Generalized Darwinism as Modest Unification

Abstract

This paper examines the nature of Hodgson and Knudsen’s version of Generalized Darwinism, asking to what extent it has explanatory force. The paper develops two criteria for potential explanatory transfer of theories between disciplines, and argues that Generalized Darwinism does not meet these. The paper proposes that Hodgson and Knudsen’s version of Generalized Darwinism is best understood as a research program aimed at modest unificationism sensu Kitcher, that provides a heuristic perspective to guide research, but does not produce actual evolutionary explanations.

Evolution at the Origins of Life?

“…This approach has been criticized on similar grounds as Organizational Ecology: it remains unclear how the members of social populations reproduce, how they interact in ways that are similar to the interactions between members of biological populations, and how they can be said to share a common descent in the same robust way that biological populations do [32]. Moreover, Generalized Darwinism has been criticized for failing to meet two requirements for the fruitful explanatory transfer of evolutionary theory to the social realm [7]. Briefly, these requirements are: (1) sufficient similarity between that which is to be explained, i.e., phenomena in the social realm must be sufficiently similar to those in the biological realm (similarity of explanandum criterion);…”

“…If origins of life researchers are ontologically justified in using evolutionary terminology, the explananda of life's origin are sufficiently similar to those of regular evolutionary biology to merit applying terminology from the latter to the former (cf. Section 2.1, [7,28,29]). In the case of epistemic use, evolutionary terminology is justified because origins of life researchers come up with genuine evolutionary explanations, those that generate genuine knowledge and understanding of an evolutionary sort.…”

“…Given the measure of its success, the broadness of both its explanatory and disciplinary scope, and the relative simplicity of the central Darwinian logic, it is not unsurprising that there have been many attempts to extend evolutionary thinking beyond the realm of biology [6]. Evolutionary research programs have been launched in economics, literary studies, psychology, computing science, and many other disciplines [7,8]. Many of these research programs stand at a great ontological distance from the kind of organismal biology on which evolutionary theory was originally based.…”

Pluralism and Epistemic Goals: Why the Social Sciences Will (Probably) Not Be Synthesised by Evolutionary Theory

“…I will not reject an evolutionary synthesis of the social sciences based on fundamental ontological or epistemological objections against the application of evolutionary theory to the sphere of the social sciences. Hence, I will not be concerned with prominent themes in the literature, such as foundational criticism of mainstream concepts of culture in evolutionary theory (Lewens, 2012(Lewens, , 2015) and analyses of ontological dissimilarities between explananda in the biological and the social world (Reydon & Scholz, 2009;Reydon, 2021).Nor will I refer to discussions that criticise evolutionary explanations in the social sciences for their lack of explanatory power (Schatzki, 2001) or arbitrariness and reductionism (Dupré, 2001).…”

The Varieties of Darwinism: Explanation, Logic, and Worldview

“…Moreover, between the extremes of incidental inspiration and rigorous generalization lies a continuum of more moderate relations, of which metaphor is but one instance. For instance, some authors have argued that the relation between Darwinism-as-explanation and Darwinism-as-logic is one of a loosely structured research program, that at most "modestly unifies" biological evolution and other evolution in other domains (Reydon 2021). Others have argued that what is distinctively Darwinian about evolutionary approaches is that individual entities are being modeled as members of populations.…”