Evolutionary explanation in the social sciences: An emerging paradigm

by Philippe van Parijs

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Otto Lehto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Van Parijs is best known as the "Universal Basic Income" philosopher due to his Real Freedom for All. However, he has also worked across numerous other areas, such as linguistic justice and, as this book attests, sociobiology. Van Parijs argues that purely Darwinian sociobiology, even the more plausible type based on group selection rather than gene selection, has only a marginal role to play in the social sciences. Culture is not reducible to biology. Nonetheless, he believes that the same social sciences can benefit greatly from various forms of functional and "reinforcement learning" based explanations (what he calls "R-evolutionary" explanations). (I would argue that the latter type explanations are Darwinian in an extended sense, although Van Parijs would want to resist such a description.)

Although written in 1980, this book is still very relevant today, perhaps more than ever. Despite the sudden downfall of "sociobiology" as an area of study (more for ideological than scientific reasons, unfortunately), evolutionary explanations in the social sciences are useful and perhaps unavoidable. There are two main reasons for this: a) biology and culture (nature and nurture) are deeply interconnected (as exemplified by the concept of "gene-culture coevolution"), and b) the sociocultural domain of human action, networks, populations, and artefacts is amenable to its own set of evolutionary explanations that are partially independent of our biological origins. Although I disagree with Van Parijs about the relevance of "national selection" (what he calls "NS-evolutionary") explanations for the social sciences, I completely agree with him about the utility of reinforcement ("R-evolutionary") explanations. He illustrates R-evolutionary processes through examples from linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and economics (both neoclassical and Marxist). His analysis is compelling. He uses graphs to illustrate "adaptive landscapes", but not to the point of distraction. His prose is lucid albeit rather technical and difficult. He is incredibly fair-minded about alternative theories and careful to address potential objections. His analytical distinctions are first rate, i.e., conceptually sound, rigorous, and very helpful for pedagogical purposes.

Interestingly, the book came out around the same time as Alex Rosenberg's Sociobiology and the Preemption of Social Science"Sociobiology and the Preemption of Social Science" (1980) and Peter Singer's The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (1981). Van Parijs matches those classics due to his unique focus and analytical rigour. A lot has happened in the social sciences since the 1980s, so most people should start by reading more recent works, such as Geoffrey Hodgson's Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution and Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Nonetheless, I was surprised at how timely and relevant the book still feels in 2024.

Overall, Van Parijs's book is an extremely analytically structured exposition of some methodological and philosophical debates in the social sciences. It is not exactly a page turner, but it is also quite economical in its language, and the whole book can be read in a few days. At the same time, it is dense and technical enough to be suitable for an advanced undergraduate or graduate level student as well as a professional researcher, although probably not to a complete novice or layman. Minor substantive disagreements aside (and these are mostly terminological), I enjoyed it a lot.