DARWIN IS MORE THAN SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST / THE FINANCIAL TIMES ( RECOMMENDED READING )

Darwin is more than survival of the fittest


Review by Morgan Witzel

Published: November 3 2010 23:16

Darwin’s Conjecture


The Search for General Principles of Social and Scientific Evolution


By Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen

University of Chicago Press, $45/ £29

Few thinkers have had quite the same impact as Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution was so powerful and compelling that it became the new orthodoxy, affecting how we think about many aspects of our lives. Not least of these influences has been on the way we do business. So-called social Darwinism has played an important role in shaping our understanding of economics, markets and organisations.

For example, when discussing business organisations we often speak of them “adapting” and “evolving” to meet conditions in their changing “environment”, as if our business organisations were some sort of Galápagos seabird and not large and highly complex institutions.


When, during the recent crisis, many companies failed, it was easy for us to explain this in Darwinian terms. These failed businesses were weak: according to the law of “survival of the fittest”, they had been selected out. The business world is a jungle, a harsh environment in which only the strong can adapt and survive. Or so our thinking often goes.

But do these “Darwinian” notions about business have any real grounding in Darwin’s own theory? Ac­cording to Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen, the answer is largely no. Nevertheless, Darwin’s theories can be extremely important in helping us to understand how organisations, institutions and markets change. Rather than picking bits out of the Darwinian corpus and adapting them to suit our own purposes – or to fit our own preconceptions – we need to look at his theory as a whole.


This is not a book about business, but it is a book that business people should read in order to understand business.


It is a scholarly and profound work of relevance to all the social sciences, and there are times when the lay reader will be glad for the glossary thoughtfully provided at the end of the book.


Its primary value for the business reader is to expose some of the fallacies connected with Darwinism that have grown up over the years, and re-examine our ideas.


The authors, professors at the University of Hertfordshire Business School and the University of Southern Denmark, maintain that Darwinian ideas have been applied to economics “in crude form”. Economists and business gurus have stressed ideas such as competition and individualism, to the point where “survival of the fittest” has become something of a mantra.


As a result, key Darwinian ideas such as mutual aid, sympathy and co-operation have often been ignored by later writers on business and economics. The authors remind us of these overlooked theories, and challenge the idea that Darwinism offers such easy solutions as “survival of the fittest” in any case. “Darwinism as such provides no single model or axiomatic system,” they say. “There is no simple explanation of why some organisations prosper and others fail.”

Darwin’s theory rests on three simple principles: variation, selection, and replication or inheritance.


Of the three, it is inheritance that has received most attention in recent years thanks to advances in genetics. And in business we sometimes talk of organisations as “inheriting” characteristics in the same way that people do, or having an “organisational DNA” as part of their cultures. But as the authors point out, this is a fallacy. Organisations do not have genes, nor is their method of evolving comparable to replication. There is, they say, no comparison between organisations and people on this level.

Instead, when we consider how organisations change, we need to look at all three principles: the variation in types of organisation, the factors for why some organisations work better in some environments than others, and then how organisations change and grow. Competition exists, of course, they write, but it is only one factor out of many.

One key lesson from this book is that we need to consider more closely how businesses interact and depend on each other, even when they are also in direct competition.


Rather than seeing markets as arenas for combat, we should consider them as complex systems, with companies linked together through that system. Rec­ognising, perhaps, that businesses need to think less about competition and more about co-operation, the latter might offer better prospects for long-term survival.


More generally, we need to remember that markets and businesses are infinitely more complex than we like to think they are. The authors do not shy away from complexity; indeed, they hint in the conclusion that we need more of it in our thinking about business.


The authors conclude that Darwin’s theory of evolution can be a rich source of inspiration and understanding for modern social scientists, economists and business people. They are critical of those who shy away from Darwin’s theories as being somehow too difficult to understand and those who treat the theory as a pick ‘n’ mix – helping themselves to the bits they like and discarding the rest.


One needs to understand the whole theory in order to see how evolution really works.


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.