Selection and Attraction in Cultural Evolution

Abstract

Suppose we set ourselves the goal of developing mechanistic and naturalistic causal explanations of cultural phenomena. (I don't believe, by the way, that causal explanations are the only ones worth having; interpretive explanations, which are standard in anthropology , are better at answering some of our questions.) A causal explanation is mechanistic when it analyses a complex causal relationship as an articulation of more elementary causal relationships. It is natu-ralistic to the extent that there is good ground to assume that these more elementary relationships could themselves be further analysed mechanistically down to some level of description at which their natural character would be wholly unproblematic. The kind of naturalism I have in mind aims at bridging gaps between the sciences. not at universal reduction. Some important generalizations are likely to be missed when causal relationships are not accounted for in terms of lower-level mechanisms. Other valuable generalizations would be lost if we paid attention to lower-level mechanisms only. If we want bridges, it is so as to be able to move both ways. Social sciences explanations are sometimes mechanistic, but they are hardly ever naturalistic (with a few exceptions in demography and in historical linguistics). They fail to be naturalistic if only