Cultural Evolution Theory – Bridging Which Gap?

Abstract

Since the 19th century, numerous approaches have been developed to determine the relationship between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and humans as cultural beings. All reductionist approaches, from Social Darwinism and its normative claims to Sociobiology and Memetics, have been subjected to considerable criticism, such as that of being subject to a naturalistic fallacy or assuming a simplifying and empirically untenable genetic or otherwise biological determinism. In more recent approaches, such as the Cultural Evolution Theory (CET), this criticism has been considered to the extent that culture is recognized as a distinct sphere with its own principles. Nevertheless, CET is also still intended to be a naturalistic approach, aspiring to bridge the gap between the natural sciences and the social sciences. In this paper I will (I) analyse what kind of naturalism underlies the CET approaches, (II) consider how this naturalistic claim relates to the thesis of unification and (III) argue that CET is not a bridge to the social sciences, but at least in some respects a social science itself. The quest for a bridge between the natural sciences and the social sciences is reasonable for the purpose of intensive cooperation, but not in the sense of an ontological or methodological naturalization.