This won’t be a comprehensive review of everything I learned or was exposed to as I have a final in 7 hours, but to summarise a few key points:
– There seems to be a lot of unnecessary conflict caused by hyperpolarisation of ideas and schools of thought. A specific example is the adaptation vs. spandrel debate concerning the evolution of language itself, which for a system so huge and complex is simply stupid. Some argue language as a whole, and all its features, are the result of adaptation, whereas other argue the whole thing is a spandrel (byproduct). Such absurdities mercilessly plague nearly all academic disciplines, and I find the all-or-nothing style arguments are extremely counterproductive and may be partly the reason academia is rather slow at the whole progress thing.
– I previously suspected that a lot of noise is caused in fields of applied evolutionary theory by the misundrestanding of its very fundamentals. Suspicions were confirmed. Contrary to its appearance (as presented to the public anyway), evolutionary theory is very complex and filled with subtleties. It takes many hours of training and neutralising polarised impressions (see above) to really begin to get a grip on the subject, and many scholars seem to get too carried away with idle hypothesising to actually check the facts. Converesely, their critics are too immersed in the age-old dogmas of their fields to give appropriate consideration to the new ideas. As a result, we have theoretical scholars who basically make stuff up regardless of actual data, and ‘experimental’ (data-oriented) scholars who generate heaps of information without bothering to analyse it in a new way. Again, such problems plague most fields (both science and humanities), but seem to affect young fields the worst. Perhaps with maturity a field tends to find more middle ground. That doesn’t mean one is excused with ignoring data or ignoring hypotheses on a personal level — an effective researcher (or anyone, really) must strive to both think creatively and stay in touch with reality.
– The field of language evolution is a mess. While we were taught in class as if Universal Grammar and whatever the pet theory of the prof is are under little dispute, the reality turns out to be quite different. Being a foreigner to the field, I felt quite overwhelmed by the arguments, as I don’t have enough background to know who and what to trust. As evolution is a fairly high level explanation, it relies on a reasonable understanding of quite a few principles of the field it’s being applied to. That is, if the field is poorly charactarised, the evolutionary analysis of it would be akin to 19th century biological evolution, where the general idea is sort of there but the principles completely unknown. Evolutionary biology became a “proper” (“hard”, or in Kuhn’s sense, closer to “Normal”) science roughly around Modern Synthesis (arguably), when the main mechanism of heredity (genetics) became better understood. Likewise, in order for evolutionary linguistics to become an undisputably respected field, the mechanisms of language transmission, as well as the neurological underpinnings of language itself (like biochem for biology), must be better understood. Neurobiology is also quite murky at the moment, but there does seem to be encouraging progress in that field; perhaps someday it will be sufficient for more rigorous models of language transmission and change.
That said, the sociological aspect of things is also quite important, and greater effort must be done to reconcile sociological theories with lower level explanations. The problem with higher level theories is that the further they are from more easily characterised ‘laws’ of nature, the easier it is to spew out hypotheses that seem plausible. This sometimes escalates to the point where it becomes taboo in a field to even consider one theory as being substantially inferior to another based on logical and evidential explanations, and instead become evaluated based on social appeal. I won’t mention any names here, but the disciplines are probably quite obvious 😉
– Cultural evolution and memetics: We don’t know what culture is. We can’t agree on its definition. That is a problem. That said, we should start focusing on smaller elements of culture first, and fiddle with more specific things first before making loud sweeping statements about everything. Cultural inheritance may well be an amalgamation of several disparate systems (that still interact; like genomic and cellular inheritance), or perhaps it all does nicely fit into one paradigm. Currently, more papers seem to focus on trying to sketch out the overall theory in the dense fog, and very few work on specific datasets — although that is changing. For example, phylogenetic techniques are becoming employed in some areas of anthropology (see Mace & Holden 2005 TrEE), and there’s great potential in the fascinating anthropological data currently gathering dust in obscure ethnographies and neglected records. Likewise, sociologists also have data to offer, and it has been long noted that even anthropologists and sociologists don’t talk to each other. That is, cultural evolution is a mess, and will require genuine cooperation between the warring tribes of academia, but there is much potential and hope.