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Biology Reinvigorated

Life/Society, Nature/Culture, Evolution/History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Georges Guille-Escuret

Extract

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In fact, analogy is a legitimate form of comparison, and comparison is the only practical means we have for the understanding of things. The fault of the biological sociologists was not that they used it but that they used it wrongly. Instead of trying to control their studies of society by their knowledge of biol ogy, they tried to infer the laws of the first from the laws of the second.

Émile Durkheim, 1898

In order to establish itself as a discipline, it was not enough for sociology to disassociate itself from philosophy and psychology. The lines appearing in the above epigraph, published exactly one hundred years ago, remind us of what is often not considered in the difficulty of establishing social sciences in the world as a whole: first – and as a question of priority – disciplines had to fight the widely prevailing influence jointly held by evolutionism, “social Darwinism,” and “biological sociology” at the end of the nineteenth century. Durkheim's methodological warning thus contains something that elicits a “feeling of déjà vu” in us, with respect to some of the theoretical debates that the “scholarly community” puts forward today for the general public. Is this simply a superficial and somewhat coincidental similarity, or is it, rather, the rebirth of an idea?

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 45 , Issue 180 , December 1997 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. Émile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, trans. D.F. Pocock (Glencoe, IL, 1953), p. 1.

2. Patrick Tort, La Pensée hiérarchique et l'Évolution (Paris, 1983), p. 539.

3. Inasmuch as the expression "social Darwinism" is paradoxical, as Patrick Tort noted, in that Darwinism only becomes social when it is no longer Darwin ism, it is best to keep the quotation marks in each occurrence.

4. For example, Shirley Strum and Bruno Latour, "Redefining the Social Link: From Baboons to Humans," Social Science Information 26 (1987): 783-802.

5. Herbert Spencer, Les Bases de la Morale Évolutionniste (Paris, 1880), p. 176.

6. John B.S. Haldane, The Causes of Evolution (New York, 1932).

7. John B.S. Haldane, "Population Genetics," New Biology 18 (1955): 34-51.

8. John Maynard-Smith, "Group Selection and Kin Selection," Nature 201 (1964): 1145-1147; William D. Hamilton, "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behav ior," Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 1-52.

9. Robert L. Trivers, "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism," Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971) : 35-57.

10. John F. Eisenberg and Wilton S. Dillon (eds.), Man and Beast: Comparative Social Behavior (Washington, D.C., 1971).

11. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA, 1975).

12. Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Co evolutionary Process (Cambridge, MA, 1981).

13. Leonard Lieberman, "A Discipline Divided: Acceptance of Human Sociobio-logical Concepts in Anthropology," Current Anthropology 30 (1989): 676-682.

14. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976).

15. Joseph Soltis, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richerson, "Can Group-Functional Behaviors Evolve by Cultural Group Selection? An Empirical Test" with com ments, Current Anthropology 36 (1995): 473-494.

16. Laura Betzig (ed.), Human Nature: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1997), p. xi.

17. Pierre Thuillier, Les biologistes vont-ils prendre le pouvoir? La sociobiologie en ques tion (Bruxelles, 1981).

18. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London, 1975).

19. Obviously one thinks here of Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (London, 1977).

20. See, among recent publications, Del Thiessen, Bitter-Sweet Destiny: The Stormy Evolution of Human Behavior (New Brunswick, 1996).

21. Daniel Dreuil, "Entre science et eugénisme: le fardeau génétique," in P. Tort (ed.), Darwinisme et société (Paris, 1992), pp. 471-487.

22. Robin Fox, The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality (New Brunswick, 1989).

23. Alfred Espinas, Des sociétés animales: étude de psychologie comparée (Paris, 1924). The first edition in 1877 did not include the in-depth historical introduction since the thesis committee wanted the reference to Auguste Compte to be taken out.

24. See Michael H. Hansell, "Les nids des insectes sociaux," La Recherche 209 (1989):14-22.

25. We have certainly intended to reduce this critique to its simplest expression. Other factors include both termites and hymenopterans in close association with building ability (group effects, stigmergie). On this point, as well as on the debate between Durkheim, Tarde, and Espinas, see Georges Guille-Escuret, Le Décalage humain: le fait social dans l'évolution (Paris, 1994).

26. Randall White, "Introduction," in André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 1-21.