Selection and Coevolution in Industrial Economies

Abstract

A defining characteristic of modern industrial economies is extremely rapid change. This phenomenon as a general characteristic is evidently unique in human history. Judging from the archaeological record, in hunting and gathering societies stasis was the norm. Technologies remained essentially unchanged for very long periods until they were (relatively) rapidly replaced by other equally persistent technologies. The Acheulean technology, associated with Homo erectus and characterized by a type of finely worked handaxe, lasted for about 1 1/2 million years (Rowley-Conwy 1993, p. 64). The Mousterian technology, associated with Neanderthals, lasted almost 100,000 years. Identifiable agricultural technologies such as the Hopewellian of the eastern U.S. and the Anazazi of the southwest persisted for hundreds of years. Observers of contemporary agricultural or peasant societies also report the persistence of economic and social traditions and a reluctance to change. In industrial societies, on the other hand, economic and technological punctuations come rapidly and in seemingly limitless forms.

It is not that Darwin is wrong, but that he got hold of only part of the truth. For Darwin’s answer to the sources of the order we see all around us is overwhelmingly an appeal to a single singular force: natural selection. It is this single-force view which I believe to be inadequate, for it fails to notice, fails to stress, fails to incorporate the possibility that simple and complex systems exhibit order spontaneously. That spontaneous order exists, however, is hardly mysterious... What is mysterious is the extent of such spontaneous order in life and how such self-organizing may mingle with Darwin’s mechanism of evolution-natural selection-to permit or, better, to produce what we see.

Stuart Kauffman