THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF SOCIAL CHANGE: A COMMENT ON PROFESSOR STEBBINS' PAPER.

The article focuses on irreducability of social change. The essence of the modern theory of biological evolution lies, as Stebbins J. Gould makes clear, not in vistas of stages, unilinear or multilinear, proceeding from primitive and simple to modem and complex types. The real essence of evolution lies in what the theory has to say about the mechanism of change: specifically, about the processes of genetic variation and natural selection. Common ignorance of the real nature of both processes on the part of social scientists is the basis of their frequent supposition that they are in fact dealing with "variations" and "selection" in their studies of kinship, class, tribe, or nation. modern icience But this is their business. The danger in any case does not come from the occasional Stebbins. There are three central ways in which the differences between biological evolutionary change and social change are manifest: the type of data the two disciplines work with; the altogether different role of time in each; and the relation between process and event.