Overqualified: generative replicators as Darwinian reproducers

When Charles Darwin was developing his ideas for On the Origin of Species, the most widely accepted estimates of Earth’s age were those of William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin). Kelvin used calculations involving thermodynamics to argue that Earth is only 20–100 million years old—an age far too brief to accommodate evolution by natural selection. Darwin referred to Thomson’s claim as one of his “sorest troubles,” for Darwin understood that the history of life on Earth ultimately relies on geology. Darwin suspected that Earth was much older than Thomson claimed, but Thomson’s enormous stature as a scientist obliged Darwin to reconcile his claims with Kelvin’s data. To accommodate Kelvin’s timeline, Darwin proposed pangenesis as an explanation of inheritance (i.e., every sperm and egg contained “gemmules thrown off from each different unit throughout the body”). Darwin’s explanation sped evolution while avoiding Lamarck’s quasi-spiritual sources of acquired traits. However, Darwin’s explanation of inheritance was wrong (see discussion in Moore et al. 2009a). The age of Earth remains a divisive topic in the modern evolution–creationism controversy. Whereas mainstream science has long acknowledged that Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, a vocal group of citizens and religious activists continue to insist that Earth is less than 10,000 years old. Although most geocentrists and flat-Earth advocates have capitulated to scientific evidence, young-Earth creationists continue to reject scientific evidence in favor of religious dictum to claim that Earth is less than 10,000 years old. These antiscience claims have been surprisingly popular with the public. For example, a Gallup Poll in early 2009 reported that “On Darwin’s [200th] Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution” (Newport 2009), and Berkman et al. (2008) noted that “16% [of biology teachers] believed that human beings were created by God in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” In another study, 12.5% of students were young-Earth creationists (Rutledge and Warden 2000), as are 10%–14% of biology majors (Moore and Cotner 2009). Answers in Genesis’ (AiG) Creation Museum, along with the $27 million in donations required to build it, attest to the appeal of young-Earth creationism. Indeed, AiG’s income for 2005 exceeded $13 million, and that of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR, another religious organization based on young-Earth creationism) exceeded $7 million. For comparison, the 2005 income of National Center for Science Education—the nation’s leading organization that defends the teaching of evolution in public schools—was

A biologist and an anthropologist use evolutionary biology to explain the causes and inform the prevention of rape. In this controversial book, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer use evolutionary biology to explain the causes of rape and to recommend new approaches to its prevention. According to Thornhill and Palmer, evolved adaptation of some sort gives rise to rape; the main evolutionary question is whether rape is an adaptation itself or a by-product of other adaptations. Regardless of the answer, Thornhill and Palmer note, rape circumvents a central feature of women's reproductive strategy: mate choice. This is a primary reason why rape is devastating to its victims, especially young women. Thornhill and Palmer address, and claim to demolish scientifically, many myths about rape bred by social science theory over the past twenty-five years. The popular contention that rapists are not motivated by sexual desire is, they argue, scientifically inaccurate. Although they argue that rape is biological, Thornhill and Palmer do not view it as inevitable. Their recommendations for rape prevention include teaching young males not to rape, punishing rape more severely, and studying the effectiveness of chemical castration. They also recommend that young women consider the biological causes of rape when making decisions about dress, appearance, and social activities. Rape could cease to exist, they argue, only in a society knowledgeable about its evolutionary causes. The book includes a useful summary of evolutionary theory and a comparison of evolutionary biology's and social science's explanations of human behavior. The authors argue for the greater explanatory power and practical usefulness of evolutionary biology. The book is sure to stir up discussion both on the specific topic of rape and on the larger issues of how we understand and influence human behavior.

The dispute between the empiricist and interpretivist conceptions of the social sciences is properly conceived not as a matter of reduction or covering laws. Features specific to the social sciences include the following. Explanations of human behavior make reference to intentional causation; social phenomena are permeated with mental components and are self-referential; social science explanations have not been as successful as those in natural science because of their concern with intentional causation, because their explanations must be identical with the propositional content of the mind of the actor, and because a social phenomenon exists only if people believe it exists. Elements of an apparatus necessary to analyze this problematic social ontology are given and include selfreferentiality, constitutive rules, collective intentionality, linguistic permeation of the facts, systematic interrelationships among social facts, and primacy of acts over objects.

The debate about explanations in social and human sciences is multifaceted. In my view the fundamental dispute concerns deep metaphysical convictions about the relations between individuals and society and how one conceives a human being, a person. The dividing line goes between those who conceive individual human beings as basically independent of society and other persons, (which seems to be implicit in the liberal political tradition), and those who rejects this view, holding that a human being is constituted by its social relations. The former view is taken for granted by thinkers in the liberal tradition, and latter view is clearly expressed by Marx and is also stated by Aristotle. These views give rise to different methodological views regarding scientific explanations; those who conceive man to be constituted by its social relations are naturally methodological collectivists, while those who think of people as independent individuals are methodological individualists. The difference concerns what is explanans and explanandum: collectivists hold that explanans are social structures and explanandum consists of individual’s actions, whereas methodological individualists have it the other way round: explanans consists of individual’s actions and explanandum consists of social structures and facts.

In this paper we examine the question of whether complexity-like explanations can be applied to the psychology of individuals, and its implications for the scope of complexity explanations of social phenomena. We start by outlining two representational-cum-computational models of the mind—a symbolic model and a networks or connectionist one—and their pros and cons. Based on this we then outline a radical, non-representational and non-computational alternative model that has been gaining ground recently, and which has significant affinities with complexity explanations in social science. Deploying neo-Kantian considerations, we then argue that due to the discursivity, or conceptual dimension of our cognitive system, the radical alternative must be incorrect insofar as humans are concerned. Indeed, human psychology must involve, at least partly, a representational understanding of the sort provided by the symbolic model. Relatedly, we show how the discursiviry of human cognition complicates our psychology and makes it difficult to account for. Finally, we briefly address the question of how the complicated nature of individual psychology, implied by human discursivity, may affect complexity explanations of social behavior.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the nature of explanations as given in both natural and social sciences. It discusses models of explanation adopted in natural and social sciences. The author also elaborates upon naturalistic and anti-naturalistic views and other types of explanations such as functional, purposive, etc in social science. The volume elaborates upon themes like bridge principle; functional explanation; purposive explanation; teleological explanation; prediction; methodological individualism; methodological collectivism; illocutionary redescription; principle of action; and dispositional explanations to understand whether the explanations given in the realm of social sciences are the same or different from the explanations that are given in the field of natural sciences. This introductory book is a must read for students and scholars of philosophy of science, logic, science and technology studies, social sciences and philosophy in general.

Critics of functional explanations in social science maintain that such explanations are illegitimate unless a mechanism is specified. Others argue that mechanisms are not necessary for causal inference and that functional explanations are a type of causal claim that raise no special difficulties for testing. I show that there is indeed a special problem that confronts testing functional explanations resulting from their connection to second-order causal claims. I explain how mechanisms can resolve this difficulty, but argue that this does not provide support for methodological individualism since it is not necessary that the mechanisms be described in terms of individual interactions.

As early as 1970, M. S. Archer argued that Bourdieu's sociology of education was the product of the particular conditions of the French educational system within which it was formulated. The same argument was subsequently advanced more generally by Richard Jenkins, who insisted that Bourdieu's sociology of culture, particularly the analysis contained in La Distinction/Distinction (Bourdieu, 1979, 1986), was an expression of the peculiarly French emphasis on taste as a basis for social differentiation. Bourdieu was himself interested in the relations between particular and universal explanation in social science, and in many of his later articles he focused specifically on the question of the transferability of his concepts, such as ‘cultural capital’. The English Preface to Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1988) is an explicit discussion of how the analysis presented in the text of French higher education should be read and adopted by English readers, while Practical Reason (Bourdieu, 1994, 1998) contained published lectures in which Bourdieu considered the applicability of La Distinction to Japanese society. The purpose of my proposed contribution is to trace the development of Bourdieu's sociology of education in the context of educational policy developments in France during his lifetime and, equally, to trace the ways in which his work has been used in the British context during the period between the first reception of his educational work in the United Kingdom in Knowledge and Control (Young, 1971) to the reception of his more polemical political interventions of the 1990s, many of which implicitly invoked earlier educational thinking. The intention is that this discussion should revive interest in the relevance of Bourdieu's work to the British situation by reference to many of the later texts that appeared after the emphasis of the British field of reception had shifted from education to cultural studies. La noblesse d'e´tat/State nobility (Bourdieu, 1989, 1996) and La mise`re du monde/The weight of the world (Bourdieu et al., 1993, 1999) have direct implications for British thinking about education that are different from the implications of the texts of the 1960s, and it is important to disrupt the tendency still to see the importance of Bourdieu's educational work primarily in relation to Les he´ritiers/The Inheritors (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964b; 1977) and La reproduction/Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970, 1977). Finally, the discussion will confront the question of transferability and ask whether the comparative conditions in Britain and France between 1960 and 2002 justify the transfer of his analyses and research methods across the cultures in the future beyond his death.

Laws and explanation in social sciences

The Problem of Explanation in Social Science: A Weberian Solution?

This chapter explores why and how — path dependence explanations offers us a useful way to analyze the role of history in social change. However for path dependence, to help us to achieve better understanding we must clearly specify it. For these reasons the emphasis in this chapter lies in differentiating and defining the many approaches all which are now confusingly called path dependence, even when each is based on a different set of assumptions about how the world works, and hence, embody different ontology and give us different ways in which to understand social change and conditions for change (Hall, 2003). In so doing this chapter is taking the challenge issued by Paul Pierson, Kathleen Thelen, John L. Campbell, and Colin Crouch to encourage such a debate (Campbell, 2004; Crouch, 2005; Pierson, 2000a; Pierson, 2000b; Thelen, 2004).

This article provides an overview of causal thinking by characterizing four approaches to causal inference. It also describes the INUS model. It specifically presents a user-friendly synopsis of philosophical and statistical musings about causation. The four approaches to causality include neo-Humean regularity, counterfactual, manipulation and mechanisms, and capacities. A counterfactual is a statement, typically in the subjunctive mood, in which a false or ‘counter to fact’ premise is followed by some assertion about what would have happened if the premise were true. Three basic questions about causality are then addressed. Moreover, the article gives a review of four approaches of what causality might be. It pays attention on a counterfactual definition, mostly amounting to a recipe that is now widely used in statistics. It ends with a discussion of the limitations of the recipe and how far it goes toward solving the epistemological and ontological problems.

Journal Article XI.—NEW BOOKS Get access Explanation in Social Science. By ROBERT BROWN. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. Pp. viii+198. 25s. PETER WINCH PETER WINCH Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume LXXIII, Issue 291, July 1964, Pages 451–455, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LXXIII.291.451 Published: 01 July 1964

Book Reviews: Communication and Social Order, Explanation in Social Science, Evangelicals in Action. An Appraisal of Their Social Work, the British Political Elite, on the Shop Floor, Coal and Conflict, the Enterprise and its Environment, Dark Strangers: A Sociological Study of the Absorption of a Recent West Indian Migrant Group in Brixton, South London, the Urban Villagers: Group and Class

On the Independence of Singular Causal Explanation in Social Science: Archaeology