Taking Evolution Seriously : Institutional Analysis and Evolutionary Theory

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in evolutionary theory in wide variety of scientific domains. In fields as diverse as computer science, philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, biology, and anthropology “evolutionary thinking” (Dennett 1995) has come to the forefront of the discipline. Political scientists use the term “evolution” quite often as well, but generally they use it rather casually – i.e. to invoke the concept of change – without really understand the theoretical mechanisms underlying evolutionary change. For most political scientists, “evolution” is generally meant to infer some basic type of the historical path in which events are connected to each other over time. We argue in the following essay that political science generally, and new institutionalists in particular, should take evolutionary theory more seriously. While some social scientist have long been interested in applying evolutionary theories to social systems, there are a relatively small number of political scientists who have examined these theories’ implications for political and institutional development. We suggest that this lacuna grows out of the fact that evolutionary theory operates from an ontological position quite different from the Newtonian physics based ontology commonly adopted in traditional political science. While many political scientists are clearly dissatisfied with the physics based ontology, they have not generally explored the alternative theories originally developed in the life sciences. In this essay we offer a modest introduction into evolutionary theories and suggest that in doing so we gain substantial insights into some of the most confounding problems facing institutionalist scholars today. The analysis is divided into three main parts. In part I, we present a basic overview of some of the key concepts in evolutionary theory. We focus largely on evolutionary theories originally developed in the biological sciences. We show how evolutionary has built on and developed