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It is becoming standard for sociologists to preface their books with a brief autobiography. This I have done, emphasizing belief in the potency of politics as the atmosphere of LSE in the 1940s. A strong tradition of empirical sociological enquiry has existed since the ‘invisible college’ of the seventeenth century. But sociology belongs to all human civilization, not only to Britain, which was arguably slow in promoting academic sociology.

Five themes will be elaborated in the following chapters: (1) The consequences of Darwin; (2) the division of ownership of the subject between science and literature; (3) methods in the study of society focussing on the scientific and statistical history of the sample survey; (4) the use of sociology in social policy and its characteristic capture by the Fabians and (5) the institutionalization of academic sociology at LSE before 1950.

This chapter applies some of the biological ideas discussed in earlier chapters to a critique of contemporary neo-Darwinism. Central points are the need to expand the possible modes of inheritance from the genetic to include epigenetic and cultural inheritance; the importance of considering cooperative relations as well as competitive relations between organisms; and the potential importance of external origins of selectable variation, through processes such as endosymbiosis and lateral gene transfer.

This chapter takes up a theme from earlier work, the critique of Evolutionary Psychology. The chapter focuses on one central claim of Evolutionary Psychology, that the crucial human cognitive mechanisms evolved in the Pleistocene, two million years or so prior to the appearance of human civilization. Drawing on the critiques of neo-Darwinism described in Chapter 9, it is argued that the theory is based on an obsolete view of the evolutionary process. A wider view of evolutionary processes, including cultural evolution, suggests that significant evolutionary changes are likely to have taken place in the last few millennia.

This chapter explores the scope of neo-Darwinism in relation to the history of life on earth, and asks whether its explanatory power can extend to religious belief and activity. First, it discusses the compatibility of design and evolution. It argues that Darwin's case illustrates the fusion of personal and intellectual factors in one's faith position, and raises the question of whether one's beliefs can ever reach a stasis or become altogether free of incoherence. Second, it turns to the application of evolutionary psychology or cognitive science to the phenomenon of religion. It suggests that cognitive science has an important contribution to make towards an understanding of religion.

This chapter determines the problems of the origin of speech in the general framework of the origins of form in biology. It explains the phenomenon of self-organization along with that of natural selection, both features of the mechanisms of creation of forms in the living world. Particularly, it presents a connection between the concepts of self-organization and natural selection, which will lead to a discussion of how one should construct the arguments clarifying the origin of living forms.

This chapter analyses Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, a book that explores the analogy between technical innovation and biological evolution, and whether such an analogy could be developed from a ‘metaphor’ into a ‘model’. After discussing the explanatory power of ‘evolutionary reasoning’, the chapter describes an alternative approach to the analysis of technological innovation. It then presents an evolutionary argument for the growth of knowledge and explains how it differs from neo-Darwinism, and examines rational choice theory in relation to natural selection. It also looks at six elements of Adam Smith's psychological theory of the emergence and development of science: the motivation for generating new ideas; the generation of novelty and the ex-ante selection processes which guide its adoption or rejection; the role of aesthetic criteria both in guiding conjectures and in encouraging their acceptance; Smith's argument that connecting principles which seem to work well are widely diffused; the renewal of the evolutionary process; and the evolution of the evolutionary process itself. Finally, the chapter considers the implications of uncertainty for cognition and the growth of knowledge.

Humanity now exists at the height of its technological achievements yet also at the height of environmental shifts associated with disease emergence. This threatens our ability to survive as a technological species with the potential to achieve better lives for future generations; understanding the relationship between pathogen evolution and evolution of the biosphere as a whole is one way to help in that effort.

The book’s last chapter reinterprets Kant’s distinction between a determining and a reflecting judgment in modern, cybernetic terms: a reflecting judgment is a feedback loop of the mind. It further argues that Kant’s perforce ignorance of the concept of feedback led him to place the “as if” of reflection in the human mind rather than in nature, the way modern scientists routinely do when they say, for example, that it is as if natural selection had chosen this or that biological solution to a species’s survival. More radically, this last chapter argues that the discovery of the concept of feedback has made the Critique of Teleological Judgment obsolete. The fact that living nature apparently orients itself according to goals has been explained, and explained away, by cybernetics and neo-Darwinism. But far from disqualifying the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, this leaves the realm of art alone to bear the weight of having to answer Kant’s third fundamental question, “What are we allowed to hope?”

The Introduction sketches the principal features of current social-evolutionary theory to be applied to English (and to a limited extent British) society in subsequent chapters. This theory has nothing to do with the teleological presuppositions of nineteenth-century evolutionism, or the discredited fallacies of ‘Social Darwinism’, or the reductionist claims of twentieth-century sociobiology, or present-day theories of ‘modernization’. Despite sociology’s lack of an agreed taxonomy, England’s distinctive institutions can be shown to be the outcome of an open-ended but path-dependent trajectory which turned out to preclude a revolutionary transition to a qualitatively different mode such as could be seen both in England’s past and in numerous other societies during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Moreover, this approach effectively bypasses the controversies between authors of rival political persuasions over whether any given institutional change (or its absence) is to be judged a good thing or a bad one.

Chapter 10 includes a synopsis of key points from previous chapters as well as reflections on changing explananda, notions of causation, and the importance of identifying testable theories. The ongoing delay in recognizing the introduction process as a dispositional evolutionary cause reflects the lasting influence of the shifting-gene-frequencies theory, and a lack of influence of molecular studies of evolution. Evolutionary discourse proceeds as if the major issues are defined relative to the morphology and behavior of large charismatic animals, yet evolutionary biologists themselves focus increasingly on molecules and microbes. Verbal theories of causation play an important role in determining what causes are possible and what they may explain. In contemporary debates on the status of “evolutionary theory,” the pressure to defend or reject a flexible “Synthesis” distorts history and spawns confusion over what makes a theory. Testable theories, not loosely defined traditions, are what make science distinctive.

Under the neo-Darwinian theory, selection is the potter and variation is the clay: peculiarities or regularities of variation may emerge from internal causes, but these are ultimately irrelevant, because selection governs the outcome of evolution. Chapter 6 addresses this sense of “randomness” as irrelevance or unimportance, featuring (1) an analogical-metaphysical argument in which mutation is equated with raw materials or fuel, or is said to act at the “wrong level” to be an evolutionary cause; (2) direct empirical arguments; (3) mechanistic claims, e.g., claims about the ability of the “gene pool” to maintain variation, or of selection to be creative; (4) methodological claims to the effect that selection is amenable to study, but not mutation; and (5) an explanatory claim to the effect that mutation, though perhaps influential, only affects the boring parts of evolution. Appendix D provides quotations on the theme of unimportance.

Chapter 7 maps out a broad framework for considering the problem of variation in evolution. Under the neo-Darwinian view that variation merely plays the role of supplying random infinitesimal raw materials, with no dispositional influence on the course of evolution, a substantive theory of form and its variation is not required to specify a complete theory of evolution. This view has been breaking down from the moment it was proposed, and is now seriously challenged by results from evo-devo, comparative genomics, molecular evolution, and quantitative genetics. For instance, the multivariate generalization of quantitative genetics indicates that selection cannot possibly act as an independent governing force. Replacing a theory of variation as fuel with a theory of variation as a dispositional factor will require, at minimum, an understanding of tendencies of variation (source laws), and an understanding of how those tendencies affect evolution (consequence laws).

This chapter outlines the debates over the genetic origins of human nature which form the wider context of the literature discussed in this book. It traces the rise of gene-centric neo-Darwinism in the late twentieth century and its mediation by popular science books which made claims about the causes of human behaviour which directly challenged humanistic values. It explores the ways in which novelists responded to this challenge, at a time when the arts and social sciences espoused social constructivism and were opposed to any biological account of human nature. It then considers the factors which have brought about a rapprochement between literature and biology, as genetic determinism has been supplanted by a post-genomic perspective which emphasizes the openness of the genome to environmental factors, while twenty-first century writers and philosophers increasingly represent humans and the environment as mutually constitutive.

Chapter 3 considers Ian McEwan’s engagement with neo-Darwinism in its manifestation as evolutionary psychology. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, human behaviour is driven by genetic self-interest and society is structured around competition, while our tendency to self-deception disguises our motives from ourselves and others. This bleak view of human nature, which was promoted in the 1990s by influential figures such as Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, informs the characterization and plot of McEwan’s major novels (Enduring Love, Atonement, and Saturday). It also inflects the movement known as literary Darwinism, with which McEwan was closely associated. Having charted McEwan’s tight connections with neo-Darwinism, the chapter concludes with a reading of his recent novel Nutshell (2016) as a witty subversion of the neo-Darwinian orthodoxies which shaped his earlier work

This chapter confronts the neo-Darwinian core tenet of blind variation, or random mutation, with classical and recent models of genetic assimilation. We first argue that all the mechanisms proposed so far rely on blind genetic variation fueling natural selection. Then, we examine a new hypothetical mechanism of genetic assimilation, relying on nonblind genetic variation. Yet, we show that such a model still relies on blind variation of some sort to explain adaptation. Last, we discuss the very meaning of the tenet of blind variation. We propose a formal characterization of the tenet and argue that it should not be understood solely as an empirical claim, but also as a core explanatory principle.