Biology without Biologism: Social Theory in a Postgenomic Age

Neurosociology

The first use of the term ‘neurosociology’ goes back to the 1970s when it referred to studies of variations in the use of areas of the brain due to different cultural and ecological pressures (TenHouten, 1997). However, in the recent writings of American sociologist DD Franks (Franks, 2003, 2010; Franks and Smith, 1999), ‘neurosociology’ has taken a much broader meaning, and now indicates the attempt to understand, inform, and reformulate concepts from the sociological traditions on the basis of the results and methodologies of contemporary neuroscience. As Franks writes, introducing his recent book Neurosociology: ‘Sociologists can find various areas of creditable neuroscience that on closer analysis are compatible with their interests (…) Many areas of neuroscience inform sociological understanding and deepen our knowledge of our essential social natures’ (2010: 6).

Of all the projects tending to use findings from the life sciences more directly, neurosociology is probably the closest to the intellectual agenda of the ‘material-corporeal sociology’ mentioned above. First, neurosociology is meant as an attempt to find a neurobiological embodiment for sociological concepts, especially those coming from the pragmatist and symbolic interactionist tradition, on the grounds that ‘symbolic processes are firmly dependent on brain processes’ (Franks, 2010: 64). Second, neurosociology openly locates itself within the ‘biological turn in social theory’ (Franks and Smith, 1999); it contests the boundaries and partitions between sociological and biological phenomena, and shares the frustration toward the ambiguity of symbolic interpretations and ‘the extremes of the “linguistic turn”’ (Franks, 2003: 613). To this dissatisfaction, however, it adds a further step, the idea that the vagueness of social-constructionist explanations must find a confirmation in neuroscientific discoveries. The key theoretical assumption of neurosociology is the aspiration to ground social and cultural processes in the activities of the working brain. Though it openly refutes reductionism (‘neuronism’: Franks, 2010: 154) and recognizes the reality of mind as irreducible to that of the brain (2010: 199), neurosociology’s basic epistemology reflects the assumption that the findings from neuroscience are somehow ‘deeper’ or more ‘tangible’ and less ‘debatable’ than sociological-culturalist findings. For instance, in the case of a phenomenon like intersubjectivity, Franks, relying rather uncritically on the new burgeoning literature on mirror neurons, claims that ‘since our motor cortices are actually doing what we watch others do, we share immediate and direct intersubjective understandings free from the ambiguity of symbolic interpretation’ (2010: 90, my italics). Neuroscience is unlikely to ‘replace the linguistic formulations of Mead and Cooley’, but it is somehow better positioned than sociology, Franks believes, to reveal the very social nature of humans, the fact that ‘our brains are social to the core’ (2010: 60). Sometimes neuroscience will not contradict sociological findings, but, even in these fortunate cases, the function of neuroscience is believed to give a firmer ground to ‘airy’ sociological explanations. As Franks claims, as a consequence of brain science advancements, we can say today that ‘comprehension, understanding, and intersubjectivity have been dislodged from the airy realm of pure symbols (…) into a firmer behavioral world of real success and failures’ (2010: 102, my italics). Biological knowledge emerges from Franks’ account as something stable and solid, opposed to the vagueness and ambiguity of sociological interpretations. The epistemic function of neuroscience seems to be to place a limit on the never ending debates in cultural and sociological disciplines. Franks concludes:

… in spite of our constant interpretations of its ways, the behavioural world is not as open to debate – at least not in brain science (…) With all our constant interpretations, we live in real worlds – of real actions and real consequences. Our brains and the mirror neurons seem constituted to respect this fact. (2010: 102, my italics)

Stephen Turner: Social Theory as a Cognitive Neuroscience

The starting point of the American sociologist Stephen Turner is somehow more radical than the approach of neurosociology. Turner’s basic assumption is that there is a mismatch between new discoveries in cognitive neuroscience and a certain conceptual legacy of the sociological tradition, and that this latter has to ‘adjust’ to the ‘reality’ of cognitive neuroscience if it wants to remain scientifically credible (2002: 20). In particular, the vocabulary of sociology that Turner believes is no longer tenable is the holistic vocabulary of ‘collective intentionality’, ‘tacit norms’, and ‘shared premises’, a neo-Kantian and Durkheimian legacy that for Turner has to be dismissed today as it fits ‘badly with what we have come to understand about (…) brain processes’ (2002: 4). What can produce today ‘a genuine rebirth of social theory’ (Turner, 2007a: 371) is for Turner only a radical transformation of its core concepts in the light of the vocabulary of cognitive science, and connectionism in particular. If social theory wants to avoid ‘the path of spiritualism’ (2002: 7), Turner continues, it has to take seriously the idea that ‘any plausible mental concepts in social theory need to be realizable in terms of the real features of real brains’ (2007a: 359). In Turner’s proposal what emerges clearly is a strategy of passively importing the findings of a particular scientific research program (cognitive neuroscience), whose epistemic premises are never questioned. To social-cultural disciplines in crisis, Turner wants to administer the bitter medicine of a cognitive science considered as truer, more ‘realistic’, and in the condition of validating (or dismissing) the dubious findings of the sociological tradition. As in Franks, recent discoveries in neuroscience are quite uncritically taken to show their superiority compared to sociological explanations. The recent findings around mirror neurons for instance are believed to ‘transform empathy (…) and imitation, from vague and dubious phenomenon that can be observed and described but not explained, into something that can be explained in terms of brain processes’ (2007a: 367; my italics); mirror neurons are believed to solve ‘the problem of the social transmission of skills and tacit knowledge’ in a more straightforward and elegant way than the Bourdieusian notion of habit, for instance (see Turner, 2007b). This use of biological knowledge as an external validation for sociological concepts reaches, in Turner, the point of affirming a principle of physical realism for theoretical constructs, by which ‘a theory that matches up with known causal mechanisms [in the brain] is better than one that does not’ (2007a: 368). The use of the brain sciences in Turner is thus as an ultimate yardstick against which it is possible to measure the truth of a certain theory. Turner concludes provocatively:

… one can imagine a future in which the absence of any such correspondence, for example, between a notion of normativity, and any specifiable activity in an actual brain location, would count as a ground for doubting the cognitive causal reality and role of that concept. (2007a: 367)

Alex Mesoudi: Darwinizing the Social Sciences

With Alex Mesoudi’s proposal for a Darwinization of culture we move from neuroscience and cognitive science to the use of evolutionary methodology and findings as a ‘common theoretical framework’ (2011: 23) to reform and unify (‘synthesize’) the social sciences. In a series of articles and in a recent monograph, Mesoudi has stressed ‘the similarity between biological and cultural change’ (2011: X). Since in the study of culture the three conditions of variation-competition-inheritance are met, for Mesoudi, a Darwinian analysis of culture is entirely possible:

… culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties. If this is accepted, it follows that the same tools, methods, and approaches that are used to study biological evolution may productively be applied to the study of human culture, and furthermore, that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should broadly resemble the structure of evolutionary biology. (Mesoudi et al., 2006: 329)

In truth, Mesoudi presses things even further and proposes a second and more direct historical parallel: the social sciences, Mesoudi believes, ‘are currently in a similarly fractioned state as the biological sciences were prior to the 1930s’ and are therefore ready to become the object of a larger synthesis, a process of reformulation and unification of the single disciplines on the model of what the modern evolutionary synthesis (hereafter MS) did to the ‘fractured biological sciences’ between the 1930s and 1940s (2011: 210).

Although this is not the space to discuss thoroughly the soundness of Mesoudi’s proposal, or to go into the details of the many criticisms that the idea of modelling culture in analogy with biological evolution has historically received, a series of observations can still be proposed in this summary. First, it has to be recognized that Mesoudi’s proposal stays away from the most problematic aspects of both late 19th-century waves of evolutionary sociology and the dogmatic neo-Darwinism of sociobiology or memetics. In the first case, no naïve linear progressism or evolutionary stages are implied by Mesoudi’s account; in the second case, Mesoudi is aware of the importance of explicitly incorporating ‘non-neo-Darwinian microevolutionary processes such as blending inheritance, Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, and nonrandom variation’ in his evolutionary analysis of culture (2011: 47). In spite of these and other appreciable corrections, however, Mesoudi often falls victim to the same rash ambitions (for instance: 2011: 205), partisan claims (2011: 206), and unconvincing metaphorical apparatus of former reductionist attempts to biologize the social (the same idea of ‘synthesizing the social sciences’ in his title resonates with Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis). Exactly as in these past reductionist frameworks, Mesoudi tends to maintain a series of uncritical oppositions that polarize his narrative: between the ‘vagueness’ of concepts like ‘socialization’ or ‘social influence’ (2011: 56) on one side, and ‘fully scientific, quantitative, and rigorous’ (2011: 18) approaches drawing inspirations from the biological sciences, on the other; between the lack of achievements and slowness of what he calls nonevolutionary social sciences and the successes of biology (Mesoudi et al., 2006); between the fragmentation and plurality of paradigms in the social sciences, and the victorious unification of evolutionary theory under the aegis of the modern synthesis. Also, his treatment of alternative nonevolutionary approaches in the social sciences is often caricatural (Lewens, 2012), as when he claims that ‘mind-body dualism’ lurks behind the resistance to psychologize cultural/sociological phenomena (Mesoudi, 2011: 52). Moreover, Mesoudi never discusses his basic epistemological assumption that ‘the traditional social sciences are hindered by the separation of different methods and different subjects into different disciplines’ (2011: 208, my italics), and seems to take for granted that unification is always better than a plurality of paradigms. Finally, and more importantly, his belief that the ‘little theoretical common ground’ (2011: XIII) between the different branches of the social sciences can be cured by the advent of an evolutionary synthesis on the model of the MS in the 1940s (2011: 53) is never really problematized in his work. This over-confidence in the integrative force of MS, around which Mesoudi’s theoretical hypothesis revolves, might look to be ill timed, as we see in the final section.

Runciman’s Selectionist Sociology

Runciman’s proposal for a selectionist sociology, ‘a programme of research which starts from the premise that social evolution comes about through a process analogous to natural selection’ (1998: 169), is an obvious final candidate in this synopsis. Runciman’s ‘quest for a distinctively Darwinian sociology’ (1998: 168) arises from the remark that over the last few decades an intellectual revolution has occurred in the understanding of human behaviour as a consequence of the extension of the neo-Darwinian paradigm (or ‘new synthesis’) to the study of human affairs. This growing body of research, which ‘bears directly on sociology’s traditional concerns’ (2009b: 358), has not, however, found an intellectual referent within the sociological agenda. This is exactly the gap that Runciman aims to fill, by applying ‘the concepts and methods which have proved so successful in the explanation of the evolution of species to the explanation of the evolution of human cultures and societies’ (2009a: VII). In overt polemic against ‘the founders’ of sociology, Runciman claims that the time has come to challenge ‘the inability, or unwillingness, of 20th-century sociologists to move beyond the agenda bequeathed by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim’ (2008: 358–9). ‘Sociologists who feel threatened by the claims made by, or on behalf of, evolutionary psychologists (…) will have to refute them rather than simply bemoan their influence’, Runciman observes (2008: 361).

Methodologically, Runciman’s suggested extension of ‘the neo-Darwinian paradigm’ to social and cultural processes starts from a classification of human behaviour into three categories: biologically evoked, culturally acquired, and socially imposed behaviours. These three levels are inescapably integrated, and the analysis of social and cultural phenomena in terms of ‘heritable variation and competitive selection’ (2009a: 9) requires an understanding of this threefold structure. The selectionist sociology Runciman envisages is therefore committed to the study of the ‘simultaneous workings of natural and cultural and social selection’ (2009a: 70), not the reduction of one level onto the others. Clearly much of this strategy lies on the assumption of profound analogies between biological evolution, cultural evolution, and social evolution (between genes, memes, and practices for Runciman) that, though distinct in their workings, can be all studied in terms of the triad of variation-competition-inheritance, as we saw in Mesoudi. And, as in the case of Mesoudi, it is fair to give Runciman credit for recognizing some of the potential issues with selectionism, such as the fact that ‘not all cultural and social variation can be explained by natural selection’ (2009a: 8) and the question of dis-analogies between the three levels of selection (2009a: 52). He is also aware of some problematic assumptions of neo-Darwinism, such as its reading of the organism as merely passive to the requirements of the environment (2008: 365), and its tendency to be Panglossian in some of its conclusions about optimization (2008: 367).

However, in spite of these caveats, one can find in Runciman much of the same conceptual apparatus already seen at work in other authors here reviewed. First, especially in his publications in the late 1990s (1998: 163–4), Runciman confidently embraces several very controversial notions such as evolutionary psychology’s list of ‘metacultural constants’ (Brown), and other similarly dubious hypotheses such as the ‘language instinct’ (Pinker) and the view of the mind as a set of specialized psychological algorithms (Tooby and Comsides). Second, although his attacks against a certain holistic vocabulary in sociology are not so vitriolic as Turner’s, Runciman still proposes an epistemological model in which biological findings are conferred the authority to authenticate sociological vocabularies: he writes that collective categories such as ‘Western mind’ or ‘conscience collective’, though they don’t need ‘to be expunged’ from the vocabulary of sociology, have ‘to be validated by accurate reports of the distribution and ongoing reproduction of identifiable memes which significantly influence the course of cultural and social evolution’ (2009a: 119). Finally, the usual metaphorical apparatus of ‘firmer bases’ and ‘stable foundations’ is also found in Runciman. Once again, biological findings are said to offer sociology ‘a basis far more solid than Marx, Weber, or Durkheim could have conceived of’ (2008: 367, my italics) and neo-Darwinian theory is supposed to guarantee the social sciences the ‘theoretical grounding which they otherwise lack’ (1998:175).

Biology as a Theoretical Discipline: A Monolithic Synthesis?

All the authors reviewed here have a tendency not to question the disciplinary status of the biological knowledge that they want to import into social disciplines. This is true for Franks’ and Turner’s passive attitude with regard to neuroscience as well as for Runciman’s and Mesoudi’s taking for granted the solidity of the Modern Synthesis (MS) and neo-Darwinism. I focus my analysis here on these two latter authors in particular.

The over-confidence in the solidity of evolutionary theory as a ready-made package capable of offering the most disparate answers transpires, for instance, from Runciman when he expresses his confidence in the explanatory success of ‘neo-Darwinian’ theory, its ‘proven capacity to resolve such hitherto vexed questions as reciprocal altruism, mate choice, senescence’ (1998: 163). For Mesoudi, even more significantly, the MS not only offers the theoretical framework to reconstruct the social/cultural sciences, but also a model of integration for them (repeating what MS did to fragmented biological disciplines in the 1940s). However, even a rapid overview of the debate occurring in theoretical biology today shows a reality very distant from this vision of MS as a firm, uncontroversial understanding of evolutionary processes. It is impossible to go into more substantial detail here, but the least that can be said is that theoretical biology witnesses today an explosion of proposals and intellectual movements whose ambition goes from ‘extending’ (Pigliucci and Muller, 2010) to bringing a ‘revolutionary change’ (Gilbert and Epel, 2009; Jablonka and Lamb, 2005) into the very foundations of MS. Intellectual movements like Developmental Systems Theory (DST) (Oyama et al., 2001), Niche-Construction (Lewontin, 2001; Odling-Smee et al., 2003) and Evo-Devo (Amundson, 2005; Muller, 2007), just to name a few, are symptomatic of the very fluid status of evolutionary theory and the heated debate within it. Each of these new proposals aims to highlight certain shortcomings of the neo-Darwinian consensus: the flux of information is not only one-directional, from genes to organisms, as the MS believed (DST); the organism is not a passive object of the environment but contributes to its construction (niche-construction); development is not a trivial factor, the mere activation of a ‘genetic program’, that can therefore be sidelined when understanding evolution (Evo-Devo). It goes beyond the goals of my article to discuss more deeply these three major revisions of evolution. What is important to notice for the purpose of my analysis is that, against many of the stereotypes found in the four biologizers reviewed above, biology as a theoretical discipline is today a field of intense epistemological conflicts and disagreements, in which a strong pluralism, epistemological tensions, and lack of stability characterize its internal debate. Evolutionary theory is not ‘set in stone’ (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005), but a discipline open to revisions, challenges, and contestations in a certain measure as the social sciences are. My critique joins here what postpositivist critiques in social theory have convincingly repeated (Holmwood, 1996; Kemp, 2005): a theoretical framework for the social sciences cannot be built in advance on the basis, in this case, of an idealized view of ‘evolutionary thinking’, imagined as a prêt-a-porter conceptual scaffolding, but has to emerge from a constant dialogue with the substantive empirical research and situated current theorizations in the biosciences. And what clearly emerges from this substantive research is a more dynamic notion of biology, no longer sealed off from the influences of the social, as my second point illustrates.

Farewell to Biologism: From Biology as a ‘Firmer Basis’ to Interactant in a Chain

Moving from biology as a disciplinary field to ‘biology’ as a concept, what emerges from the contribution of each of these new movements, and Developmental Systems Theory in particular, is a demolition of one the key conceptualizations that has been so great a part in the irresistible allure of appeals to biological knowledge. I refer to the stratigraphic (or foundational) model according to which the concept of ‘biology’ is invariably associated with notions of a ‘firmer basis’, or a ‘deeper layer’ upon which social and cultural processes are ‘anchored’, and ‘guaranteed’ in their workings (or ‘limited’ in their range of variations). Nothing like this hierarchical model reveals the essence of biologism. It has been the criticism of Susan Oyama in particular (2000a, 2000b) to expose the widespread tendency to use the notion of ‘the biological’ in such a foundational way, that is as a solid bedrock that lies below cultural and social ‘appearances’. The stratigraphic model is present every time an author conveys the idea that in moving from the social to the biological, we are moving, so to speak, ‘“down” the layers (…) from effect to cause, from the provisional to the immutable, from the trivial to the profound, from the merely mental to the fundamental’ (Oyama, 2000a: 164–5). This hierarchical way of thinking is accompanied almost inevitably by a set of metaphors of solidity, stability, and logical primacy of biological processes, as it has emerged quite eloquently from the language of almost all the authors reviewed above: from neurosociology’s idea of a ‘firmer behavioral world’ revealed by neuroscience as an alternative to the ‘airy’ vocabulary of sociology (Franks, 2010: 102), to Runciman’s notion of a ‘basis far more solid’ offered by evolutionary findings (2008: 367).

My argument here is that this uncritical way of conceptualizing the biological as a stable, more fundamental, pre-existing resource, is strictly connected to parallel, increasingly untenable, views of the gene as a context-independent, primary cause of development. The bad news for this kind of foundationalist biology is that such a view of the gene squares poorly with the context-dependent view of the gene that is increasingly making its way into contemporary ‘postgenomic’ biology (Barnes and Dupré, 2008; Dupré, 2012; Griffiths and Stotz, 2007; Keller, 2000; Lewkowicz, 2011; Mameli, 2005; Moss, 2003; Oyama et al., 2001; Parry and Dupré, 2010; Robert, 2004). For this new postgenomic biology, it is meaningless to think of the biological as something given in advance of the social/environmental level. As neuroscientist Michael Meaney remarked more than 10 years ago:

There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment, and there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome (…) At no point in life is the operation of the genome independent of the context in which it functions. (2001: 51–2)

The recent explosion of interest in epigenetics is the most telling example of this postgenomic appreciation of a bi-directional interaction between ‘the biological’ and the ‘environmental’. In epigenetic terms, gene expression is determined by regulatory mechanisms that depend on social experiences and environmental factors such as maternal-offspring interaction, nutrition, and exposure to stress. Epigenetics shows how gene expression is directly affected by ‘nurture’ factors and life events, and how the link between ‘the social’ and ‘the biological’ is impossible to disentangle. Especially in the light of this, the ‘biological’ that the theorists reviewed here still fantasise about is an outmoded legacy of the old nature/nurture dichotomy. The paradox here is therefore that while the importation of biological knowledge into the human/social sciences often contributes to reinforce the foundational view of biology as what always comes first in the chain of causal factors (which is the essence of biologism), an increasing body of research within the life sciences is leaving behind all this metaphorical apparatus and making room for a more pluralistic and contingent vision of ‘the biological’. Once biology loses its mystique it becomes just another interactant, in the language of Developmental Systems Theory, that co-contributes to socio-cultural processes. A social-cum-biological exploration is made even more plausible by this postgenomic approach, but losing the allure and authoritative dimension that is often attributed to the importing of biological knowledge into the social.