Search Results

This introductory chapter discusses the book’s focus on the nature of industrial dynamics, structural change, and transformation in our time. The aim is to understand, conceptualize, and explain what changes and what does not in the economy, and how individual actors and ‘systems’ relate to each other through differences in perceptions and actions. The central focus is on the question of evolutionary processes and complex transformation in the economy, with a particular emphasis on the nature of flexibility and stability.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of frequency-dependent selection—the phenomenon that the evolving population is part of the changing environment determining the evolutionary trajectory. Selection is frequency-dependent if the sign and magnitude of the correlations between heritable variation and reproductive variation change as a consequence of changes in the trait distribution that are themselves generated by such correlations. From the perspective of mathematical modeling, the realm of frequency dependence in evolution is larger than the realm of situations in which selection is not frequency dependent, because the absence of frequency dependence in a mathematical model of evolution essentially means that some parameters describing certain types of biological interactions are set to zero. Thus, in a suitable parameter space, frequency independence corresponds to the region around zero, while everything else corresponds to frequency dependence. In this way, frequency-dependent selection should therefore be considered the norm, not the exception, for evolutionary processes.

Standard evolutionary theory is highly successful, based as it is on solid mathematical foundations and a rich empirical tradition, constantly renewed by exchanges of hypotheses and data among diverse researchers. Yet, despite its successes, it does not provide a satisfactory basis for understanding human evolution. Primarily, this is because standard evolutionary theory's assumptions limit what it can explain. Significantly, it largely neglects the role of niche-construction in evolution. As a result, it has inadvertently erected conceptual barriers that make it difficult to integrate evolutionary biology with several neighboring disciplines, including developmental biology, ecosystem-level ecology, and the human sciences. This chapter describes how niche construction can usefully be regarded as a process which, combined with established evolutionary processes, improves understanding of human evolution. By integrating human niche construction with gene-culture co-evolutionary theory, an evolutionary framework to explore the evolution of language is developed.

This chapter discusses the evolution of immune function. It emphasizes two points. First, the immune system is complex, with many responses that may act together or inhibit each other to determine the outcome of an infection. Using an immune response as an indicator of the host's resistance (or, more generally, its quality) is therefore problematic, as increased investment in a given immune response may well indicate increased susceptibility to a parasite. Second, resistance is a product of the interaction between a host and a parasite. Thus, we cannot understand the evolution of immune function without considering the co-evolution of the host's and the parasite's contributions to resistance. Indeed, as found in a more general context, mathematical models of the evolution of the host that do not consider the co-evolutionary response by the parasite can be misleading as their predictions can differ qualitatively from the co-evolutionary dynamics and equilibrium.

This chapter focuses at the dynamics of technological change. It specifically asks whether technological change occurs in leaps and bounds, or whether it takes place gradually and continuously. The chapter sets up an analogy between technological progress and biological evolution, and tries to apply the concept of punctuated equilibrium to the analysis of technology. It observes that one concept that has been employed in the economics of growth is the steady state, a form of growth which is itself constant and predictable, and thus can be regarded as a dynamic equivalent to the concept of equilibrium. The chapter opines that it would seem natural to think of the steady state as an evolutionary process.

This chapter has two major aims. First, to describe the primary scenarios under which genetic variation in phenotypic individual differences is maintained, and illustrate how they have been or could be applied to an understanding of genetic variation in personality traits. Second, to stress the need for psychologists interested in these matters to develop plausible ways to test particular models. At this point, there is no dearth of general proposals about the evolutionary processes that account for genetic variation in personality. Currently, however, there are few compelling tests of the possibilities in the literature.

This chapter outlines a view of emergent reality in which it is clear that non-physical quantities such as information and goals can have physical effect in the world of particles and forces. It explains how complexity emerges at higher levels of the hierarchy of structure on the basis of the underlying physics, leading to emergent behaviours that cannot be reduced to a description at any lower level. The first key to handling complexity is hierarchical physical structuring and function. Such functioning involves the combination of bottom-up and top-down action in the hierarchy of structure. The second key to the emergence of truly complex properties is the role of hierarchically structured information in setting goals via feedback control systems. The development of complexity in living systems requires both evolutionary processes acting over very long time periods and developmental processes acting over much shorter times.

This chapter focuses on the significance of evolutionary forensic psychology. Several sources of conflict between individuals have been recurrent over human evolutionary history. Understanding the nature of recurrent conflicts between individuals in our evolutionary past can give insight into the form and function of manifest conflicts between people today. The chapter explores some of the most important sources of conflict for our ancestors and discusses their implications for the field of evolutionary forensic psychology.

This chapter suggests that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory will continue to dominate future studies of human behavior. Despite criticisms on the Darwinian Imperative and the problems in placing human beings within the evolutionary process, it is undeniable that biology plays a major role in understanding human nature. Biology can help clarify the continuity between human and animal experience and determine whether consciousness and awareness exist in animals.

This chapter deals with the large-scale evolutionary processes underlying patterns of phenotypic innovation. It describes the origin of evolutionary novelties, specifically their nonrandom origins in time and space, which demands novel approaches to the evolution of form, and considers the fates of novelties and the clades they define. The chapter suggests that the spatial and temporal regularities in the origin of phenotypic novelties are just one aspect of macroevolution which seems to need an expansion of evolutionary concepts and methods. It appears that multilevel approaches are significant in the understanding of long-term evolutionary processes.

Evolutionary rates not only reflect the tempo at which genotypes, phenotypes, and species lineages are transformed over time but also offer valuable insight into the evolutionary processes involved in divergence. For the last century and a half, biologists have been, and to a large degree still remain, steeped in the paradigm of slow and steady gradual evolutionary change. New findings and technologies are beginning to change this view as significant rate variations are seen in a large number of examples across and within all levels of biological organization. This introductory chapter provides a brief historical account and broad survey of recent findings on evolution rates and highlights examples demonstrating rapid and/or non-gradual evolutionary change. What do these exceptions to slow and gradual rates of evolution tell us about higher-level processes? How does such episodic change fit into our neo-Darwinian notions of gradualism? And what exciting prospects do we expect to discover in the future?

This concluding chapter provides a synthetic review of the research program on biology and organizational behavior laid out in the book. Taking a broad view, the chapter suggests that the book reflects two main themes that contain unique and somewhat separate sets of issues for organization studies, a first theme that focuses primarily on the organic basis of behavior including genes, and a second theme that explicitly brings evolution and evolutionary processes into the picture. Although these two themes can be discussed in relative isolation because they each raise important unique issues and challenges to behavioral researchers, the chapter also considers the two themes jointly and simultaneously. Doing so is important because the promise of combining the two approaches makes this “biological foundations” project unique and potentially path-breaking. But the combination also makes the project extremely challenging and perhaps daunting for reasons articulated in the chapter.

This chapter examines the emergence of taxic paleobiology during the early 1980s, which was advocated by its proponents as a solution to the problem of independent levels of selection within the evolutionary process. It describes how the development of taxic paleobiology affected the paleobiology/neontology interface during the 1980s and explains the principal differences between neontology and paleobiology. The analysis reveals that though taxic methods quickly became influential among paleontologists, they had little impact in evolutionary studies and that the rise of taxic methods did not seem to promote closer collaboration across disciplines.

How do diverse species coexist in the complex networks of prey-predator interactions in nature? While most theoretical models predict that complex food webs do not persist, recent empirical studies have revealed the very complex structure of natural food webs. This discrepancy between theory and observation implies that essential factors stabilizing natural food webs are lacking from previous models. This chapter reviews these studies on food web complexity and its community-level consequences. It contends that the architectural flexibility arising from foraging adaptation of consumer species is key to explaining linkage patterns and persistent mechanisms of complex food webs. A novel hypothesis is presented, which relates the complexity-stability relationship to evolutionarily history of the community.

There is a longstanding debate among geneticists about the relative importance of large-scale migrations following founder effects (SFE) vs. migration between local demes, i.e., gene flow (GF), in shaping human genetic diversity. This chapter compares genetic patterns simulated under these two evolutionary processes to the observed pattern in 108 globally distributed populations. The comparison shows that the SFE process has played the dominant role in shaping variation at both global and regional scales. Because of the SFE process, non-African variation is largely a subset of African variation, and most genetic changes that have occurred since we left Africa are shared by groups in multiple geographic regions. This pattern of variation is inconsistent with conventional taxonomic concepts of biological race, and it suggests that people in all regions will share the genetic variants that contribute to complex human disease.

This chapter discusses the basics and foundations of the ideas and concepts that form evolutionary parasitology. It takes a look at the evolutionary process and how it applies to parasites in particular. The chapter looks at, for example, Charles Darwin’s own postulates for such evolution by natural selection, and how they stipulate four basic observations that can easily be verified. These postulates contain some important points for evolutionary parasitology and also serve as conditions that should be met in order for evolution to take place. Also discussed in the chapter are certain questions about host–parasite interactions, using Niko Tinbergen’s four basic questions as a guideline for asking questions about host–parasite interactions. Finally, the chapter references certain comparative studies and how they can be a powerful approach too, because they explore the fact that nature has already made ‘experiments’ for us.

This chapter examines the nature of truth. It provides a classification of the main motives which are represented by the principal recent theories regarding the nature of truth. First, there is the motive especially suggested by the study of the history of institutions, by people's whole interest in what are called “evolutionary processes,” and by a large part of people's recent psychological investigation. This is the motive which leads many to describe human life altogether as a more or less progressive adjustment to a natural environment. The second motive is the same as that which, in ethics, is responsible for so many sorts of recent Individualism. It is the longing to be self-possessed and inwardly free, the determination to submit to no merely external authority. Meanwhile, the third motive has led to the discovery of what are novel truths regarding the fundamental relations upon which all of human thought and human activity rest.