238 Wybo Houkes
willingness to employ structural similarities between organisms and artifacts and to trans-
fer additional concepts. As soon as the border patrol runs out of ways to euphemize current
or future smuggling as harmless verbal interchange or metaphor coining, the programs
will be outlawed.
Thus the separatist iron curtain image puts tight and, ultimately, uninteresting con-
straints on the viability of both evolutionary research programs: they are either nonstarters
or bound to exhaust philosophical patience quite soon. Moreover, this judgment may be
passed on the basis of conceptual analysis—and creative reformulation—alone. This con-
sequence seems unacceptable. Whether ED and EA are successful programs should be a
specifi c and (partly) empirical, not a general and a priori, matter. As philosophers have
learned the hard way, a priori and general limitations on scientifi c research typically expire
long before the programs they try to constrain. Kant’s admonition that neither chemistry
nor psychology could ever become a scientifi c discipline comes to mind (Friedman 1992:
ch. 5.III), as do neo-Kantian resistance against general relativity theory and the nagging
complaint that the social sciences lack universal laws.
On a unionist image, the prospects for EA and ED are hardly better than on a separatist
image, for unionism entails that researchers in both programs are underachievers: instead
of seeking a particular mode of coexistence, they should seek to replace the intentionalist
framework with the selectionist. This has the minimal effect of increasing the burden
resting on both programs far beyond their expected carrying capacity: as I have described,
researchers in both programs are already struggling to realize their more modest goals.
What is more, unionism might undermine EA: if the intentionalist mechanism of cultural
transmission would be replaced with natural selection, the central dichotomy between
functional and stylistic features would disappear.
The conceptual transfer in EA and ED fi ts neither the separatist nor the unionist image
presented in the introduction. The relation between the domains of organisms and artifacts
must be understood in a different way.
Let me end by describing one such way. On this open-border image, there is no general
limitation on the transfer of concepts from the domain of organisms to that of artifacts.
Instead such transfer is a decidedly pragmatic affair. Researchers may attempt to
apply elements of the framework used to describe the other domain, provided that
there is a well-determined need for such a transfer and that there are similarities
among the domains that support a nonmetaphorical transfer. Thus conceptual transfer
is more than an heuristic process; it may play a role in descriptions and explanations
in the domain of artifacts—and not just in the search for such descriptions and explana-
tions. The success of this transfer is not determined by general principles, but there are
constraints on transfer set by the specifi c project. To stay with the original metaphor,
transferring concepts and models from the domain of organisms to that of artifacts involves
neither smuggling nor an attempt at conquest, but resembles immigration for economic
reasons.