Despite persistent rumours to the contrary, Darwinism seems to be flourishing. One reflection of this was a three-day conference organised by the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences which was held at the LSE on 24-26 June. The theme of the meeting was what Darwinian evolutionary theory had to offer the social and human sciences. The main programme included 24 invited speakers drawn from Europe and North America and covered the full range of topics from social psychology and cognition to language, economics, philosophy of mind and medicine. A series of nine subsidiary symposia focused on mating behaviour, behavioural ecology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, culture and cultural evolution, theory of mind, language evolution and political economics. About 150 people attended the meetings, many of them from North America and continental Europe.
The principal objective of this meeting was to draw attention to the fact that Darwinian evolutionary theory had a great deal to offer other disciplines outwith its conventional home within biology. Unfortunately, much of the past debate in this respect has been clouded by a common failing by non-biologists to understand just what evolutionary theories (and, in particular, the more behaviourally relevant sub-disciplines like socio-biology) are all about. Probably the most insidious of these misunderstandings has been the assumption that evolutionary biology = genetic determinism.
Not all of these misunderstandings will have been laid to rest by this meeting, if only because at least some socio-biologists (those who now identify themselves as ‘‘evolutionary psychologists’’) do believe that much of our behaviour has a deep genetic underpinning. However, the broader sociobiological view would be that even though our evolutionary history has saddled us with certain kinds of predispositions (to prefer kin to non-kin, to pay attention to certain kinds of social cues, etc), it nonetheless remains true that an individual decides to behave in a certain way in response to the circumstances it finds itself in. The inherited predispositions are like rules of thumb that provide the individual with a set of guidelines, but its final choice of action reflects that balance of benefits between the different choices, and those benefits are largely context-dependent. The real point that evolutionary biology has to offer is to identify genetic fitness as the criterion on which these choices are judged. That has implications that may be relevant to disciplines like economics that have long recognised that individuals make choices on the basis of some kind of criteria, but have conspicuously failed to identify a criterion that actually works.
In this respect, one of the most interesting developments to emerge from the meeting concerned the uses being made of evolutionary theory within medicine. Within conventional biological medicine, for example, major improvements of understanding have been generated by applying parent-offspring conflict theory from evolutionary biology to problems associated with the maternal-fetal relationship that had hitherto been difficult to explain. Similarly, research on HIV is beginning to benefit from incorporating ideas from life history theory to explain why the virus appears to be more virulent in some populations than in others.
More intriguingly, perhaps, psychoanalysts seem to be developing a major interest in what evolutionary theory may have to say about phenomena as different as repression, depression and the concept of the self. If the psychodarwinians (as they have taken to calling themselves) are right, then Freud may be in for a renewed lease of life, this time underpinned by some solid biology.
The message of the meeting is, I think, that those disciplines that fail to take account of evolutionary biology may seriously retard their own future development. This is not to say that historians or economists must now practise biology - far from it. Rather, the point is that their theories should be informed by the evolutionary considerations of fitness maximisation that underpin Darwinian biology. How historians and economists apply these ideas within their own fields will depend on the particular characters of the disciplines in question. History and economics will always remain history and economics, but they will be based on a more robust foundation that links them directly to each other as well as to biology and psychology.
Robin Dunbar
Department of Anthropology
University College London