Hodgson, Geoffrey M., and Thorbjørn Knudsen. Darwin’s conjecture: The search for general principles of social and economic evolution . University of Chicago Press, 2010.
URL1 URL2
Although the idea of generalizing core Darwinian principles to social evolution is well over a century old, ours is the fi rst book-length, systematic treatment of the topic. Despite the celebrated power of Darwin’s ideas, it is remarkable that they have had relatively little impact on the social sciences. The adoption of Darwinism by social scientists has been thwarted by numerous misinterpretations and misunderstandings, several of which we hope to remove in this volume. And Darwinism is not simply an option. We hold that there is no known alternative to Darwinism as a general framework with which to analyze the evolution of social and economic systems. The core Darwinian principles involve variation, selection, and inheritance (or replication). The claim that Darwinism applies to social evolution must rest on a clear picture of what these concepts mean. Otherwise, the arguments and counterarguments become lost in a fog. Consequently, much of this work is devoted to clarifying concepts and refi ning defi nitions at a fairly abstract level. The importance of these preliminaries should not be underestimated. While we refer to some empirical cases, this work is largely conceptual—and necessarily so. The disposing of major misconceptions and the provision of clear defi nitions of the general elements and mechanisms of Darwinian evolution are ground-clearing preconditions for both middle-range theory and more extensive empirical research. The primary aim of this book is to show that the core Darwinian mechanisms of variation, selection, and replication apply to social entities and processes, and we give some examples of how they pertain to business and other social phenomena.