits such as a disposition to physical violence. Just what part genes play in determining why particular people behave as they do in their various environments must be empirically investigated case by case. Second, the value of Darwin's insight about "descent with modification" extends beyond his original concern with the origin of species. It extends back into the process of chemical evolution from which genes themselves have emerged, and forward into the process of the evolution of consciousness from which art, literature and science have emerged.
Some sociologists' resistance is probably a legacy of social Darwinism, with its exaggerated stress on individual competition and overtones of racism. But the point about social Darwinism is not that its ideological presuppositions have been discredited; rather, that it was bad science. Had the social Darwinists known what neo-Darwinians now know about evolution, they would not have reached the mistaken conclusions they did. First, they drew from the observation that we live in a world of competition for finite resources the mistaken conclusion that individual and groups are therefore locked into an inescapable sequence of adversarial contests-thanks to the work of Fisher, Haldane and WD Hamilton, we now know that reciprocal altruism is a predictable consequence of natural (as well as cultural) selection. Second, they drew from the observation that human beings differ genetically in physical characteristics the mistaken conclusion that people with white skin have greater mental capacities-thanks to palaeontologists and biological anthropologists we now know that our divergence from common African ancestors doesn't allow sufficient generations to have elapsed for our different environments to have imposed selective pressures which would have required our brains to differ (as our pigmentation does). Nobody disputes that there are significant individual differences in mental capacity within groups, about which behaviour geneticists as well as developmental and cognitive psychologists have interesting things to say. But the supposed Darwinian justification for late 19th century European and American imperialism is simply not there.
To be sure, competition for scarce resources does continue between individuals as well as between the communities, institutions and societies to which they belong. But such explanations cannot provide the answer to the sociological question why those societies are as they are-any more than a prima-tologist who observes how one dominant chimpanzee male displaces another is thereby enabled to understand the mechanism of natural selection underlying the behavioural strategies which the rival males are programmed to pursue. Just as in this example the real competition, so to speak, is between the genes of which the rival chimpanzees are the carriers, so in cultural selection the real competition is between the memes of which individual people are the carriers; and in social selection it is between the practices which define the roles the individual people perform in their institutional dealings with one another.
There is, however, a further unease with the neo-Darwinian approach. By directing attention away from the tactics and stratagems, hopes and fears, ambitions and desires of individual human agents to the units of competitive selection of which they are the carriers, is it not reducing them to automata controlled by instructions emanating from sources outside their control-the genes they are born with, the memes they take from other people, and the practices they have not themselves framed? What has become of our own free will? But there is no incompatibility between saying that human actions result from conscious decisions to pursue goals and saying that that capacity is part of the same continuous process of natural, cultural and social evolution. It explains as little to say of one of our intentional actions "I did it because that's what I had decided to do" as it does to say "I did it because that was my instinct." The behavioural scientist wants to know why you decided to do that rather than something else; and that question can be addressed in the same way, and answered in accordance with the same criteria, as when the stratagems and tactics of rival male chimpanzees are being studied in the Gombe rain forest.
Moreover, however different the decision-making processes of the human mind from those of the chimpanzee mind, identifying the causes of a decision and the action which follows from it cannot by itself provide an explanation of the action's consequences. And it is the consequences, not the causes, of individual human action which explain why communities, institutions and societies evolve as they do. Innovations, whether cultural or social, succeed (if they do) not because of what prompted them but because the environment into which the mutant memes or practices are introduced is favourable to them, as with infantry drilling. The discovery of whatever caused Jesus of Nazareth to formulate the memes which he preached to his followers would still leave the successful spread of Christianity unexplained, just as the origin of the practice of wage labour leaves unexplained why the institutions of capitalism have dominated the economies of some times and places, but not of others. To suppose otherwise is to commit what philosophers of science call the "Genetic Fallacy" (which, despite its name, has nothing to do with genes but everything to do with thinking that to identify the genesis of something enables you to predict its effects).
Some people dislike any talk of "mutation" because it implies that what happens in human affairs is a matter of chance. But chance, properly understood, is fundamental to the process of "descent with modification"-whether genetic, cultural or social. Nobody is suggesting that our decisions to act as we do are random in the sense that it is random whether a coin comes up heads or tails. But it is true to say that they might as well be, because the mechanism of variation, whatever it is, although necessary for evolution to be possible at all, is never sufficient to account for the course which evolution turns out to follow. No doubt it feels, to successful reformers, as if their success was directly predictable from the considerations which led to their conscious decisions to modify the existing memes or practices dominant in the community, institution or society which they wished to reform. But it wasn't. Where innovators do succeed in predicting the consequences of their innovations-as they seldom do-it is because they have identified the features of the environment which will, as it turns out, favour the carriers of the mutant memes or practices as they compete with others for influence and power. To go back again to our military example: Maurice of Nassau was right to predict that soldiers trained to march in step in close-order tactical formations, and to load and discharge their guns in a co-ordinated sequence, would be more effective in battle than their opponents. But to explain the consequent evolution of European military institutions and behaviour requires us to show what it was, in the relation between the mutant practices and their environment, which proved him right.
To analyse the history of different human communities, institutions and societies in this way is not to deny the value of conventional historical accounts. But to a sociologist, history is not just one damn thing after another, but one damn thing instead of another. There is always a sequence of events to be set out in terms of the individual actions which cause particular battles to be won, particular governments to come to power, particular technologies to be developed, particular trade routes to be opened or particular creeds to be promulgated. But there is, at the same time, a sense in which the neo-Darwinian paradigm stands the conventional wisdom on its head. To the decision makers and their biographers, it is their ideas and ambitions which are the driving force of social change; the obstacles placed in their path are the random inputs. They do not take kindly to being told that they are the random inputs into an evolutionary process which they can neither predict nor control. But the explanation of the actual changes which do or don't take place in the societies in which they perform their decision-making roles will be better advanced by the second way of looking at it rather than the first. Nobody disputes that Julius Caesar's decision to lead his troops across the Rubicon led to the fall of the Roman republic. But why did it? Other generals had marched on Rome without causing it to evolve from republic into monarchy.
I published last year, as the concluding volume of my Treatise on Social Theory, an account of Britain since the first world war. While writing the volume, I was repeatedly struck by the huge discrepancy between politicians' perceptions of their roles and the realities of the environment in which they performed-an environment of mutant memes and practices and of competition between their carriers which, time and again, drives even the most skilful and determined politicians into courses of action which neither they nor anybody else either planned or foresaw. Politicians are probably well aware that their social actions are apt to have unintended consequences. But it is much easier to see why this is so, and why their particular actions have the particular unintended consequences they have, if the story is told in terms of variation, replication and selection of practices, rather than the ambitions and frustrations of the individual political decision makers and their opponents and allies.
All advances in the sciences of human behaviour are likely to meet with scepticism-if not downright hostility-for a reason well stated by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals. All the sciences, says Nietzsche, both the natural and what he calls the "unnatural" (the self-reflexive, human sciences), "talk human beings out of their former self-respect." So they do. Like it or not, our idea of our place in the universe has been subjected to a continuous series of humbling corrections, whether from astronomy and physics, or psychology and anthropology. The theory of natural selection is no more likely to be overturned than the earth turn out to be flat. However different the mechanisms of cultural and social selection from the mechanisms of natural selection of which they are the product, their outcome is inescapable. Our understanding of them, like our understanding of the workings of the human mind (or brain), is still rudimentary by comparison with our understanding of the genetic code and the function of DNA. But it will continue to advance; and it will do so whatever the costs to our self-respect.
