ROLES, SYSTACTS, SOCIETIES, EMPIRES

It should by now be abundantly clear just how different are the mechanisms of heritable variation and competitive selection of information affecting phenotypic behaviour when social rather than natural or cultural selection is the driving evolutionary force. If the archetypal just-so story of cultural selection is the visionary preacher from whom an expanding group of disciples acquires by imitation and learning a novel set of memes and a consequential life-style whose ongoing reproduction the environment turns out to favour, the archetypal just-so story of social selection is the innovative entrepreneur who in the environment of a putting-out economy – with or without the memes of a ‘Protestant Ethic’ inside his head – imposes the novel but highly adaptive practice of wage-labour on an expanding workforce and thereby forces his competitors either to exit the market or to employ wage-workers themselves. There is of course no single practice ‘for’ a distinctive mode of production (or persuasion, or coercion) any more than there is a single meme ‘for’ a distinctive cultural behaviour-pattern or a single gene ‘for’ a distinctive personality trait. But at the social, as at the cultural and biological, level there are somewhere in all the noise and clutter the critical mutations and combinations in the information affecting behaviour at population level which have to be identified and traced.