The Selectionist Paradigm: More Implications for Sociology

Abstract

This paper argues that despite 50 years of empirical research, the phenomenon of social contagion is still poorly understood. Social contagion research has produced an eclectic, largely confused and jumbled body of evidence that lacks any comprehensive organising principle or conceptual framework. Whilst the great majority of this empirical research has identified and confirmed existence of the social contagion phenomenon, results have been undermined because the phenomenon itself has been variously and ambiguously defined and operationalised. This has meant that the potential radical implications of social contagion research findings for an orthodox understanding of the human individual as a rational Cartesian agent, have been largely ignored. It is suggested that the emerging evolutionary paradigm of memetics may provide a novel conceptual framework for understanding and explaining the empirical phenomenon of social contagion, by understanding it as the observable action of selfish memes replicating through a population. The article concludes by proposing a memetic theory of social contagion, and ends with a call for the synthesis of the two bodies to create a comprehensive body of theoretically informed research.

DNA Dispose, but Subjects Decide. Learning and the Extended Synthesis

“…The fact that learning is independent of genes was in reality also acknowledged by Richard Dawkins ( 1976 ), reflected in what he called memetic inheritance (Marsden 1998 ; Aunger 2001 ). How well the meme concept explains the impact of culture on evolutionary novelties remains open (Rose 1998 ; Kull 2000 ; Deacon 2004 ; Distin 2005 ).…”