Posted on October 8, 2010 - by David
Diseases of the Will: Schizophrenia and MDI as One Illness
I am working directly from the unpublished text of Liah Greenfeld’s forthcoming book, Mind, Madness, and Modernity: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience. All the original ideas, and all interpretations and analysis of primary and secondary source materials used to support the ideas are attributable to Liah Greenfeld. Read the introduction to the exposition here.
part 1 – Doing Away With Dualism: A Solution to the Mind/Body Problem
part 2 – A Symbolic Reality: The Emergence of Culture and the Mind
part 3 – Madness: A Modern Phenomenon
part 4 – Schizophrenia and Manic-depressive Illness: What do we Know?
In this last installment, we consider how Greenfeld’s theory of the mind makes it possible to see schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness (that is, major depression and bipolar disorder), which are usually considered distinct disorders, as diseases of the will, existing on a continuum of complexity of the will-impairment experienced.
Culture – the symbolic transmission of human ways of life- is an emergent phenomenon, a new reality with its own rules, that nonetheless operates within the boundary conditions of life. This symbolic reality is only alive, (the process can only occur), in individual brains, hence the understanding of the mind as “culture in the brain,” or “individualized culture.” As described in part 2, three important “structures” of the mind – (patterned and systematic symbolic processes which must be supported by corresponding patterned and systematic processes in the brain) – are identity, will, and the thinking self.
Identity - the relationally constituted self – is always a reflection of a particular cultural environment. Greenfeld hypothesizes that the lack of direction given by modern culture makes the once relatively simple process of identity formation much more complicated. A well formed identity is able to subjectively rank the choices present at any moment, giving the will, (or acting self), a basis for decision-making. It follows then that problems with identity formation lead to problems with the will. Malformation of identity and impairment of the will necessarily affect the functioning of the thinking self (the “I of self-consciousness”) – the part of the mind which is explicitly symbolic in the sense that it operates with formal symbols – above all, language. The thinking self may become fixed on questions of identity; it may have to stand in for the will, when a person has to talk him/herself into acting in situations which normally wouldn’t require self-conscious reflection (e.g going to the bathroom, eating, getting out of bed); or in the most severe cases, the thinking self may become completely disconnected from individualized culture, in which case all the cultural resources of the mind range free, without direction from identity and will.
The experiences of those who suffer from mental illness begin to make sense within this framework. In major depression, the will is impaired in its motivating function – the ability to force oneself to act or think as one would like to, or as would seem appropriate, is severely lessened. The mind at this stage remains individualized and one has a definite, though distorted and painful, sense of self. The thinking self becomes negatively obsessed with identity, and an incredible dialogue of self-loathing thoughts takes hold. It is insufferable to be oneself, and death naturally suggests itself as the only possibility of escape. Though tragically, as we all know, many depressed people do take their lives, for many even the will to take this action is not present. In bipolar disorder, the impairment of the motivating function of the will in depression mixes with the impairment of its restraining capacity in mania. One can neither move oneself in the desired direction nor restrain one’s thoughts and actions from running in every direction. The negative self-obsession of depression (which can still be justifiably considered delusional) alternates with (the often more noticeable to the outside observer) grandiose and exalted self-image and beliefs. Mania can either cycle back to depression or, through delusional tension, develop into acute psychosis.
The most characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia – hallucinations and elaborate delusions – are usually preceded by a prodrome which bears significant resemblance to certain aspects of depression and mania. This is often a period of social withdrawal, when the experience of the outside world seems to move from a sense of unreality to a sense of the profound yet ambiguous meaningfulness of all things. In healthy minds, identity provides a relatively stable image of the cultural world and the individual’s place in it, and thus the will directs thought and action towards relevant goals. Naturally, at each moment much of the environment is overlooked so that attention can be focused where it should be. In the prodrome, however, the thinking self becomes fixated on mundane aspects of reality, and things in the environment which are usually taken for granted become alternately senseless or imbued with special significance. This experience of the world as incomprehensible and inconsistent suggests a serious problem with identity. The will, (which in healthy cases is a largely unconscious process directed by identity), gets put on the shelf, so to speak, and the thinking self takes on the task of trying to piece together this unreal or hyperreal outside world.
The prodrome is usually only identified after the fact, since it is the appearance of hallucinations and delusions which allows the illness to be diagnosed as schizophrenia. Delusions, (often also present in patients diagnosed with bipolar), are the best known feature of schizophrenia. We can understand delusion as the inability to separate between subjective and objective realities, or put another way, the inability to distinguish between the cultural process on the individual level (the mind) and culture on the collective level. Thus internally-generated experiences are mistakenly thought to have originated outside. The elaborate delusions described by schizophrenic patients can be seen as a kind of rationalization of the experience of acute psychosis. It is important to distinguish between delusional accounts of the acutely psychotic phase, given after the fact in moments of relative self-possession, and the experience itself. In the midst of acute psychosis, a person is almost always incommunicative. Descriptions of this stage often mention the loss of the sense of self, as well as the sense of being watched by an external observer. The mental process, no longer individualized, is beyond willed control. Schneider’s first-rank symptoms, such as the belief that thoughts are extracted or implanted and that physical sensations and actions are controlled by an external force, clearly point to the experienced loss of will which runs underneath so many schizophrenic delusions. The sense of an alien presence is explained by the continued processing of the thinking self even after identity and will have (if only temporarily) disintegrated. Lacking this individualized direction, the “I of self-consciousness” becomes the “eye of unwilled self-consciousness,” – the defenseless sufferer necessarily experiences this free-ranging cultural process as foreign, and quite possibly terrifying, because it is beyond his control.
The formal abnormalities of thought which were so important to Eugen Bleuler’s diagnosis of schizophrenia also fit into the cultural framework. Schizophrenics are often unable to privilege conventional, socially-accepted associations in thought. Most of the time in our modern societies, normal associations follow the rules of logic, (in the strict sense of Aristotelian logic based on the principle of no contradiction). (However, it must be noted that logic is an historical, thus cultural phenomenon, so the inability to think logically should not be taken as evidence of brain malfunction). Of course, depending on the context, some other logic may be culturally appropriate, and arbitrating between contextual logics is one of the primary ways that the will directs thought. In schizophrenia, though, with the will impaired, thought is unanchored to any of these logics, and seems to jump from one to another at random. This becomes most evident in the use of language, which seems to speak itself, flowing without direction and often tied together by the sonic qualities of words or connections in meaning which would usually be overlooked as irrelevant. While the use of language will necessarily depend on the particular cultural resources present in the individual’s mind, it is impersonal in the sense that it draws it life from the associations inherent in language itself, rather than associations pertinent to individual identity or the objective cultural context.
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Not only does Greenfeld’s continuum model better account for the huge overlap between the illnesses as currently defined, it also allows us to pay closer attention to movement along this continuum throughout the course of an individual’s illness. While anomie is presumed to be the initial cause of mental illness early in life through interference with identity formation, the various swings on the spectrum may become more comprehensible when we consider what is happening to the individual at the time when the change in symptoms occurs. It is possible that specifically anomic situations may lead to shifts in the already existing illness. (These considerations are explored in Greenfeld’s analyses of the well-publicized cases of John Nash, ( Nobel prize winner in economics), and Kay Redfield Jamison, co-author of the authoritative book on manic-depressive illness.)
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The focus on the symbolic, mental processes at work in these “diseases of the will” should not be misunderstood as in any way taking away from the biological reality of major mental illness. Just as the activity of healthy minds corresponds to certain brain activity, so the abnormal processes of a sick mind would be expected to correspond to atypical patterns of brain function. Neither does the hypothesis that mental illness has a cultural rather than biological cause ignore potential genetic conditions that might make certain individuals more vulnerable than others. In fact, it is possible that mechanisms of interaction between culture and genes may become known with continued research in epigenetics – the study of changes in gene expression not caused by changes to the underlying DNA sequence. Some have already hypothesized that gene-environment interaction may lead to epigenetic changes that are central to the expression of mental illness. Of course, unless epigenetic research is specifically designed to take the symbolic nature of the environment into account, it will probably do little to help us to better understand mental disease and the mental process in general.
Summary/Commentary
Part 1 of the exposition looks at the the mind/body problem which has stood at the center of Western Philosophy for over 2000 years, and considers Greenfeld’s proposed resolution – a 3 layer view of reality (matter, life, and culture/mind) in which the top 2 are emergent phenomenon. Greenfeld credits Charles Darwin with making it possible to view the world in terms of emergent phenomenon, which in turn makes possible her theory of culture and the mind which can put the mind/body question to rest. At the same time, she exposes the historical roots of the dogmatic bias of science (as it is normally practiced) towards materialism, and dismisses the notion that science has (or can) in any way empirically prove this position, thereby maintaining that there is no inherent conflict between faith and rigorous empirical study.
In part 2, the proposed solution to the dualist problem is developed – culture is a symbolic process emergent from biological phenomena and operating within the boundary conditions of life, yet fundamentally autonomous and governed by different set of rules. As life organizes the matter out of which it is composed into unlikely patterns, so the symbolic process of culture organizes the brain, (which at all times both supports and provides the boundary conditions for the process) to suit its own needs. Greenfeld logically deduces that the point of emergence for culture and the mind must have been the moment vocal signs were first intentionally articulated, and became symbols. The internalization of this intention creates the mental structure of the will. Yes, this means that in a single moment, culture, the mind, and “free will” as we know it appear together, forever separating homo sapiens from all other animal species and making humanity a reality of its own kind. This view of culture, as a symbolic process which not only structures social life but individual minds, has radical implications for the many disciplines which study the various aspects of humanity. This view also demands the attention of neuroscience, which will remain purely descriptive and not gain any ground in the attempt to understand and explain “consciousness” until it takes into account the symbolic reality – by far the most important aspect of the human environment.
Part 3 reiterates the ideas about nationalism developed in Greenfeld’s first two book and takes things a step further. She identifies nationalism, a fundamentally secular consciousness based on the principles of popular sovereignty and egalitarianism, as the defining element of modernity, responsible for massive changes in the nature of human experience. More specifically here, she claims that love, ambition, and madness as we know them today emerged out of this new consciousness in 16th century England and spread from there to other societies that adopted and adapted the nationalist culture.
Part 4 challenges the current psychiatric dogma that manic-depressive illness and schizophrenia are distinct illnesses with biological causes. The need to rethink this distinction is evidenced by the high degree of overlap in symptoms between two conditions and the failure to find consistent functional or structural brain abnormalities which would allow for accurate differential diagnosis. Not only have genetic researchers been unable to find individual genes that cause schizophrenia or mdi, their best work suggests a shared vulnerability to both illnesses. Epidemiological data seems to show that mental illness occurs at greater rates in modern nations with Western-derived culture, and studies within these nations suggest that the upper classes (i.e those individuals who fully experience the openness of society and have the greatest number of choices) are particularly affected. Both of these findings are consistent with Greenfeld’s hypothesis that anomie causes mental illness. Nevertheless, this data is consistently ignored or rejected as flawed, since it flies in the face of the currently accepted notion of mental illness as biologically caused and uniformly spread across cultures and throughout history. Likewise, the fact that no genetic cause of mdi or schizophrenia has been found has done little to dhake the faith that such a cause will one day be found. Unfortunately, this systemic materialist bias can only continue to impede progress in the understanding of these fatal conditions.
The theoretical view of mental illness as ultimately stemming from problems with the formation of identity is a new one, and thus it does not come packaged with some ingenious cure. However, the clear implication is that something must be done to help individuals in anomic modern societies to create well formed identities. Since this process begins very early in childhood, the intervention must begin then as well. Educating children about the multitude of choices they will face in their extremely open environment, and alerting them to the presence of the many competing and often contradictory cultural voices vying for their attention would become priorities. We should also be cautious (as the recent work of people like Ethan Watters suggests) of the potential side effects of exporting our culture to other societies.
While this exposition is in some sense finished, there is much more to say, and I will continue exploring these ideas and comparing them with other perspectives in my future posts. I realize this work is controversial, and can be difficult to take in all at once. Please, if any part (of the whole) of this seems unclear, unsupported, or simply outrageous, ask a question or give your critique. I’m eager to hear what others have to say.
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October 18, 2010
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Brian said:
Hi David,
I heard you on the Sociology Improv podcast and just subscribed to your blog. This is the first post I have read, and you have my interest!
I study psychophysiology in school and other social sciences on the side, so the mind-body problem fascinates me and this is the part I want to ask for clarification on. You mention three mental structures: will, identity and thinking self. You also define them as different aspects of self. At first glance, this theory reminds me of Freud’s tripartite self: ego, id, and superego. Can you address the differences between Freud and Greenfeld?
I am also curious whether the main (materialist) critique of Freud’s theory will apply here. That is, lots of social scientists reject Freud because operationalizing a concept like the “superego” is problematic. I wonder if they would feel differently about Greenfeld’s “will”.
Kudos for tackling a content rich subject!
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October 19, 2010
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David said:
Thanks for your interest Brian.
First, I would suggest if you haven’t already to check out parts 1 and 2 of the exposition, especially the second, which describes these mental processes in more detail.
The idea of these three mental structures, ( ‘structures’ is basically a metaphor, they are really interconnected processes) is built upon the view of culture – (the symbolic transmission of human ways of life) – as an emergent phenomenon. Since the moment that culture emerged (however long ago that was), it has been the encounter with this symbolic reality that has called each individual human mind into existence. While these mental processes happen in the brain, they are not produced by the brain. In other words, without contact with a human (which is to say cultural) environment, our brains will not create “minds.” We cannot be, act, or think as we do without contact with the symbolic process, which imposes such unlikely patterns on our species.
Greenfeld describes Identity as a cognitive map of the symbolic environment, comparing it to the map of the physical environment created in the memory of animals. Clearly such a mental record of the environment is necessary for adaptation – perhaps this is accomplished human brains by something like the place cells that aid in the construction of the cognitive map of the physical environment for other animals.
While having an identity is a logical implication of the symbolic nature of the human environment, the “content” of one’s identity is context-dependent – it cannot be separated from the collective cultural process of the particular place and time in which the individual lives. While the general mental structures/processes (Identity, will, and thinking self) are universal in the sense that they are functions of culture, the existence of a wide variety of cultural environments means that the “content” of identity has varied greatly throughout history and across distances, leading necessarily to differences in will and thinking self. Even within one society, no individual will encounter the almost infinitely complex symbolic process in exactly the same way as any other – there are no identical identities.
I think this already introduces a huge difference between Greenfeld and Freud. It is not a set of universal, instinctual drives which form the basis of the self, but a dynamic, historical, symbolic process we call culture. This is not to say however that the biological drives and emotional capacities that we share with other animals are unimportant. Greenfeld hypothesizes that symbolic stimuli delivered with a particularly strong emotional charge will likely be especially important in the process of identity formation during childhood. So while identity formation is dependent on our biological capacity to experience basic animal emotions like pleasure, pain, and anxiety, history shows us a whole range of (often contradictory) ways in which culture interacts with these emotions to produce new complex human emotions, determining to a large extent the possibilities for our existential experiences.
You mentioned the materialist critique of Freud and wondered about the difficulty of operationalizing a concept like Greenfeld’s “will.” In fact, considering the mind as “culture in the brain” – a process taking place in, and therefore dependent on, the brain, but governed by its own laws, (the laws of symbolic reality) –may begin to illuminate the immense amount of neurological data we have gathered. One of Greenfeld’s students is already dedicated to this kind of work, combining neuroscience and Greenfeld’s theories to investigate the correspondence between the symbolic mental processes and the functioning of the brain. The three “structures” of the mind as described so far are logically deduced from what we can observe empirically about the human environment and learn by comparison with animals. Greenfeld seeks to be scientific (that is, empirical and logical) in this project, so hopefully what is discovered through cooperation with neuroscience will allow us to develop a more precise theory of mind.
I hope this at least begins to answer your question, but if not, or if it raises other questions, please, ask away.
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November 12, 2010
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Chris said:
I am a little unsure of why you reduce what you call the “psychical approach” to Freud (in your first entry in this series)?
To clarify: I am interpreting “psychical approach” in the broad sense, i.e., simply as a non-physical approach to examining the mind – examining the mind as a non-physical entity.
My issue is that you suggest the “biological approach” to the mind triumphed as a matter of course. Yet this is not historically true, even up to the present day.
Firstly, Freudian psychology was not the dominant methodology for 50 years. It essentially died as a scientific discipline with when falsification emerged as a philosophy of science. It was replaced with behaviourism (although behaviourism in psychology was established much earlier).
Methodological behaviourism simply suggested the mind could not be empirically studied but that components of the mind (i.e., “psychologically real” – observable strategies) could be, while radical behaviourism denied a causative role of the mind in behaviour and reduced behaviour to stimulus-response (philosophical behaviourism denied the mind altogether, see Gilbert Ryle).
Similarly the dominant approach in psychology at the moment is Cognitivism. This is the idea that the mind is defined by its computational state.
Note that this approach is, in practice, independent of the mind-body problem, it is not contigent on the mind being either physical, or non-physical. (Although it draws on the idea of functionalism, which is generally physicalist).
It is odd you conclude “At the same time, she exposes the historical roots of the dogmatic bias of science (as it is normally practiced) towards materialism, and dismisses the notion that science has (or can) in any way empirically prove this position, thereby maintaining that there is no inherent conflict between faith and rigorous empirical study.” In light of the above. Further, it seems disingenuous to say science cannot prove materialism. If you follow the philosophy of science of falsification, (as basically all practicing scientists do) then science can not definitively prove any statement, only provide varying degrees of support for it.
I was also wondering what, if any, distinction Greenfield draws between her view regarding culture as a symbolic process and the concepts of say the “Sign” in semiotics or the meme in memetics (e.g., Susan Blackmore)?
Thanks for your stimulating series.
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November 14, 2010
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David said:
Your first set of questions/comments refer to the following paragraph:
The dominance of the materialist position can be seen clearly in the history of psychiatry. While one approach aimed at addressing the “psychical,” (Freudian psychoanalysis), was extremely influential for about a 50 year span during the 20th century, the biological approach was destined to prevail. Psychiatry is, after all, a medical specialization, and medicine, with the body as its subject, is a decidedly scientific endeavor. After the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the prestige of biology was solidified. To question the biological paradigm was to effectively exclude oneself from the medical field.
I do not reduce the “psychical” to Freud, (I only say that he was historically and culturally of particular importance), nor do I claim that “Freudian psychology” was the “dominant methodology for 50 years.” I am writing here specifically about psychiatry, not psychology – while the two have clearly influenced and informed one another, they are not one and the same thing, and therefore one would not expect their histories to be identical. What your point may demonstrate is that Freudian theory lost its currency within psychology before psychoanalysis lost its place of privilege within psychiatry.
Perhaps my choice of the phrase “the biological approach was destined to prevail” is confusing. I am not saying that this happened “as a matter of course.” The point which Greenfeld makes in detail and which I attempt to summarize is that the historical forces at work gave the biological paradigm particular authority.
As far as cognitivism, the following critique comes from an article called ‘Postmodernity and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder’ by Patrick J. Bracken:
Many cognitivists insist that their understanding of the mind involves a rejection of Descartes’ ontological dualism. Within the cognitivist framework the res cogitans is no longer an immaterial or spiritual entity but becomes something akin to computer software. It is understood to be an internal world of rule-governed processes. These processes operate according to a causal logic which can be investigated scientifically. In a Cartesian idiom, mind is said to manifest the property of ‘extension’, it can be measured. By asserting the computational nature of mind and by using the computer analogy cognitivists feel confident that they have overcome the major difficulties of Cartesianism. However, while rejecting Descartes’ ontological dualism, cognitivism continues to endorse his epistemological separation of inner mind from outside world.
For my part, I don’t see how cognitivism is doing anything other than asserting that certain (universal) “computational” processes occur in the brain – that they are biologically given. Yet it seems implied that the computational nature itself can be separated from what is being computed. The “hardware” (the internal biologically given computational processes) encounters the “software” (input representations from the external world) and then goes to work. In distinction, Greenfeld claims that:
… culture is a symbolic and a mental process. The fact that it is a mental process means that it occurs by means of the mechanisms of the brain. The fact that it is a symbolic process means that its logic cannot be reduced to the logic of the brain mechanisms, that it is an emergent phenomenon and a reality sui generis. In other words: the neural processes by means of which the cultural process occurs serve only as boundary conditions outside of which it cannot occur, but are powerless to shape the nature and direction of the cultural process. In contrast, culture itself consistently directs the brain, by means of which it occurs, forcing brain mechanisms into patterns of organization and operation which (though, obviously, not impossible) are most improbably given all that we may know of the biological functioning of the brain. (Nationalism and the Mind, 213)
To posit that, for instance, computational processes are ruled by logic or certain emotional drives, is to forget that logic is an historical and cultural development, and ignore the fact that many (if not most) human emotions are not universal, but like logic, are historical and cultural phenomena.
Greenfeld’s theory of the mind does identify certain mental structures/processes (they are structures only by analogy), but these are both a function of the interaction between the human brain and the symbolic environment, and in every individual case, a reflection of a specific cultural context. What this calls for then, is cooperation between neuroscience and the various disciplines which study culture.
You write:
…it seems disingenuous to say science cannot prove materialism. If you follow the philosophy of science of falsification, (as basically all practicing scientists do) then science can not definitively prove any statement, only provide varying degrees of support for it.
This is precisely what Greenfeld is saying – there is nothing disingenuous about it. I wrote:
The problem is, science is not supposed to be a set of beliefs but a method, that method being logical formulation of hypotheses, followed by attempts to refute them with the help of empirical evidence. Science is therefore, as a matter of principle, (though obviously not always as a matter of practice), skeptical of belief. Science is especially skeptical about the immaterial, because of the close association between the immaterial (or the spiritual, ideal, etc., call it what you will), and religion, since religion is always a matter of belief. Unfortunately, science has transformed this skepticism into a dogma – that there is nothing more to empirical reality than the material.
Behaviorism is a good example of what this materialist tendency leads to – only what we can gather from objectively observed behavior is treated as valid empirical evidence. And yet Greenfeld’s whole point is that the only thing of which we can be certain – that which we know empirically – is the existence of our own subjective consciousness. While I trust the neuroscientists who tell me there are neurons in my brain firing as a write these sentences, and I have good reason to believe that without them doing whatever it is exactly that they do, I wouldn’t be able to write these sentences, what I am actually aware of is the , symbolic process of trying out words, keeping some, and discarding some in favor of others as I try to make my point. This is not to say that through introspection we can gain objective knowledge of everything that is happening in our brains, only that introspection does give us access to something real, and that there is no reason that this ‘something’ cannot be subjected to scientific study.
As for your last question, (“…what, if any, distinction Greenfield draws between her view regarding culture as a symbolic process and the concepts of say the “Sign” in semiotics or the meme in memetics (e.g., Susan Blackmore)?”)……….
I wrote in the second post:
Unlike signs, whose meanings are fully contained in their referents in the environment, symbols are arbitrary, given their meaning from the context in which they appear. While the number of signs was essentially limited by the number of potential referents in the environment, symbols, being arbitrary, are not bound by the material environment, instead drawing their life and meaning mainly from the context of other symbols.
This means that symbols cannot be understood apart from the context in which they appear, and because culture is not a thing, but a process, happening in time, this context is constantly changing. In Greenfeld’s words symbols are “endlessly proliferating.”
I may not know enough of semiotics to really do your question justice, though hopefully what I have reiterated above helps draw out some of the distinction. It seems to me that attempts to formally decode symbols which refer not to material objects but primarily to other symbols are bound to be problematic. Furthermore, even symbols which refer first and foremost to some object or concrete thing are bound to be connected in real ways to an almost infinite range of other symbols in the mind of the individual processing the symbol. Thus we can never get away from the issue of context and the fact that culture is a process occurring simultaneously on the collective and individual levels.
I have a number of criticisms of memetics, which I hope to address here soon. I began writing about this at the end of this paper, but in hindsight this was hardly sufficient. For now, I would say these are some of the mains problems:
The idea of the meme as a “unit of cultural transmission, or unit of imitation,” doesn’t clearly distinguish between learned behaviors in general and symbolic transmission.
The idea is justified by the strong claim that, “Meme evolution is not just analogous to biological or genetic evolution, not just a process that be metaphorically described in these evolutionary idioms, but a phenomenon that obeys the laws of natural selection exactly. The theory of evolution by natural selection is neutral regarding the differences between memes and genes; these are just different kinds of replicators evolving in different media at different rates.” (Dennett 202) In order to maintain this claim, they must admit that memes don’t have to be beneficial to their carriers (human minds), they just have to be good self-replicators. However, memeticists seem to be constantly considering also how the survival of certain memes is related to fitness-enhancing effects. Consider this article, in which just two months ago Susan Blackmore goes back on the idea that religion is a “virus of the mind” upon learning that religious people on average may have more children than non-religious people. They seem to switch between two modes of evolutionary thinking in order to account for new data or suit whatever particular argument is at hand. In my opinion, this kind of move consistently reduces the complex and dynamic process of culture to rather banal, general categories of evolutionary fitness.
I hope all that was helpful. Of course, further questions and comments are welcome.