Theoretical Problems:Lamarck and/or Darwin
Nobody should doubt that it is legitimate and necessary to place the
study of animal behavior and intelligence in the context of Darwin’s
theory of evolution,this “dangerous idea”that still seems to evoke fear
in so many people (Dennett 1995).But if we no longer have reason to
doubt Darwin’s idea,which is,according to its proper form,the notion
of “descent with modification,”the situation is much less certain with
respect to mechanisms,to the tempo of evolution,as well as to the rela-
tionship between macroevolution and microevolution.(These remarks
are almost certain to provoke irritation or scorn in many specialists of
evolution:numerous divergences remain between them,even if,it must
be added,these differences do not in any way threaten the stability of
the edifice.) What is of greater interest to the specialist in the social sci-
ences is that the notion of adaptation is often far from convincing,and
this makes one think,according to the formula of Gould and Lewontin,
of a type of “Panglossian paradigm”:in this regard,it suffices to recog-
nize the diversity and fragility of adaptive explanations to account for
the behavior and capacities of animals and humans,and in particular for
music and language.
But it is not here that the principal theoretical problem is presented
to specialists in the social sciences when thinking about the evolution of
human capacities and their origins.Let us place ourselves in the frame-
work of what Richard Dawkins (1983) called “universal Darwinism.”
Darwinian principles of biological evolution are valid for all evolution-
ary processes,whatever their particularities may be;they occur in a more
general and more abstract form that one could summarize in the fol-
lowing scheme:Evolution =replication +variation +selection
+isolation of populations.One should recall in this regard that the very idea of extending
Darwinism to cultural phenomena was presented by Darwin himself
who,in a significant passage from The Descent of Man,and Selection in
Relation to Sex(1874),suggested that the formation and transformation
of languages was analogous to the evolution of living species:“The
formation of different languages and of distinct species,and the proofs
that both have been developed through a gradual process,are curiously
parallel”(p.106).But it is clear that one cannot simply transpose the
mechanisms of biological evolution to the evolution of culture:that
is the error that was committed by those who were too quick to use
Darwinism in the service of their own ideological and political agendas.166 Jean Molino