Divergent Histories, Divergent Views? -- A Comparison of Conceptual Perspectives among Japanese and North American Evolutionary Biologists

Andrew Yang
Liberal Arts Department, The Art Institute of Chicago

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     Last modified: February 26, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/16/2005 11:00 AM in MACK 237
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Abstract
It’s argued that historical and cultural contexts have fundamentally influenced theory development within the biological sciences, and especially so in the case of Darwinian evolutionary biology. Malthus and Adam Smith’s economic theories, and the socio-political attitudes of British cultural more broadly, are believed to have played important roles in the genesis of both Darwin’s and Alfred Wallace’s principles of natural selection. The potent social and political connotations of Darwin’s formulation are evident not only in the “Social Darwinian” readings that popularly followed, but were also manifest in the reactions his theory met in the scientific communities of other national and cultural contexts, including both Russia and Japan.

In the case of Japan, the confluence of both relative isolation of the biological community, as well as the prominence and influence of an avowedly anti-Darwinian biologist, Kenji Imanishi, delayed the wide acceptance of Darwinian evolution in the that biological community until the mid-1970’s. Because of this, the Japanese biological community’s first concerted introduction to Darwinian evolution was largely through the sociobiological perspective ascendant at that time, but apparently without any of the attendant controversy that surrounded sociobiology in the American and European communities, with their long tradition of more organismic-level approaches [4].

Given these divergent histories, current members of the biology communities in North America and Japan might be expected to hold different or varying perspectives in regards to certain concepts in evolutionary and sociobiology. To examine this possibility, I collected the responses of Japanese and North American biologists to a survey questionnaire concerning various evolutionary concepts (including levels of selection, cultural evolution, and definitions of evolutionary change). I will discuss both the differences and commonalities in Japanese and North American views revealed from this survey information, as well as the snapshot this information provides of two scientific communities in very different stages of their development.