Patterened Variation: The Role of Psychological Dispositions in Social and Economic Evolution
Journal
of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 153(4), 1997, 722-736.
Reprinted in M. E. Streit, U. Mummert, and D. Kiwit (eds.), Cognition,
Rationality, and Institutions, Berlin: Springer 2000, 39-53.
Abstract
Any evolutionary explanation of institutions must necessarily presuppose regularities which are themselves not subject to the evolutionary processes studied. The essay highlights the necessity of patterning from an evolutionary perspective and emphasizes the strong parallelism of patterning in biological and social evolution. It is argued that processes of social and institutional evolution build on the psychological patterning of human motivation and action. As a result, we cannot start from the individual mind as a tabula rasa, but must posit psychological regularities from the beginning.
Keywords: social evolution, patterned variation, directed variation, adaptive landscapes, constraints, channeling, hitchhiking, radiation, founder effect, irreversibility, functional shift, punctuation, evolutionary detour, organic growth, development
Professor Dr. Ekkehart Schlicht: Veröffentlichungen/Publications
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