Thomas Reydon (Leibniz Universität Hannover)
Both in academic and in public contexts the notion of evolution is often used in an overly loose sense. Besides biological evolution, there is talk of the evolution of societies, cities, languages, firms, industries, economies, technical artifacts, car models, clothing fashions, science, technology, the universe, and so on. While in many of these cases (especially in the public domain) the notion of evolution is merely used in a metaphorical way, in some cases it is meant more literally as the claim that evolutionary processes similar to biological evolution occur in a particular area of investigation, such that full-fledged evolutionary explanations can be given for the phenomena under study.
Such practices of “theory transfer” (as sociologist Renate Mayntz called it) from one scientific domain to others, however, raises the question how much can actually be explained by applying an evolutionary framework to non-biological systems. Can applications of evolutionary theory outside biology, for example to explain the diversity and properties of firms in a particular branch of industry, of institutions in societies, or of technical artifacts, have a similar explanatory force as evolutionary theory has in biology? Proponents of so-called “Generalized Darwinism” (e.g., Aldrich et al., 2008; Hodgson & Knudsen, 2010) think it can. Moreover, they think evolutionary thinking can perform a unifying role in the sciences by bringing a wide variety of phenomena under one explanatory framework.
I will critically examine this view by treating it as a question about the ontology of evolutionary phenomena. My claim is that practices of applying evolutionary thinking in non-biological areas of work can be understood as what I call “ontology-fitting” practices. For an explanation of a particular phenomenon to be a genuinely evolutionary explanation, the explanandum’s ontology must match the basic ontology of evolutionary phenomena in the biological realm. This raises the question what elements this latter ontology consists of. But there is no unequivocal answer to this question There is ongoing discussion about the question what the basic elements in the ontology of biological evolutionary phenomena (such as the units of selection) are and how these are to be conceived of. Therefore, practitioners from non-biological areas of work cannot simply take a ready-for-use ontological framework from the biological sciences and fit their phenomena into it. Rather, they usually pick those elements from the biological evolutionary framework that seem to fit their phenomena, disregard other elements, and try to construct a framework that is specific to the phenomena under study. By examining cases of such “ontology fitting” we can achieve more clarity about the requirements for using evolutionary thinking to explain non-biological phenomena. I will illustrate this by looking at an unsuccessful case of “ontology fitting” in organizational sociology.
