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Why do Spatiotemporally Restricted Regularities

Explain in the Social Sciences?∗

Abstract: Employing a well-known local regularity from macroeconomics, the

Phillips curve, I examine Woodward’s (2000, 2003) account of the explanatory power

of such historically restricted generalizations and the mathematical models with which

they are sometimes associated. The paper seeks to show that, pace Woodward, to be

explanatory such generalizations need to be underwritten by more fundamental ones,

and that rational choice theory would not avail in this case to provide the required

underwriting. Examining how such explanatory restricted regularities are

underwritten in biology—by unrestricted Darwinian regularities--provides the basis

for an argument that Darwinian regularities serve the same function in human affairs.

The general argument for this claim requires, inter alia, that we accept some version

or other of a theory of memes. The paper concludes by clearing the field of some

prominent objections to the existence of memes, and extracting some policy

implications from the persistence and acceleration of arms races in human affairs.

1. Introduction

2. Invariance as evidence or diagnosis: an example from Woodward

3. Why are restricted generalizations explanatory?

4. Invariance and arms races in biology

5. Restricted regularities, and arms races in human affairs

6. Dealing with the no-memes objection to Darwinism about human affairs

7. Conclusion: a moral for institution design

1. Introduction

All regularities in social science are local—that is, spatiotemporally

restricted.1 Moreover, mathematical models in the social sciences that explain do so

∗ Thanks to James Woodward, Philip Kitcher, Kevin Hoover, Elliot Sober, Ken

Waters, Carl Hoefer, Kim Sterelny, and Don Ross, for helpful comments on previous

drafts.1 I assume without argument that the regularities of physical science are not similarly

restricted. If they are held to operate only in this, among many universes in the

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usually because the domains to which they are applied realize spatiotemporally

restricted regularities that approximate these models. It is not generally held that these

spatiotemporally restricted regularities can be expected to give way to less restricted

or ultimately unrestricted regularities. Nevertheless, the spatiotemporally restricted

regularities are treated as explanatory ones. This raises the problem of why such

regularities are explanatory. What is the difference between them and

spatiotemporally restricted regularities that are accidental and have no such

explanatory power. (Hereafter I drop the ‘spatiotemporally’ qualifier to ‘restricted.’)

In this paper I offer a surprising answer to this question, one which

underwrites a Darwinian approach to understanding human affairs across the social

sciences. My argument will employ a well-known example of such a restricted

regularity from economics, and a proposed answer to the question of why local

regularities are explanatory that is due to James Woodward (2000, 2003). Reasons for

focusing on his answer to the question include its contemporary currency, widespread

acceptance, and most of all, the deep study of regularities from which it emerges.

Woodward’s approach either takes account of or subsumes most of the other

approaches that have eventuated in affirmative answers to the question of why

restricted regularities explain.

If my example is typical, and if the problem identified for Woodward’s

approach is irremediable, then both the example and the difficulty provide a powerful

argument for treating restricted regularities as the outcomes of Darwinian processes

operating in human affairs. This conclusion in turn requires me to face obvious

objections to a Darwinian approach, objections often framed in terms of skepticism

about whether there are cultural replicators--‘memes’ of the sort required for

Darwinian processes in human affairs. However, I argue, the same argument for

restricted regularities in human affairs are explanatory, also enables a Darwinian

approach to deal with doubts about whether there are ‘memes’ or other replicators of

the sort a Darwinian process requires.

2. Invariance as evidence or diagnosis: an example from Woodward

The “Phillips curve,” which names a regularity about the relationship between

inflation and unemployment: there is an inverse relationship between the rate of

multiverse, or to be evolving in this one, suitable qualifications to my claim can be

added.

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change in money-wages and the level of unemployment. This claim, famously made

by A.W. Phillips [1958] in the late 1950s provides a basis for Keynesian fiscal and/or

monetary policy, in particular that unemployment can be lowered by inflationary

government action, for example, interventions such as increasing the money supply or

incurring a budget deficit. Woodward’s approach to why the Phillips curve was

explanatory turns on the nature and role of such interventions.

According to Woodward, for the Phillips curve relationship between

unemployment and the rate of increase in money wages to explain the original data

which supported it and subsequent phenomena to which it was applied, the regularity

about their relationship must satisfy the following requirements [2000, p. 201]:

M1. The intervention—in this case, for example, increasing the money supply,

changes the rate of inflation from what it would otherwise be.

M2. The Phillips curve generalization asserts that increasing the rate of

inflation really does reduce the unemployment rate from what it would

otherwise have been.

M3. The increase rate of money supply growth lowers the unemployment rate

only through its impact on the inflation rate, and not by any other means—for

example, by (improbably) making workers reduce their labor supply in protest

at the rate of money supply growth, and thus reduce the rate of unemployment.

M4. The increase in money supply is not correlated with other causes of

unemployment increases besides inflation, so that we can exclude the

possibility that money supply increases and inflation are both the joint

products of some other independent change. This condition rules out the

possibility that some other variable may work independently of either one to

change the rate of unemployment.

By the 1960s monetarist economists, following Milton Friedman [1968], were

challenging the Phillips-curve-regularity as an explanatory one. They did so by

denying M2 on the basis of another regularity deemed by them to be invariant, that

agents choose rationally.

Friedman held that in the long run, the rate of unemployment was constant for

any rate of inflation, that insofar as the Phillips curve regularity obtained, this was a

short run phenomenon, and that after a temporary increase, the rate of employment

returns to its “natural rate” as economic agents realize that the price changes are

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merely nominal and not real. Friedman thus sought to undercut the Phillips curve’s

explanatory power by arguing that it is not invariant under changes in the beliefs of

economic agents, employers and workers. And this failure is due to another invariant

relationship, one that figures in rational choice theory. Since rational employers and

workers recognize that changes in money prices may not reflect changes in relative

prices, such changes by themselves can have no impact on their choices.

But the invariance Friedman invoked to under cut the Phillips’ curves

explanatory power is itself subject to an objection of the same kind. Experiments in

cognitive science, for example, provide evidence that the choices of actual economic

agents persistently respond to changes in money prices, even when they are

acquainted with the relevant economic theory that vindicates the rationality of

indifference to changes in money prices which leave relative prices unchanged. There

is both anecdotal and experimental evidence that suggests such a conclusion. Of

course such experimental data, if replicated and otherwise reliable, would lead one to

conclude that the regularities of rational choice theory were not invariant in the way

that Woodward requires explanatory generalizations to be. That is, the claims of

rational choice theory must be denied (at least some) explanatory power, and/or they

may not provide a basis to deny the invariance, and thus the explanatory power, of the

original Phillips’ curve relationship.

At this point in the dialectic among economists, the late 1960s, defenders of

the Phillips curve generally insisted that the statistical and anecdotal historical

evidence for the Phillips’ curve outweighs an argument like Friedman’s appeal to

rational choice theory. They had grounds for doing so: first, the continuing evidence

that the curve held, second, they could reject rational choice theory’s alleged

invariants, invoking the operation of “animal spirits” to which Keynes himself

adverted in one of his digressions into informal micro-theory in The General

Theory.2 Both of these considerations gave continued life to the Phillips curve and its

explanatory force through the 1960s and early 70s. For by this time the Phillips curve

2In the General Theory, Keynes wrote only a little about this notion: “a large

proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than

mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably,

of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be

drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits -

a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of aweighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities."

Keynes, 1937, pp161-162

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had been taken up by Keynesians as empirical evidence for the applicability of the

Keynesian models of the economy. Because Keynesians did not give much credence

to rational choice theory nor seek microfoundations for their macroeconomic

generalizations, they paid little regard to Friedman’s argument, and continued to treat

the Phillips curve as an explanatory invariance.

However, by the 1970s fiscal policy designed to decrease the unemployment

rate by increasing inflation began to fail. This period was characterized by

“stagflation” since employment was stagnant while the rate of inflation was

increasing.

At this point, owing to the failure of accelerating inflation to be correlated

with reduction in unemployment, that economists began to seek an explanation for its

failure to be invariant in economic theory and in particular in “microfoundations” for

macroeconomic models. Robert Lucas [1972] and other rational expectations theorists

argued that economic models intended to be used by government in policy guidance

had to incorporate, or even be grounded on, the way in which policies effected

individual economic agents, and how they would respond to them. The “Lucas

critique” and the rational expectations theories based were consistent with the demise

of the Phillips curve and explained why it should have ceased to be invariant in the

period from the 1970s onward.

It is important to note that the Lucas critique gained currency only after the

empirical disconfirmation of the Phillips curve by 1970s stagflation. It was then that

economists began to seek explanations for a failure of invariance already recognized.

Woodward says, “The interesting question for economists is not whether the Phillips

curve is a law of nature, but rather whether it is invariant under certain specific kinds

of changes and interventions.” (2002, p. 221) But the order of events in the process of

abandoning the Phillips curve did not begin with an initial discussion of the

conditions under which its invariance might fail. Rather the Phillips curve was treated

as direct disconfirmed, and only then economic theorists set about seeking an

adjustment in economic theory that would explain the disconfirmation. Lucas

founding one by re-asserting the importance of microfoundations and re-asserting the

rationality of economic agents: in general they take into account policy changes in

rationally determining future actions.

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Woodward writes, “judgments about the significance or importance of the

intervention over which a generalization is invariant…play an important role in the

construction and assessment of explanatory generalizations.”

This does not appear to have been the case in the construction or assessment of

the Phillips curve. Consider its construction first. Phillips offered his curve after

undertaking the study of a correlation, one which Keynesian theory might lead us to

expect. But in many of the cases included in Phillips’ data, governments did not

intervene to increase money prices, and the price rises were due to a variety of

unintended economic causes. Phillips was not identifying interventions when he

constructed the curve.

As for assessment, the stagflation of the 1970s provided empirical

disconfirmation of the Phillips’ curve, because governments were relying on it to

stimulate employment by increasing the rate of increase in money prices. In retrospect

it was clear that the failure of policy-interventions to increase employment which

assumed the Phillips curve correlations did lead to its reassessment. But

governmental intervention played little role in the reassessment of the Phillips curve

as an explanatory generalization. The Lucas critique identified quite different non-

governmental interventions as significant in its assessment of the failure of the

Phillips curve as an explanatory generalization. The explanatory failure of the

Phillips curve was traced to its failure to be invariant over interventions in rational

agents’ information. It was the failure of the Phillips curve to hold over these

interventions that rational-expectations economists turned to, after the Phillips curves’

explanatory power was called into question by good old statistical evidence of

correlations, without treating changes in money prices as “interventions.”3

However, there was a serious problem with the diagnosis of the Phillips

curve’s failure under interventions in information of economic agents, offered by the

rational expectations theorists. It is now well-know from the work of Kahneman and

Tversky [1982] and many others, that economic agents are far from rational in many

respects, so many that we can hardly have much confidence that the invariance of the

components of rational choice theory correctly diagnoses the failures of the Phillips

3 If intervention is synonymous with change, then of course the disconfirmation of the

Phillips curve was the result of noticing that interventions on (changes in) money price levels ceased to co-occur with changes in levels of employment. Here I assume

that in macroeconomics, interventions are policy-directed changes.

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curve to be invariant. If the regularities of rational choice theory themselves lack

invariance under a range of interventions to which they are applied, then it becomes

problematical to employ them in an assessment of the failure of the Phillips curve to

be invariant. In [2000, p. 232-3], Woodward himself sketches considerations that have

led economists and political scientists to doubt the invariance of rational choice theory

under relevant changes to its variables. Under these circumstances one must consider

how it can reliably explain why the Phillips curve fails to be invariant.4

The problem this history of the Phillips curve raises for understanding how

explanations work in economics (and all the special sciences, I hold), is this: The

Phillips curve actually explained the relationship between the rate of change in money

prices and employment over some period up to the 1970s. This period may even

have been a long one, going back to the beginning of fiat currency or even earlier if

currency debasement and vast new discoveries of gold and silver result in inflation.

During the whole time it obtained and really did explain how inflation enhanced

economic activity—including employment, the Phillips curve could have broken

down had economic agent’s expectations about changes in the rate of inflation been

different. Had workers not suffered from a money illusion, had businesses not realized

that the resulting higher interest rates would reduce the attractiveness of increased

production and increased employment, had savers not realized that their real savings

rate was too low as inflation increased, in general, had economic agents had different

expectation (or as micro-founded macroeconomic theory requires, acted as if they

did), the Phillips curve would have ceased to hold earlier.5

There was no causal barrier to such realization through out the whole time the

Phillips curve held good. But if the Phillips curve regularity could have broken down

at any time, was it not merely an accidental regularity lacking explanatory force?

“Surely not!” we might want to say.

4Experiments of the sort Kahneman and Tversky and others inspired by them have

run do not directly address “money illusion” phenomena, but they do show that there

are asymmetries in the dollar valuation of goods depending only on whether the

subject has ownership or not. So, there is good reason to think that economic agents

persistent violate the strictures of rational choice theory, contrary to the assumptions

of the Lucas critique.5 It was not merely a short-run money illusion of the sort Friedman granted, nor yet

simply a long term one, as the Keynesians seem to have held, but a variety of

regularities about expectations and behavior that drove the Phillips curve and whose break down resulted in the Phillips curve ceasing to hold. I owe this insight to Don

Ross.

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But consider, the Phillips curve does not support the counterfactual that even

had people realized how inflation impacts their rational choices, changes in the

inflation rate of the former would still be followed by changes in employment levels.

Once people actually came to the relevant realization, it ceased to have explanatory

power. They could have come to this realization at any time during the period the

Phillips curve did hold. So here is the question: why should the Phillips curve ever

have had explanatory power, given that it could have been made false at any time

prior to the stagflation of the 70’s? This is just a version of the question of why

restricted regularities are explanatory.

3. Why are restricted regularities explanatory?

Woodward writes,

It is perfectly possible for a generalization to be invariant only for changes and

interventions that occur within a limited spatial or temporal internal and to

break down outside that interval. Suppose that, contrary to actual fact, the

Phillips curve turned out to be invariant under government interventions that

changed the inflation rate between say, 1870 and 1970 in the United States,

although not invariant outside this interval. If this had been the case, then (I

would claim) despite the limited spatio-temporal scope of this relationship,

one could appeal to it and to the fact that the US government intervened to

raise the inflation rate in 1915 to explain why unemployment fell after the

intervention. More generally, in contrast to the traditional law based account

of explanation, the notion of invariance allows us to talk about explanatory

relations that hold only over limited spatio-temporal intervals or which make

reference to particular objects, events or processes….Many explanatory

generalizations seem to have exactly these features and this is one reason why

the notion of invariance is particularly well suited to understanding their

character. (2000, 224-5).

As Woodward rightly says, we treat restricted regularities as invariant and therefore

explanatory, even when they could have been made false at any time during which

they held. For example, in the case of the Phillips curve, “interventions” drawing

economic agents attention to the differences between money prices and relative ones

could have been undertaken at any time before the 1970s with the same effect that the

Lucas critique alleged to have destroyed the correlation after 1970.) My question is,

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given this possibility, why do we treat restricted regularities of economics or the other

social sciences as explanatory?

Compare the reasons we treat the regularities of common sense- or every day-

or folk-physics are explanatory, in spite of their restricted invariance. In the case of a

variety of folk-physics regularities about specific objects, or processes such as iron

sinks, wood floats, free falling bodies move towards the center of the earth, it is fairly

easy to check for invariance by experiment, either casual or systematic. Regularities

that pass such tests are accorded explanatory power in ordinary life and they are the

starting point for refinements that systematic science seeks. This is true even when as

in many cases the folk-physical explanations of these regularities are wildly wrong

(e.g. Non-zero velocity requires the action of a continuously applied force, all

velocities are additive, space is anisotropic).

Suppose as seems reasonable that the regularities of folk psychology are the

starting points for explanatory regularities in social science (think of Thucydides).

Our confidence in them is not similarly the result of informal experiments that

identify the range of variations in causal variables over which they are invariant.

Rather, the explanatory folk-psychological regularities we begin with in social science

(e.g., if you desire d and believe that action a is the best way to secure d, you do

action a) are vouched safe by some combination of introspection, the meanings of

words, and a bit of informal conceptual analysis. It is hard even to know how to set

about testing folk psychological regularities for the range of values of the causal

variables over which they are supposed to be invariant. Almost all tests of invariance

advanced in these cases are either indecisive because the experimental set ups don’t

replicate the regularity in question, or else their outcomes are subject to alternative

interpretations, or else replication is impossible or otherwise deemed to be irrelevant

to the explanatory force of folk psychological regularity.

Empirically driven social science adds some explanatory regularities to those

of folk psychology, and also provides some formalization of the folk psychological

regularities it adopts. The evidence for these regularities is often statistical,

econometric, or (increasingly) based on data-mining. It is sometimes anecdotal, and

rarely based on laboratory-findings, controlled experiments, quasi-experiments, or

natural experiments. But none of these regularities comes up even to the level of

predictive reliability or explanatory power of many of the restricted regularities of

folk physics and folk biology.

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In the absence of unambiguous experimental or observational results,

regularities in social science cannot help themselves to the grounds that make

explanatory the temporally restricted regularities of folk physics or folk biology. So

how can a regularity of economics true only within a certain period really be judged

invariant in that period and so explanatory during that period?

Here is one answer that vindicates Woodward’s approach. It actually requires

some claims that the passage seems to deny. First, the Phillips curve probably was

invariant for government interventions that increased the rate of inflation in the period

1870-1970.6

(Woodward’s use of the counterfactual, “If this had been the case”

suggests he disbelieves it.) On several occasions during this period government action

increased the rate of inflation, for example, during the panic of ‘93, during First

World War, after the mini-depression of 1937, and in each case unemployment

decreased. Of course the government intended neither action—increasing the rate of

inflation, or decreasing the unemployment rate (except in the 1937 case), but its

interventions had the effect the Phillips curve describes

The Phillips curve was invariant over this time, because governments were not

persistently intervening to increase the inflation rate, and when they did so, e.g. by

issuing greenbacks during the civil war, the intervention was comparatively

infrequent. Thus economic agents did not have occasion regularly to incorporate in

their economic calculations the fact that money prices levels were changing in ways

that did not reflect relative prices. Accordingly, the increases in the inflation rate were

followed by increases in employment as a Keynesian theory would suggest and as

Phillips discovered. After the publication and dissemination of Keynes’ General

Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1937) government policies began to

exploit the Phillips curve. But after 1970 economic agents began to respond

differently to inflation’s persistence, which resulted in part from government’s

willingness to exploit the Phillips curve relationship. At this point, owing to

expectations that inflation will persist and accelerate, the Phillips curve disappears—

the life-times of the short run curves gets get shorter and shorter, and adjustment to

the long long run vertical curve comes faster and faster until we have stagflation, and

the impotence of deficit spending as well as expansionist monetary policy. In short,

the Phillips curve explains changes in employment up to 1970 because before then it

6 See James 1985, “Shifts in the Nineteenth-Century Phillips Curve Relationship”

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really was invariant, given economic choices, public policy-choices in the case of the

government, and private policy choices in the case of individuals. Changes in private

policy choices responding to public policy deprived the Phillips curve of its

invariance.

If this account of the matter is right,7 the change in the Phillips curve from

being invariant, and therefore explanatory up until 1970, to no longer obtaining after

1970, is the consequence of what evolutionary-game theorists will recognize as “arms

races”: strategic interactions between two or more players, in which each searches for

strategies that will attain aims which are incompatible, and in which temporary

equilibria between strategies in play are broken by the implementation of a new

strategy by one side or the other, in a persistent cycle. 8 In an arms race an equilibrium

among strategies will obtain for a period of time, sometimes a very long time, and

then will be broken, by one party finding a better response to the strategy of the other.

In the US the Phillips curve is the product of strategic interactions over a long period,

one that began when, for example, fiat money was introduced in the US with the

introduction of “green-backs” during the Civil War, in 1862. Apparently it required

70 years or so before governments began to exploit this regularity in its own full

employment-stimulation strategies, and another 30 years before economic agents

recognized the impact of government monetary strategies on the outcomes of their

economic choices, and began to take action based on this recognition which frustrate

the government’s strategy.

So, now we have an explanation for the explanatory power of a

spatiotemporally restricted invariance: it is a temporary local equilibrium among two

or more players. The equilibrium is temporary because one or more of these players

7 It is fair to say that this is the received view about macroeconomic history amongmany economists and Woodward accepts it (personal communication). Some

economists add complications to the story, ones explicitly involving not justconsumers and workers, but also suppliers and investors making decisions involving

opportunity costs of production v lending, along with central bankers making

decisions about interest rates and the money supply independent of government fiscal

policy, all seeking to exploit several distinct related local equilibria reflected in the

Phillips curve.8 I employ the terms strategy, arms race, player here with the meanings common to

evolutionary game theory, which does not require that the players be intentional

agents knowingly employing strategies they can express. Hawks and doves can playhawk/dove without knowing it, so can governments and citizens. “Expectations

should be understood similarly.

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will sooner or later hit upon a new strategy that enables it to exploit the equilibrium

strategy of other players, thus destroying the equilibrium, breaking the temporarily

invariant regularity it sustains. If we can treat explanatory regularities in social

science in this way, we will have an attractive argument for Woodward’s conclusion

that even when spatio-temporally restricted, some regularities have explanatory

power, owing to their temporary invariance.

If this argument is right, it turns out that restricted regularities are invariant

and therefore explanatory because they are underwritten by less restricted invariances,

and these in turn by others, until we reach bed-rock with strict laws of the sort which

Woodward certainly does not think we need to back up explanations in social

science.9 To see why this is so, we need to turn to the home base of arms races,

biology, and consider how restricted regularities can be explanatory in that discipline.

4. Invariance and arms races in biology

It is widely held among philosophers of biology that there are no completely

invariant regularities in biology except for those reported in the Darwinian theory of

natural selection. A variety of arguments have been offered for this consensus view,

of which perhaps the most influential is John Beatty’s “evolutionary contingency

thesis”: All other regularities in biology—from the most invariant to the least—obtain

only as a result of the operation of natural selection on initial conditions that have

obtained in the history of the Earth, and are subject to abrogation by the operation of

natural selection on later conditions.10

The general argument is obvious, and it has immediate implications for

biological arms races. Since nature builds adaptations by a process of environmental

filtration of random variations, when environments change adaptations can become

9 That there will be strict laws at some deep level or other underwriting and

explaining restricted regularities is not disputed by Woodward (personalcommunication). But strict laws of physics, say, on which all other processes,

including those treated in social science, supervene, will not do the work which I will

argue Woodward’s theory requires. No one supposes that physical laws have any

significant role in social science’s explanations! Woodward’s claim is that

spatiotemporally restricted regularities in social science are explanatory even in the

absence of any less restricted regularities, still less strict social scientific laws to

underwrite them.10

Some philosophers of biology even deny that any invariant regularities operate inevolution. Beatty’s argument and conclusion can be rephrased to accommodate this

denial.

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maladaptations and vice versa; variations neutral in fitness in one environment can

become adaptive or maladaptive in another one. But nothing is forever: even the most

stable environmental conditions will sometimes change, and even quickly. Consider

how the asteroid impact at the Crutaceous-Tertiarty boundary 65 million years ago,

changed the environment and killed off all dinosaurs within a few years. Thus no

regularity thrown up by the process of natural selection is immune to breakdown as a

result of environmental change.

Once the evolutionary environment comes to include creatures and their

effects on one another, the life-times of regularities about creatures’ adapted traits fall

from the scale of billions of years (archebacteria—whose environment has not

changed for 3 billion years) to multiple geological epochs (oxygen-respirators) to

hundreds of millions of years (vertebrates) to weeks and months in the case of others

(the AIDS-virus). These evolutionary interactions between biological lineages are the

original “arms races.” Owing to the role of environmental change, even the most

established and long lasting regularities in biology are not as invariant as any well

established regularity of physical science.11

Given the slowness of most environmental changes, regularities about

individual species can remain invariant over geologically long periods. Changes such

as the shift to an oxygen-rich atmosphere, or continental drift or the on-set of ice ages

will break up some invariances and create new ones. Other, more rapidly occurring

species-making or changing processes such as earthquakes, major droughts, will have

similar results. But the invariances produced will be hard to break down for the same

11 Consider what was until recently thought to be the most invariant of

biological regularities: all genes are composed of DNA. For a long time this regularity

was subject to no exception. But because it remained invariant over a very long

period, its operation provided an environment that would allow for the selection for

any new biological system that could take advantage of the fact that all genes arecomposed of DNA. Such a system eventually came into existence—the RNA viruses,

whose genes are made of RNA and which parasitize the machinery of DNAreplication (the HIV virus is the most notable example of these viruses). Thus, the

regularity that all genes are made of DNA gives way to the regularity that they are all

made of nucleic acids (either RNA or DNA). But we can be sure that the arms race of

evolutionary competition will eventually undermine this new invariant regularity, by

producing an alternative means of genetic transmission that exploits the regularity

(unless it already has done so, by bringing about the prion protein that transmits Mad

Cow disease). The same arms race between DNA and RNA and priors also disposes

of another invariance of molecular biology, the so-called Central Dogma (in its strongform) that the flow of genetic information is always from DNA to RNA to proteins.

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reason that massive and long lasting environmental change was required to put them

in place.

However, matters begin to change quite radically once any species becomes

part of the selective environment of another species. In these circumstances

regularities about the latter species become comparatively shorter lived, more

temporary and more spatially restricted as well. The reason of course is that species

become part of one another’s selective environments when they compete, or one

predates upon or parasitizes the other, or both are predated by a third species, or both

predate a third species, or both cooperate for that matter. Under all these

circumstances, nature is persistently searching through design space seeking

variations in both species that will provide them with a selective advantage over the

other. Until it finds one, the two species are locked into a local equilibrium, one which

is reported in a temporarily invariant regularity. The theory of natural selection

however assures us that, if it can, natural selection will break up these local equilibria

along with the regularities that describe them and their consequences.12

12 Natural selection even produces locally invariant regularities between traits

that are not adapted at all, but are correlated as the by-products of traits mutually

selected for. For example, consider a remarkable discovery of Darwin’s: In all

mammalian species subject to domestication at least some examples are “piebald”— i.e. have spots, usually white on dark—and this trait is heritable. Darwin’s observationhas since been widely confirmed, even in “natural experiments,” in domestication of

hitherto wild and non-piebald species such as the mink have produced this trait.Presumably, being piebald is not an adaptation, and in general animal breeders do not

select for it. The relationship between being domesticated and being piebald is

nevertheless invariant, or has been hitherto. However, we pretty much know why.

Domestication has always proceeded by allowing the tamest, least aggressive young

to reproduce with one another. Tameness is a hereditary trait. At least some of the

genes involved in tameness behavior are probably located close together on the same

chromosomes as recessive genes that control for variegated coat color. Repeated

interbreeding always brings out the recessive trait of piebald coat in at least somedescendants. So long as those chromosomes are not broken in meiosis at points

between the herd genes and the piebald genes, the regularity that domestic specieshave some piebald members will be invariant. But of course this generalization is

evolutionarily contingent. There are several obvious circumstances—human and

natural interventions—that can and some day probably will break it down. Besides a

suite of mutations, a founder effect recombination that breaks the chromosomal link,

or (equivalently) a persistent program of artificial selection to breed non-peibald

domestic animals, there is the possibility of a new move in some arms race we have

not noticed breaking the invariance. Being peibald may become an adaptational

disadvantage owing to the conspicuousness or other fitness lowering effect of suchmarks in an evolutionary arms race with predators or parasites.

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When traits are genetically coded, the arms race process will be relatively

slow, though much faster than non-arms race adaptational change. Since favorable

mutations are rare, biological invariances between genetically encoded traits will be

often be locked as the result of some relatively long term stable equilibrium in the

arms race. Besides interspecific competition, there is also a great deal of intraspecific

competition, arms races between lineages within a single species, which also makes

and breaks invariances at an even faster rate than intraspecific competition does.

The upshot is that all invariances among genetically encoded traits are

restricted. During the periods that they obtain, they are vulnerable to being

undermined by random variations that break up co-adaptational equilibria. As the rate

of variation increases, the life span of an invariant regularity will decrease as will the

spatial range over which it obtains. In the case of competition between very fast

breeding species—say, between parasites and their host-targets—for example phage

and bacteria or bacteria and humans, regularities may remain invariant only for a few

years, months or even weeks. (Consider the life-times of antibiotic effectiveness).

The role of the environment and of the onset of arms races in making and

breaking biological invariances explains clearly the differences in the successes and

limits of biological models. Among the most widely used models in biology is the

Hardy-Weinberg model which is employed to describe gene and genotypic

frequencies of sexual species under a set of well known assumptions, and can reliably

be employed to identify sources of evolutionary change. There are only a small

number of values of its variables for which the Hardy Weinberg model fails to be

invariant. This is largely because intergenomic arms race conflicts are few and far

between, most having devolved into very stable equilibria long ago on evolutionary

time scales. A somewhat less invariant relation is described Fischer’s model of why

sex ratios remain equal in sexually reproducing species. There are well understood

environments in which the optimal sex ratios are far from equal and the model fails to

apply—for example where the environment prevents female off-spring from

dispersing. Relationships among predators and prey of the sort modeled by Lotka

Volterra simultaneous differential equations are likely to be more invariant than those

between bacterial parasites and their hosts described in Nicholson-Bailey models of a

mathematically similar type. For the much more shorter intergenerational time and

more rapid rate of mutation in the latter case will result in one or the other of the

parasite or host much more quickly breaking out of the relationship between them

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altogether than will predator/prey relations among much more slowly varying

metazoans break down.

In biology, restricted regularities are explanatory because they reflect local

equilibria underwritten by unrestricted regularities—laws of nature—that Darwin

discovered. These regularities are restricted owing to the inevitability of arms races

which the unrestricted regularities Darwin discovered ordain.

The next section explores whether appealing to Darwinian processes and their

consequent arms races can underwrite the explanatory power of restricted regularities

in the social sciences.

5. Restricted regularities, and arms races in human affairs

There is a simple argument for the claim that restricted regularities in human

affairs are explanatory for exactly the same reasons that such regularities are

explanatory in biology. The difficulty with this argument is grounding its premises. I

provide the argument and sketch how its premises can be grounded immediately

afterward.

1. Almost all significant features of human affairs—historical actions, events,

processes, norms, organizations, institutions, etc—have functions—i.e.

adaptations, or else they are the direct results of such adaptations.

2. The only source of functions or adaptations in nature—including human

affairs--are Darwinian processes of blind variation and environmental

filtration. All regularities among adaptations (or their direct results) are local

equilibria, which are eventually broken up by arms races. Such restricted

regularities have limited explanatory power underwritten by unrestricted

Darwinian regularities.

Therefore,

3. All restricted regularities about human affairs are local equilibria eventually

to be broken up by arms races, and have limited explanatory power

underwritten by unrestricted Darwinian regularities.

This argument provides the restricted regularities of the human sciences with all the

explanatory power that such regularities have in biology. The cost of adopting such an

argument is a strong commitment to Darwinism about all human affairs. But the

premises can be given considerable support, and so provide reason to adopt such a

commitment.

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Premise 1 may seem dubious at first blush. How could almost everything in

human affairs be an adaptation? That sounds like an idea worthy of Pollyanna or

Voltaire’s Dr Plangloss. Even in biology, not everything turns out to be an adaptation.

Much of evolution is a matter of drift—the play of chance on small and sometimes

even large populations that leads to changes in the distribution of adaptations, and

even to the persistence of non-adaptive and maladaptive traits. Moreover, important

biological traits are themselves either the result of physical constraints or were

acquired as adaptations early enough in evolutionary processes to remain fixed long

after they ceased to be adaptations. Surely all the same must be said of the course of

human affairs. Indeed, for obvious reasons, there may well be a great role for drift and

constrain in human affairs than biological processes.

Of course premise 1 does need to be understood as qualified by the reality of

drift and constraint in human affairs. In fact the plausibility of the claim that premise

1 makes about the adaptedness of most features human affairs relies a great deal on

the qualification ‘significant.’ There will be many features of human affairs that are

the result of drift, and yet few social scientists will accept the suggestion that what

particularly interests them about human affairs is the result of random drift alone or

even mainly. Similarly, social scientists will recognize constraints of many kinds as

forcing subsequent features of human affairs to adapt to them. But few social

scientists accord such constraints the fixed character that constraints—especially

physical ones—have in biological evolution. In fact, the most revolutionary social

changes in fact break down the oldest, firmest, and most pervasive constraints, as a

result of processes of variation and selection. The real issue is whether such variation

is blind and the resultant selection natural.

Reflection on human affairs does suggest that even more than in biology,

significant features of social life are largely or even wholly adaptations for some one,

or some group, or some practice. Human social life consists of adaptations

constructed by individuals and groups to cope with an environment that has mostly

come to consist of other individuals and groups and their adaptations. Social life is

nothing but adaptations competing and cooperating with one another. Some of the

adaptations are ones people think they designed—institutions like the US constitution,

and built—artifacts like the Eifel Tower. But mostly the adaptations emerged from

history without any one intending, designing, or even recognizing them. This is

especially true of the most important ones: think of feudalism, the Roman Catholic

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Church, two adaptations that were around for a long time. Then there are short lived

adaptations—processes like the New Deal, occurrences like D-Day, or events like the

Defenestration of Prague, which are composed of parts someone did intend and ordain

and other parts that just emerged as the unintended consequences of intentional

actions by some of their participants.

Then there are the features of human life that no one designed, that didn’t

emerge unintentionally from actions and events people did “design” or intend, but that

are best thought of as symbionts, or parasites, or sometimes combinations of both,

living on human life, and changing it for the better or for the worse, but always

adapting to insure their own survival.

It’s difficult to think of tobacco-smoking, or heroin addiction as adaptations,

because they are harmful. They are harmful to humans, but they are practices with

features that ensure their persistence and spread through human history, at least until

their environments change and their effects start to be selected against. Chinese foot-

binding is a nice example of how this works. Foot-binding persisted for about a 1000

years in China. It got started because women with bound feet were more attractive as

wives. Bound feet were a signal of wealth, since only rich families could afford the

luxury of preventing daughters from working. Girls with bound feet were easier to

keep track of and so likelier to be virgins, etc. So, at first, when the practice arose,

foot-bound girls had more suitors. Pretty soon every family that could afford it was

binding daughters’ feet to assure they’d get married. Result: when every girl’s feet

were bound, foot-binding no longer provided an advantage in the marriage market,

and all foot-bound girls were worse of because they couldn’t walk, suffered other

health effects, etc. Foot binding starts out as an adaptation for some girls, and for

some families, but by the time it becomes really widespread and fixed, it is actually a

physical maladaptation that lowered every foot-bound girl’s fitness. But once every

one was doing it, no one could get off the foot-binding merry-go round. Any one who

stopped binding daughters’ feet condemns them to spinsterhood. Here we have a

tradition, a norm----Bind daughters’ feet!--that by the time it was widely adopted

ceased to an adaptation for the people whose behavior it governs. Why did it persist

despite its maladaptive effects on foot-bound girls? For whom or for what were its

features adaptations? For itself, for the practice, norm, institution of foot binding! The

practice persists, like any parasite, because of its adaptations, those of its features that

exploit the “weaknesses” of humans and their institutions—marriage, the desire for

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virgin-brides and large dowries, the desire to control women before and after

marriage.

Once we widen our focus, the claim that almost everything of interest to social

scientists in human affairs has functions or adaptations becomes far less Panglossian.

But can it be correct? One reason to suppose it must be is the fact that almost all the

vocabulary and taxonomy of common sense and the human sciences are themselves

thoroughly functional. As a consequence it would be difficult for common sense and

social/behavioral science to even notice or describe anything except in terms that

attributed effects to it that are beneficial for some one or something! And of course

movements in social science have erected this taxonomy into a methodological

practice: witness the traditions of functionalism, structural functionalism, and its

attendant distinction between manifest and latent functions.

Moreover, the predictive and ameliorative goals of the human sciences impose

upon them all research programs that assume that most of the significant features of

human affairs are adaptations for some individuals and groups, and maladaptations for

other groups. Though each of the social sciences may be neutral on the adaptive

character of the actions, events, norms, practices, and institutions in the domains of

the other social and behavioral sciences, it will not be agnostic about those within its

proprietary domain This will be true at least so long as it has ameliorative ambitions

for social processes in its domain. The remodeling and redesign of political, legal,

economic, social, or cultural institutions, rules, norms, and practices would be

impossible if these items were not to varying degrees adaptive and maladaptive for

individuals, and groups of various sizes and compositions, or for themselves as

parasites on human wants, needs, and interests.

To these considerations, must be added the qualifications on premise 1 that are

required to accommodate drift and constraint. Just as these two factors make a central

part of contemporary Darwinian theory in biological science, any extension of the

theory to social science must be understood as including drift and constraint as

indispensible components of its explanatory resources. If the scope for them, and

especially for drift, is much greater than in biology, then of course a Darwinian theory

of human affairs will leave proportionately more social phenomena as unexplained

because merely matters of random drift than does a Darwinian theory of biological

evolution. Great scope for drift would certainly be a weakness of Darwinian social

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science. I doubt the scope for it is in fact very great in those areas that interest social

scientists.

Premise 2 asserts that only Darwinian processes can account for adaptations,

whether biological or social. Here the argument is by exclusion of alternative

processes. There are obvious reasons to rule out several alternative explanations for

the ubiquity and persistence of adaptations in biological and human affairs. Neither a

designing deity nor future ends, goals, purposes, targets can be invoked in a causal

explanation for any adaptation. Immanent teleologies, entelechies, vital forces, are as

objectionable as future causation. This leaves only human design as an alternative to

Darwinian processes of blind variation and environmental filtration, as a source of the

adaptedness in human affairs.

In general, people overestimate the role of intentional human design in human

affairs, and even this overestimate leaves the origin and persistence of a large number

of social adaptations unexplained, among which are some of the most important ones.

For example, consider Hayek’s Nobel-prize winning identification of the function of

the price mechanism and proof that it could not be the result of any individual human

intentions. Another example is provided by Coase’s explanation of the origin and

persistent of the firm as an adaption for solving a transaction-cost problem that no one

who was party to the origin and maintenance of business firms probably ever

recognized.

Moreover, there are reasons to think that when human norms, practices and

institutions are once consciously invented, their persistence can only be the result of

Darwinian processes, as opposed to continual intentional maintenance. And there is

further reason to suppose that the processes of human conscious intentional creation

are themselves Darwinian ones carried out within the brain(s) of those who intend

them. For the explanation of the apparently purposive creations of human intention

faces the same problems as the explanation of other biological adaptations: once we

have ruled out future causation, immanent teleologies or vital/spiritual forces and

disembodied minds, there seems no alternative to treating brain processes that

eventuate in individual actions as Darwinian ones as well.

But if human affairs are mostly the emergence, persistence and improvement

of adaptations by Darwinian processes, then we can expect only a limited number of

different kinds of regularities about the relationships between them, regularities of the

sort already familiar in biology. First, regularities about the (real, or latent) function of

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a norm or practice or institution: e.g., “all firms function to solve the transaction cost

problem.” Then there will be regularities about the co-occurrence of adaptations in the

same individuals or lineages of them, regularities of co-occurrence of adaptations in

two or more distinct individuals or lineages—cases of co-evolution or mutualism, or

parasitism (I give the most famous example of such a regularity in political science

below). These regularities will in effect record local equilibria among adaptations,

ones that last as long as the regularities that report them obtain.

But as in biology, each individual’s or group’s adaptation sets a design

problem for the individuals and groups with which it finds itself in local equilibrium.

The existence of these mutual design problems together with the persistent but blind

variation among adaptations, means that the prospects for arms races are ever present

and every local equilibrium must eventually be broken by an arms race. Whence the

restricted character of every explanatory regularity and all the models in social

science.

Examples of these are easy to identify. Consider perhaps the most robust

regularity in international relations, perhaps even in the whole of political science:

Arguably, no two democracies have ever gone to war with one another. There is

apparently not a single exception to this regularity since democracies emerged at the

end of the 18th century, even though the number of pairs of countries at war with each

other since 1776 is literally in the several thousands.13 Apparently, the trait of being a

democracy and the trait of not going to war with a democracy are for the moment at

least co-adapted to each other, and this probably helps explain several things, like

why democracies do better economically than even market-economy dictatorships

(fewer wars), and why the number of democracies seems to be increasing. It has also

guided foreign policy—the US and European encouragement of new democracies to

ensure stability and peace.

But, nothing is forever. We can be confident that somewhere or some when,

some democracy is going to find a way to exploit this regularity by attacking some

completely unsuspecting fellow-democracy, lulled into a false sense of the

13Rare dissenters from this view have invoked the US Civil War, and the belligerency

of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany as counterexamples, since both parties to the civil war

considered themselves democracies, and Germany had an elected (if largely

powerless) Reichstag. Suffice it to say that these counterexamples are controversialand have been rejected on a variety of counts., If accepted they would not undermine

the argument advanced here.

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permanence of peace among democracies. How can we be so confident? Just as

mother nature searches through biological design space for variations that can take

advantage of the environment of other adaptations the variation faces, so to it will

search for variations in the human social design space. And the rate of variation will

be vastly accelerated in comparison to biological evolution. For human evolution

doesn’t have to wait a 20-year generation for a variation in genes to change a trait the

way that biological evolution must.

One more example, this time of a mathematical model explanatory over a

restricted domain whose explanatory power is destroyed by an arms race breaking up

a local equilibrium. Consider again what was for a long time the most influential

model in economics, and perhaps even all of social science, the LM/IS graphs and

equations of Keynesian macroeconomics. This set of graphs and enabled economists

of the third quarter of the 20th century successfully to model the invariant relationship

between sets of macroeconomic variables, including investment and savings,

consumption and gross national income, the interest rate and the money supply, and

with one another. The Phillips’ curve discussed above, having been grounded in

macroeconomic data, was often explained by appeal to the Keynesian IS/LM model.

The stagflation of the 70’s put an end to the model’s general acceptance, and

resulted in its replacement by newer ones, including the rational expectations model.

This model, though not as neat and simple as the IS/LM model, explained why the

superseded model was no longer a basis for effective intervention. The analysis of

why the Keynesian model ceased to work was roughly that, if it ever worked at all,

then the co-adaptations it identified, were broken up by an arms race. The model’s

widespread dissemination, or at least the fact that economic agents had become

acquainted with the governmental interventions it guided, resulted in a change in their

choices, one which rendered the Phillips’ curve inoperative and fiscal policy

ineffective.

The beautiful and for a while powerful model of the capitalist economy that

John Maynard Keynes inspired ceased to work because the relationships it described

broke down once some of the institutions, groups and individuals the model included,

began to exploit the fact that other institutions were guided by it, to frustrate the

policies the model guided. Result: 10 or 15 years after it became widely known, the

Keynesian model became the victim of an arms race.

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Examples are not arguments even though they can be proliferated ad

infinitum. But there is a simple argument which they buttress and which explains

them./ It shows exactly why restricted regularities and mathematical models are

explanatory and why they are the best we can hope for in the explanation of human

affairs.

6. Dealing with the no-memes objection to Darwinism about human affairs

The simple argument of section 4 will be accused of invoking Darwinian

processes without showing that their necessary conditions obtain, and it will be

argued that a crucial one among these necessary conditions cannot obtain in human

affairs.

The objection is simple: Darwinian processes require replicators and

interactors. In particular it requires high fidelity replicators to store and transmit traits

faithfully enough and long enough for environmental filtration to shape them into

adaptations and to maintain them as adaptations. In the biological domain these

replicators are the genes. There are no equivalent replicators in human affairs, or at

least there are not enough of them for Darwinian processes to explain human affairs.

Darwinism of the sort evinced in the argument of section 4 requires cultural

replicators--memes. But there are no memes. No memes, ergo no Darwinian

processes. (Cf. Sperber, 2000 for the origin of this widely mooted argument).

Darwinian social scientists can respond to this objection in many ways. To

begin with, it is obvious that the literal application of Darwinian theory to a domain

does not require that the domain contain gene-like replicators. Notice that biological

replicators—genes—are themselves the product of natural selection on Earth, and

evolution by natural selection presumably got its start prior to the emergence of these

replicators, and for that matter, prior to the emergence of any recognizable very high

fidelity informationally rich replicators. Moreover, natural selection is likely to

produce replicators of the sort that the genes constitute only when environments

change slowly, evolution is extremely gradual, cumulative, and atomistic in its

shaping of individual traits, one by one, for adaptations. When one or more of these

conditions do not obtain, adaptive evolution may employ replicators and processes of

replication quite unlike genes.

Following Richarson and Boyd (2006), defenders of Darwinian approaches to

culture have also argued that cultural replicators need not have the high fidelity

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features of genes, since there are a variety practices, norms, and institutions in human

culture which have emerged as adaptations precisely because they preserve the

adaptive informational content of replicators even under conditions of low copy

fidelity. (Cf. Driscoll, 2008, for a useful recent discussion.)

It should however be granted that Darwinism about human affairs does

require cultural replicators, probably a variety of quite different kinds of replicators,

and some of them may be gene-like. I am prepared to call them memes, since the label

is such a good meme. But even if we grant that Darwinism about human affairs

requires at least some memes that are a lot like genes, the arguments that there are no

such things as memes are poor ones. More important, the memes which Darwinism

about human affairs requires will be huge in number, short in life spans, and

extremely difficult to individuate, for the very same reason regularities in the human

sciences are restricted: because of the ubiquity of arms races. So, it will be no surprise

that few obvious examples of memes can be provided now, or perhaps ever.

To reprise the argument from no memes to no Darwinian processes in human

affairs; memes have to be like genes, because natural selection only works in culture

when there are gene-like replicators in culture. There are no such gene-like replicators

in human affairs. Ergo no Darwinian processes in human affairs. The trouble with this

argument is that it rests on an idea of what genes are and how they work that was

obsolete about a hundred years ago. This is the one trait-one gene idea, the notion that

most or many significant observed inherited traits are controlled by a single gene.

There are only a small number of such traits in any mammal, and in humans

only about 7 such traits are known. For example, tongue rolling or the widow’s peak.

All other inherited traits in humans, like eye- and skin color, even sexual

characteristics, are the each result of the inheritance of many and in some cases a huge

number of genes. In fact, genes don’t really transmit or control the appearance of any

of the biological traits common sense and folk biology think they do. Each gene

controls the production of a protein or other large molecule. There are 25,000 of these

genes, switched on and off in every cell of our bodies. It’s the protein molecules they

code for, and the order in which the proteins are produced by the genes that build

biological machinery. Many different traits that don’t have anything to do with each

other are built or controlled by the same gene; many traits that look to us absolutely

the same to us—say eye color—are the result of different sets of different genes in

different people. And when we actually locate the genes in side the nucleus of our

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somatic cells, and in the sperm and egg that develop into our bodies when they

combine, the DNA structures of the same genes can differ from one another without

that difference making any difference for the proteins they produce.

The moral for memes is obvious: if memes are like genes then any single

meme will by itself almost never either control the appearance of a behavior or action

or anything else that common sense or even sophisticated social science is interested

in. It will take many, many memes working together to produce anything of interest to

the human sciences, and we will never be able to detect or identify memes by doing

anything like garden-variety sociology, economics, anthropology, or even

psychology. Whatever memes are, they are going to be as complicated and hard to

identify as genes are, or even more so!

If memes are anything like genes, it is going to be very hard to identify them,

isolate or individuate them, and learn the details of how they work. Doing any of

these things for “memetics” will be orders of magnitude more difficult than what a

century of molecular biology has done for genetics. And the reason for all three of

these difficulties will in large measure be the ubiquity of arm races cutting short the

life time of any regularity about a particular package of memes. The shorter this life

time, the more difficult it will be for any social or behavioral scientist to design a

method for identifying these package, still less identifying their component memes.

To figure out the mechanism of transmission of some package of memes that controls

for a socially interesting adaptated behavior, will require first a long enough lived

regularity about that adapted behavior, second two long enough lived regularities

about how the particular package of memes that codes for the behavior and transmits

it does each of these things. Since in a social environment of accelerating change,

these packages of memes and the memes themselves will be transmitted faster and

faster, and their modes of transmission and control interfered with more and more

effectively, as arms races accelerate, the chances of identifying and locating memes

become lower and lower as cultures change accelerates.

This is not an argument for memes. At most it is a well-grounded explanation

for why social and behavioral scientists are unlikely to find them, an excuse erected

on the criticism of a bad argument against the very possibility of memes. If there are

memes, regularities about their transmission, mode of action, and realizations in the

brain, will be complex, short lived, and completely beyond the reach of any

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hypothesis-testing in the social sciences. So, if we can’t identify them, why suppose

that there are any memes?

The real argument for memes is the two premises of section 4. If these

premises are reasonable and support the conclusion that human affairs must be

Darwinian in nature, then that’s the argument for memes, or whatever replicators are

required by Darwinian processes in human affairs.

Should the human sciences down tools until neuroscience or some even more

molecular sub-discipline has established the existence or nonexistence of memes? Did

the rest of biology stop working while geneticists did the century of research that was

required first to establish the existence of genes and then to identify their location,

composition and model of action? Of course not. The same goes for the human

sciences.

7. Conclusion: a moral for institution design

In one respect the arms race character of human interactions, together with the

decreasing cost of acquiring, and employing information to make instrumentally

rational decisions, may have a reflexive impact on social science, mathematical

modeling and especially models that invoke rational choice theory. In fact the recent

financial crisis and the consequent demand for reforms of the credit markets provide a

nice illustration of the reflexiveness of social science and the arms races currently in

progress in human affairs.

As we now know from the work of cognitive psychologists, evolutionary

game theories and others, human choice-behavior is mostly the result of heuristics,

fast and frugal inferences, preferences that do not honor von Neumann Morgenstern

axioms of expected utility, and norms that emerged as a result of natural selection in

pre-modern settings.

In any competition with users of rational choice models, the loses due to

employing quick and dirty heuristics in decision making rise, and the incentives to

engage in classically rational behavior increase. As the incentives to employing

rational choice models increase and the costs of doing so decline, more and more of

the behavior of interest in the social sciences—political behavior, business strategy,

social cooperation, will begin to satisfy the models of rational choice theory

This will put pressure on many cooperative institutions that emerged in past

environments as evolutionarily stable Nash equilibria among individuals making

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choices employing a variety of heuristics, including fairness-, equity, and other

cooperative norm. Under relentless attack from rational choice norms, such

cooperative institutions will have to undergo substantial redesign. Otherwise they will

fall prey to arms race subversion, and fail to protect participants from perfectly

rational free riders operating in the new environment created by the changed costs and

incentives. Institutions that don’t change to protect their participants will be

undermined and will become extinct, along with the regularities in behavior that they

support. Institutions that do change, and altogether new institutions, embodying new

norms, may persist in new equilibria for varying lengths of time. But eventually they

will simply set new design problems for participants and others with incentives to

exploit them, and thereby set off a new sequence of arms races.

If substantial financial reform can be introduced, the costs of coming up with

good new ideas about how to beat the system will increases or the benefits to doing so

decrease enough to slow down this arms race that nature imposes on all its creatures.

But don’t count on its happening any time soon.

Alex Rosenberg

Duke University

References

Becker, G., 1976, The Economic approach to Human Behavior , University of

Chicago Press

Driscoll, C., 2008, “The Problem of Adaptive Individual Choice in Cultural

Evolution”, Biology and Philosophy, 23: 101-113

Friedman, Milton, 1968 “The Role of Monetary Policy.” American Economic Review 58: 1–17.

Friedman, Michael, 1974, “Explanation and Scientific Understanding”, The Journal of Philosophy, 71: 5-19

James, J., 1985, “Shifts in the Nineteenth-Century Phillips Curve Relationship”

NBER Working Paper No. 1587

Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A., 1982, Judgment under uncertainty:

Heuristics and biases, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Keynes, J. M. , 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,London: Macmillan

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Lucas, R., 1972, "Expectations and the Neutrality of Money," Journal of Economic

Theory ,4, 103-124.

Phillips, A., 1958, “The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of

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Richarson, P., and Boyd, R., 2006, Not By Genes Alone, Chicago, University of

Chicago Press.

Samuelson, P., and Solow, R.M., 1960, “Analytical Aspects of Anti-inflation Policy,”

American Economic Review 50: 177–194.

Sperber, D., 2000, “An objection to the memetic approach to culture, in Robert

Aunger ed., Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. OxfordUniversity Press, pp. 163-173.

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