Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution
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"The principles of Darwinism, which involve variation, inheritance, and selection, are increasingly of interest to social scientists. But no one has provided a truly rigorous account of how the principles apply to the evolution of human societyûuntil now." "In Darwin's Conjecture, Geoffrey M. Hodgson and ThorbjÀrn Knudsen reveal how these core concepts apply to a wide range of social phenomena, including business practices, legal systems, technology, and even science itself. They also critique some prominent objections to applying Darwin to social science, arguing that ultimately Darwinism functions as a general theoretical framework for stimulating further inquiry. Social scientists who adopt a Darwinian approach, they contend, can then use it to develop new explanatory theories and predictive models." This truly pathbreaking work at long last makes the powerful conceptual tools of Darwin available to the social sciences and will be welcomed by scholars and students from a range of disciplines.
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsChapter One Introduction: The Challenge of Darwinism for the Social Sciences 1Chapter Two Generalizing Darwinism 30Chapter Three Rivals and Rebuttals 47Chapter Four The Lamarckian Confusion 61Chapter Five The Principle of Selection and Its Application to Social Evolution 89Chapter Six Information, Complexity, and Generative Replication 112Chapter Seven From Group Selection to Organizational Interactors 151Chapter Eight Major Information Transitions in Social Evolution 180Chapter Nine Conclusions and Agenda for Future Research 222Glossary 237References 243Index 277
