From Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species, 1859), generalized by Donald T. Campbell (1960), Richard Dawkins (Universal Darwinism, 1983), Daniel C. Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995), Alex Mesoudi (Cultural Evolution, 2011), and Scott E. Page (The Model Thinker, 2018), and applied to firms by Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter (An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, 1982).
Tests whether variation, selection, and retention are at work among ideas, products, or firms, and if so reads their features as the work of selection pressure.
When to reach for it
When explaining why some practices, products, or firms persist and others vanish, and a story of deliberate design does not fit the facts.
How it runs
- Ask whether the population varies.
- Ask whether some variants survive while others do not.
- Ask whether the survivors' traits persist and spread.
- If all three hold, treat the dynamics as evolutionary.
- Read shared traits as signs of selection pressure.
- Read leftover features as traces of past pressures.
Where it sits in SOLVE eX
Go to the source
- On the Origin of Species, 1859
- Blind Variation and Selective Retentions in Creative Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes, Psychological Review, 1960
- An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, 1982
- Universal Darwinism, in Evolution from Molecules to Men, ed. D. S. Bendall, Cambridge University Press, 1983
- Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995
- Cultural Evolution, 2011
- The Model Thinker, 2018