Abstract
The chapter explains why evolutionary genetics – a mathematical body of theory developed since the 1910s – eventually got to deal with culture: the frequency dynamics of genes like “the lactase gene” in populations cannot be modeled correctly without including social transmission. The body of theory requires specific justifications, for example meticulous legitimations of describing culture in terms of traits. It is an immensely valuable scientific instrument, not only for its modeling power but also for the amount of work that has been necessary to build, maintain, and expand it. To demonstrate such patrimony, and to emphasize the importance and accumulation of statistical knowledge therein, this paper tells a brief history of evolutionary genetics, explaining also the probabilistic nature of genotypes, phenogenotypes and population phenomena. Although evolutionary genetics is actually composed by distinct and partially independent traditions, the most important mathematical object of evolutionary genetics is the Mendelian space, and evolutionary genetics is mostly the daring study of trajectories of alleles in a population that explores that space. The ‘body’ is scientific wealth that can be invested in studying every situation that happens to turn out suitable to be modeled as a Mendelian population, or as a modified Mendelian population, or as a population of continuously varying individuals with an underlying Mendelian basis. Mathematical tinkering and justification are two halves of the mutual adjustment between the body of theory and the domain of culture. Some works in the current scientific literature overstate justification, misrepresenting the relationship between body of theory and domain, and hindering interdisciplinary dialogue.
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Notes
- 1.
Connection: Note that, in almost every discipline, evolution has nothing to do with the concept of progress. Refer to the introduction of Chap. 3 for a commentary and further links. The separation of evolution and progress is discussed at length, in Sect. 13.3, with particular reference to ‘cultural evolution’.
- 2.
In recent years, a number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been found in association with the LP trait in different populations. The first to be identified, -13910*T, is found not in the LCT gene (the lactase gene) but within an intron of a neighbouring gene, MCM6. This nucleotide change affects lactase promoter activity, and the allele explains only partly the distribution of LP (its frequency map does not completely overlap that of LP).
- 3.
- 4.
Connection: see Chap. 4 for some more hints on eugenics.
- 5.
Case studies surely played a role as well, as exemplars, in the toolbox, used by scientists through the epistemological strategy of abduction. But my focus here is on mathematical generalizations rather than on case studies.
- 6.
This statement is a simplification and is exposed to several criticisms. For example, it could be argued that the Mendelian space is central to only one tradition of population genetics. For Lewontin (1980), population genetics was actually split into two fundamental “research traditions”, each of which based on a “theoretical structure” or “scheme” with deep roots in the history we have told so far. Lewontin viewed the two traditions as dating back to, respectively, Sewall Wright and Ronald A. Fisher. In the latter – a continuation of “biometrical genetics” (see Sect. 11.2.2) – everything is dealt with in terms of phenotype, while genes “get lost in the shuffle” (Lewontin 1980: 63). It was Fisher (1918) who showed compatibility – or even mathematical entailment – between the kind of continuous variation which is found in phenotypic traits and the distribution of discrete Mendelian genetic variation with a number of independent loci (Hartl and Clark 2007: 12). In this way, however, Fisher legitimated the two traditions in pursuing autonomous research strategies, each through equations that handled the continuity of variation and change in different ways. Today, one of the most used handbooks of evolutionary genetics, by Hartl and Clark (2007), avails Lewontin’s idea of the two traditions, and shows a flourishing development of the part Lewontin called Mendelian genetics (Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). Only Chap. 8 deals with “evolutionary quantitative genetics”. In this theoretical structure, the variance of a quantitative trait is partitioned into various components representing different causes of variation. Reminiscent of Galton’s work, quantitative genetics describes systematic relationships between traits, across parents and offspring or also within an organism. However, the most promising results come from merging the two theoretical traditions. For example, the response of a trait to selection is necessarily tied to genetic variation affecting the trait (ivi: 397). Therefore, while, e.g., heritability can be interpreted in purely statistical terms, with no genetic contents, “if we postulate that there are Mendelian genes underlying the phenotypes, then the genetic underpinning allows us to do more” (ivi: 403).
- 7.
Many philosophers of science have reflected on this problem. I only cite one stimulating work by Ankeny and Leonelli (2011), who talk about the changing “representational scope” of a model. The representational scope is distinct from the “representational target”, i.e. the initial domain that inspired the construction of the model. The scope can stretch in unpredictable ways as science proceeds. If we take the Mendelian space as a model in the sense of a “stable target of explanation” (Keller 2002: 115), then culture will constitute an extension of its original representational scope.
- 8.
Connection: Several Chapters and Sections of this book rely on the way of thinking developed from Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman’s formal approach, often mediated by some informal and inspirational books written by Cavalli-Sforza. See Sects. 7.2, 7.3, 12.4, 13.3, 13.5, 15.1, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 18.1, and 18.3.
- 9.
Boyd and Richerson’s gene-culture co-evolutionary theory was hailed as a welcome alternative to sociobiology. For an overview of criticisms to sociobiology, see Driscoll (2013).
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
Connection: This concept of choice is fundamental to models in economics, the “science of choice”, as explained in Chap. 12.
- 13.
In fact, many major works mostly retrace Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman’s (1981) Introduction, and pile up more and more examples from the social sciences on the same blueprint.
- 14.
I am referring here to books and papers such as Boyd and Richerson (1985), Richerson and Boyd (2005), Mesoudi (2007, 2011), and Mesoudi et al. (2004, 2006). A flourishing literature in philosophy of biology builds arguments or “dual inheritance theories” to hit forms of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that don’t take cultural transmission into sufficient account. A careful analysis is well beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, in light of the “body of theory” perspective, I just offer one possible criterion for analyzing these texts: the criterion of the proportion between justification and mathematical innovation.
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Acknowledgements
The author kindly acknowledges support from the John Templeton Foundation in the framework of the 2012/2013 project “Implementing the Extended Synthesis in Evolutionary Biology into the Sociocultural Domain” carried out at the Lisbon Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab (grant ID 36288).
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Serrelli, E. (2016). Evolutionary Genetics and Cultural Traits in a ‘Body of Theory’ Perspective. In: Panebianco, F., Serrelli, E. (eds) Understanding Cultural Traits. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_11
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