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In defence of generalized Darwinism

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Abstract

Darwin himself suggested the idea of generalizing the core Darwinian principles to cover the evolution of social entities. Also in the nineteenth century, influential social scientists proposed their extension to political society and economic institutions. Nevertheless, misunderstanding and misrepresentation have hindered the realization of the powerful potential in this longstanding idea. Some critics confuse generalization with analogy. Others mistakenly presume that generalizing Darwinism necessarily involves biological reductionism. This essay outlines the types of phenomena to which a generalized Darwinism applies, and upholds that there is no reason to exclude social or economic entities.

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Notes

  1. The November 2006 issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Economics was a ‘Special issue on universal Darwinism’. However, while containing critiques such as Cordes (2006), it contained no overall defence of the idea of generalizing Darwinian principles to the social or economic domain. This essay attempts to fill this gap. The authors are very grateful to Pavel Pelikan, Sidney Winter and anonymous referees for comments.

  2. Leading proponents of self-organization themselves recognize this. See Kauffman (1993, p. 644) and Camazine et al. (2001, p. 89).

  3. Dawkins’s (1983) term ‘universal Darwinism’ may misleadingly suggest that Darwinism covers everything or has ‘universal validity’ (Dawkins 1976, p. 205). As explained below, Darwinian principles apply to complex population systems only, notwithstanding that this covers a highly capacious set of phenomena.

  4. Rose (1997) has a long chapter entitled ‘Universal Darwinism?’ which very briefly (pp. 175–176) mentions memes and ‘neural Darwinism’ (Edelman 1987), dismisses them without detailed criticism, and then devotes its remaining 20 pages to biological issues that have no relevance to the claim that core Darwinian principles can be applied to social entities and social evolution.

  5. For a discussion of Witt’s argument see Vanberg (2006).

  6. Witt (2003, 2004) makes the point that diffusion of novelty rather than selection forces drive cultural evolution. While this point appears controversial to Witt (2003, 2004), Cordes (2006) and others, it is does not contradict general Darwinian principles. It is merely the (feasible) empirical claim that the second term of the Price equation is more important than its first term. The Price (1970, 1995) equation addresses changes of average fitness due to selection for a population property related to the characteristics of individual members. It shows that this population level outcome can be regarded as the sum of two distinct effects. The first term in the equation is the covariance of the individual properties and their individual fitness values, showing the extent to which possession of the property bestows fitness on individuals. The second term is a transmission effect, whereby changing properties of existing individuals lead to modifications of their individual fitnesses, such as through innovation or learning. With the first effect the population changes through selection; with the second effect the change comes through the transformations of individuals or entities. Witt and Cordes suggest that the second effect is more important. This is a matter of empirical enquiry and not a test of the principles of generalized Darwinism. Indeed, without Darwinian selection there would be no way of removing useless novelties (Pavel Pelikan, private correspondence).

  7. This account of complex population systems makes use of material from Hodgson and Knudsen (2006a), where some further details of the argument appear.

  8. See Mayr (1976, p. 28; 1982, pp. 46f.) for a discussion of the contrast between ‘population thinking’ and the outlook of the ‘typologist.’

  9. See Hodgson and Knudsen (2006a, p. 4) for a discussion of this specific concept of scarcity.

  10. The general concept of information itself requires clarification in this context and has been subject to some debate. See for example Maynard Smith (2000a, b), Griffiths (2001) and Godfrey-Smith (2007).

  11. The replicator-interactor distinction also relates to the question of Lamarckism, which typically is taken to mean the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The replicator-interactor distinction is necessary to establish adequately the concept of inheritance in this context (Hull 1982; Hodgson and Knudsen 2006b). Consequently, whether true or not, claims that social evolution is Lamarckian depend on a replicator-interactor distinction. Notably, Darwinism and Lamarckism are not mutually exclusive: Darwin (1859) himself believed in Lamarckian inheritance. However, Lamarckism alone is inadequate because it cannot explain why dysfunctional acquired characteristics are inherited without the invocation of a selection mechanism (Dawkins 1983).

  12. In important respects the idea of ‘program-based behavior’ was foreshadowed by Simon (1957) in his famous work on bounded rationality (March and Simon 1958; Vanberg 2002, pp. 24 ff.).

  13. See Miller and Friesen (1980), Tushman and Romanelli (1985), Collins (1988), Krasner (1988), Hannan and Freeman (1989), Mokyr (1990), Gersick (1991), Gowdy (1993), Aoki (2001) and others.

  14. See Bannister (1979) and Hodgson (2004b) on social Darwinism, and Segerstråle (2000) on the reactions of social scientists to sociobiology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Howard E. Aldrich

  2. The Business School, University of Hertfordshire, De Havilland Campus, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, AL10 9AB, UK

    Geoffrey M. Hodgson

  3. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    David L. Hull & Joel Mokyr

  4. University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Thorbjørn Knudsen

  5. University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Viktor J. Vanberg

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  1. Howard E. Aldrich
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  2. Geoffrey M. Hodgson
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Correspondence to Geoffrey M. Hodgson.

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Aldrich, H.E., Hodgson, G.M., Hull, D.L. et al. In defence of generalized Darwinism. J Evol Econ 18, 577–596 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-008-0110-z

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