David Sloan Wilson — From Political Gridlock to Scientific Progress. The Promise of Evonomics

Evolutionists who take an interest in economics often fall along a political spectrum, just like other folks. Right-leaning evolutionists include Larry Arnhart (Darwinian Conservatism), Michael Shermer (The Mind of the Market), and Matt Ridley, whose book The Evolution of Everything (not to be confused with my own Evolution for Everyone) is hot off the press. Left-leaning evolutionists include Herbert Gintis (The Bounds of Reason), Samuel Bowles (A Cooperative Species), Lynn Stout (Cultivating Conscience), and Peter Singer (The Most Good You Can Do). Evolutionists such as Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) and Robert Frank (The Darwin Economy ) hold down the center and offer interesting commentary on the left-right divide.…

“Evonomics” stands for the “Next Evolution of Economics” but to me it represents the field of economics resting on the foundations of evolution and complexity science. It’s similar to “evolutionary economics,” but the two terms have different histories.

“Evolutionary economics” came into use in the 1980s with books such as Nelson and Winter’s An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, while “Evonomics” was coined by Michael Shermer in a 2007 Scientific American article to describe how the cultural evolution of stuff in modern life is like biological evolution.…

As a branch of evolutionary science, evolutionary economics is a scientific discipline. This might seem to go without saying, but a lot of economic discourse — much of it intertwined with political discourse — is not scientific. My own path to studying economics is worth relating on this point.…

As I describe in my book The Neighborhood Project, this was like the gentle hobbit Frodo making his way toward Mordor. I entered a world of unsurpassed strangeness, dominated by a body of thought—so-called orthodox economic theory—that bore no resemblance to reality whatsoever. Its assumptions about human preferences and abilities were absurd, as a branch of economics called behavioral economics had no trouble showing. Behavioral economics was called “heterodox,” along with a ragtag collection of other schools of thought that included evolutionary economics and ecological economics. In my world, ecology, evolution, and behavior had become fused into a single discipline often labeled by the acronym EEB. Nothing like that was occurring in the world of economics.…

What does it mean to function in scientific mode? First, there must be a serviceable theoretical framework, whose assumptions at least crudely approximate the object of study; in this case human economic systems. Second, it must be possible to formulate alternative hypotheses about any given aspect of economic systems that can be tested with empirical data. If we can’t go back and forth between hypothesis formation and testing, then we can’t make scientific progress.

It is not required for the scientists to be unbiased, which would be impossible in any case. Scientists are flesh-and-blood people like everyone else. Some will be politically left-leaning or right-leaning and this will cause them to propose different hypotheses (e.g., concerning the ability of price systems to regulate economic activities for the common good). The difference is that when people operate in scientific mode, they are forced to change their minds when their hypotheses are rejected on the basis of empirical data or logical contradiction. Science progresses, unlike political gridlock.…

This makes me confident that Evonomics will not be a merely another way for people to spin their political biases without any resolution. Evonomics.com looks forward to featuring the views of anyone who has become knowledgable about modern evolutionary and complexity science and abides by the rules of scientific discourse, no matter what their political leanings. This is what motivated Robert Kadar and Joe Brewer, with my wholehearted support, to form a collaborative network of people creating and curating content, and hosting lively scientific debate. Let the best hypothesis win. If we can’t change our minds on the basis of empirical evidence, then shame on us.

Evonomics
From Political Gridlock to Scientific Progress. The Promise of Evonomics
David Sloan Wilson | SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University and Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo