Darwinian Economics ... ? Institutional Economics ... ?

What is 'natural selection'?

Darwin himself explained the difficulty -

'it's an awful stretcher to believe the peacock's tail was thus formed, I must be a bad explainer, I suppose 'natural selection' was a poor term ...'

Richard Dawkins, perhaps Darwin's most articulate populariser - 'it's almost as if the human brain was specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism and find it hard to understand ...'

The basic process of wealth creation and economic growth is selection NOT instruction - natural selection NOT rational purposeful intentional planning.

Us arrogant folk always tend to flip into 'instruction' mode. Or more confusingly us arrogant folk always tend to think we are doing the 'selection'.

Like Darwin, students will eventually have a slow dawning of a 'eureka' moment - an epistemic leap ...

... the giraffe's long neck results from the death of the short necked giraffes ...

... copy - vary - select ...

... inheritance with modification ...

... accumulation of successive slight variations ...

 

There is no struggle to survive with hostile environments forcing adaptation. Change is not the result of altered environmental conditions ...

Diversity is not the result of evolutionary change, diversity precedes change ...

Not survival of the fittest but generation of differences ...

Rather one pre-existing variant is 'naturally selected' and differentially survives and increases in frequency in the variant population!

No instruction, no foresight ... just generate & test variants ...

The cause of the variation is irrelevant, 'natural' or 'artificial', the variant is 'random' or 'independent', but the existence of the variation is vital! The variation if useful will be preserved ...

Darwin used 'artificial' selection to teach 'natural' selection. Not because it was a different process.

Natural and artificial selection depend on accumulation of slight independent variations.

 

Natural selection was going on a long long time before us arrogant folk could think and a long long long time before we could think we were doing the selection ... what us arrogant folk are doing is generating the variants!

 

 

Don't forget this material intentionally challenges some orthodox economic theory to provoke thinking about choices. I'm happy to see any comments, corrections and critiques ... here