Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.

33 (2002) 199207
www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Essay review

Darwinnovation!
Tim Lewens
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane,
Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK

Technological innovation as an evolutionary process

John Ziman (Ed.); Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. xvii+379,
Price 42.50 hardback, ISBN 0-521-62361-8.
It should be uncontroversial that, in some sense, technology change proceeds by an
evolutionary process.1 It should be uncontroversial because evolution is a term so
elastic that it can be stretched far enough to encompass almost any set of phenomena
that extend over time. In some sense, the cosmos has evolved. In some sense, the
Himalayas have evolved. In the most abstract sense of the term, any set of items
with a history has evolved.
The interesting question to ask is how much flesh can be put on the bones of a
minimal evolutionary conception without rendering the resulting theory implausible
as an account of technology change. In an influential book, George Basalla commits
himself only to a skeletal account:
Because there is an excess of technological novelty and consequently not a close
fit between invention and wants or needs, a process of selection must take place
in which some innovations are developed and incorporated into a culture while
others are rejected. Those that are chosen will be replicated, join the stream of
made things, and serve as antecedents for a new generation of variant artefacts.
Rejected novelties have little chance of influencing the future shape of the made
world unless a deliberate effort is made to bring them back into the stream.
(Basalla, 1988, p. 135)
No one could take issue with this, but is it enough to count as a genuine evolutionary
theory in the Darwinian mould? True enough, Basalla makes use of terms that feature

E-mail address: tml1000@hermes.cam.ac.uk (T. Lewens).

All page references are to the Ziman collection unless otherwise indicated.

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in evolutionary biology, terms like selection, fitness and replication. Yet perhaps on
inspection we will see that these are mere metaphors. The sceptic will suspect that
even the bones of this evolutionary theory will crumble under such examination.
One might ask: what is the relationship between the intuitive idea of close fit
between an invention and the wants or needs of its users and the technical concept
of trait fitness? In what sense are artefacts replicators? Artefacts arise reliably, generation after generation, yet do they make copies of themselves? Are artefacts copied
at all? Dont they more often come off production lines, so that generations of artefacts do not produce each other, but instead owe their production to a common cause?
These questions constitute a common line of attack on evolutionary theories of
technology change. Perhaps in some metaphorical sense technology evolves. But,
the argument goes, not even the core concepts of evolutionary theory fitness,
replication, heredity can be applied with sufficient precision to merit any fullblooded evolutionary theory of technology change.
There is a second line of attack that is pursued less often, but which I will focus
on in this essay. Full-blooded or not, the sceptic says, an evolutionary theory of
technology change offers no insights that have eluded, or would elude, traditional
models of technology change that refer to market forces, social forces or the inspiration of lone geniuses. Consider the following explanation as an example, again
taken from Basalla:
Structural features that were necessary for marine craft were either useless or
counterproductive on boats plying western rivers. These streams were relatively
shallow and seldom, if ever, had large damaging waves. In case of a storm a
steamboat was never far from shore. Sails were not needed on a steam-powered
vessel nor could they have been used effectively within the narrow confines of a
river . . . Because of the different conditions found on inland waters, the sea-going
model of the eastern steamboat was transformed into the river steamboat in less
than fifty years. (Basalla, 1988, p. 89)
Basalla does not offer an explicitly evolutionary explanation for the transformation
of the eastern steamboat into the river steamboat. Yet it is easy to see what such an
explanation would look like. After removal to a novel environment, variants on the
eastern steamboat plan were quickly thrown up and selected, by virtue of their better
fit with the new demands of western rivers. The notion that the makeup of made
objects can be predicted or explained in terms of the demands of the situations in
which they are put to use is hardly revolutionary. Here, then, lies the second challenge to evolutionary views of technology change: even if we grant that some quite
strictly Darwinian process applies to artefacts, what novel explanatory or predictive
resources does this buy us?
The two problems are intertwined. One way to secure the claim that artefacts
evolve by a process that is genuinely, rather than metaphorically, Darwinian is to
weaken the conditions that must be satisfied if a process is to count as Darwinian.
Some of these moves are now quite standard (see, for example, Hull, Glenn, &
Langman, 2001): one should not require that inheritance be mediated by genes; one

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should not require that patterns of heredity across generations observe Mendelian
laws. Others are more contentious, and more cautiously adopted: selection need not
require some single set of items that qualify as replicators; perhaps selection does
not need replicators at all (see Godfrey-Smith, 2000, for expansion of this last
possibility). As the content of evolutionary theory is diluted in this way, its predictive
power is correspondingly reduced. Hence the basic challenge for the proponent of
the evolutionary approach is to offer a conception of evolution weak enough to be
true of artefacts and culture in general, without being so weak as to offer no surprising predictions or insights.
John Zimans collection of twenty-two new essays on the subject of evolution and
technology certainly makes for interesting reading. It includes contributions from
historians, philosophers, biologists, anthropologists and management theorists ranging over such diverse subjects as genetic algorithms (Miller, Ch. 15), the rhythm
method of contraception (David, Ch. 10) and aircraft landing gear (Vincenti, Ch.
13). However, it does little to reassure the reader that the central challenge for evolutionary theories of technology can be surmounted. We see numerous theoretical
discussions of technology change as a selection process: do artefacts really demonstrate heritable variation in fitness? Isnt technology change Lamarckian? What are
the units of cultural selection? We also see many easily understood cases of technology change recast in the evolutionary idiom: the stasis in Japanese sword manufacture is an example of evolutionary lock-in, where a delicate process becomes
resistant to alteration because even small changes in manufacturing can make the
finished artefact useless (Martin, Ch. 8). The Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster is an
example of real-world selection: the failure of the bridge exemplifies a case where
the exigencies of the weather cause the demise of an artefact (Vincenti, Ch. 13). What
we do not see are cases where the evolutionary account offers a novel explanation for
some technological change.
Evolutionary theory itself is silent on many questions of interest to students of
technology change, hence its adoption leaves the answers to most of these questions
open. Does the evolutionary approach entail some thesis of technological gradualism?
If technology always changes by the gradual accumulation of small mutations, then
should we expect that we will always find smooth transitions in the form of artefacts
over time, without great saltations? No, and for two reasons. First, as many theorists
are keen to point out, gradual selection can take place in the minds, notebooks and
workshops of inventors (Carlson, Ch. 11). Hence, a good inventor can produce a
novel artefact quite different from any that has gone before. Second, rules of thumb
for how to modify artefacts can themselves evolve, so that significant leaps through
design space are possible even against a basically Darwinian conception of innovation.
Could evolutionary theory offer a useful predictive framework for technology
change? Again, that seems unlikely. Evolutionary biology is a science with poor
predictive power (Lewens, in press). One needs to know, at a minimum, both the
likely variants available for selection and the environmental selection pressures that
influence the fitness of these variants. Without such data, predictions are worthless.
As we accumulate such data, we begin to generate models that look similar, if not

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identical, to existing predictive models of marketing or economics. How are we to

predict which species of computer operating system will proliferate in some market
ecology? Look at what variants are available, look at their potential for mutation
and alteration, and look at the selection pressures acting on them. In other words,
look at who the competitors are in the field, at their track records for research and
development, and at their abilities to satisfy the requirements and preferences of
users.
Surely evolutionary biology offers novel explanatory concepts? One might think,
for example, that the concept of frequency-dependent selection is important, since
it can help us to see that the fate of a computer operating system is in large part
dependent on the proportion of people using the same operating system in some
community. Again, although it is true that evolutionary theory has this resource, it
is one that economics has already found and expressed through the concepts of externalities, barriers to market entry, and increasing returns. That evolutionary biology
has little to offer economics and marketing should be no surprise, since evolutionary
biology itself has borrowed some of its most important explanatory tools most
obviously game theory from economics itself.
What is more, there are many factors that enter into a marketers predictive analysis that are not so easily captured by the evolutionary view. To determine what
operating system will best succeed one needs to know about quite general features
of the organisation producing the system, not simply features of the product itself
and its environment. Does the organisation have free access to capital investment?
Is the organisation managed by competent and reputable individuals? Will other
products manufactured by the organisation tend to draw funding and support from
the product in question? Of course these considerations can be rolled into ones
estimation of artefact fitness; however, they are by no means natural features of an
analysis that thinks of a product as an entity reproducing in an environment.
For an evolutionary account of technology to be predictive, one needs some set
of principles that lay out the major determinants of artefact fitness. One could perhaps
see many grand theories of technological change that are not explicitly evolutionary Marxism, classical economics, Freudianism as providing just such principles. Marx (1967, p. 436) writes:
It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions made since 1830,
for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the
working class.
In other words, says Marx, one constant and salient selection pressure acting on
artefacts since 1830 has been their ability to supply capital with weapons against
the revolts of the working class. Equally, one can see classical economics as making
a claim about the criteria by which goods are typically selected in terms of the utility
they offer. More recent thinking about the importance of branding to success in the
marketplace points to common psychological selection pressures perhaps with
some Freudian basis set up by the consuming public that product lines must
manipulate and exploit. So rather than offering novel predictive machinery not con-

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tained within these traditional theories, the evolutionary view merely abstracts away
from the concrete claims made by each theory to arrive at a minimalist schema for
a theory of technology change according to which artefacts evolve in response to
unspecified selection pressures.
The general problem with evolutionary explanation, then, is that merely securing
the claim that technology change follows a Darwinian pattern still leaves open too
many questions that are of interest to historians of technology. Perhaps the authors
themselves see this. The concluding essay in the volume, apparently written by all
nineteen contributors jointly, claims that their individual contributions show:
. . . the effectiveness of selectionism as a unifying paradigm of rationality, that
can provide a conceptual vocabulary for the particular interpretations that it evokes
in otherwise very diverse circumstances. (p. 313)
What this means, I take it, is that explanations and controversies regarding technology change can be framed in the vocabulary of selection and evolution. It does
not tell us that the evolutionary approach will give us answers to these questions,
nor that it will do anything to overturn the models of technological change that are
already used by historians and economists.
Let us move on to details. Although I believe that a Darwinian theory of evolution
(one that is suitably abstract) does apply to most technology change, there are dangers
in applying many evolutionary concepts. Two examples illustrate two different dangers. The concept of fitness is appropriate in the cultural realm; however, many of
the contributors fail to apply it properly. The distinction between Lamarckian and
Darwinian theories of evolution, on the other hand, is of little value in illuminating
cultural evolution, yet the contributors discuss it all the same. I take each concept
in turn.

1. Fitness
There is no easy answer to the question of what fitness should mean in evolutionary biology. Aside from the question of whether fitness is a property of genes, organisms or even groups, there is a second and in some ways deeper problem of whether
fitness is truly a causal property of individual entities at all. (For an excellent discussion of these issues see Sober, 2001.) Yet whatever property fitness is, it clearly
has something to do with the expected reproductive output of some type of item.
Hence, if we are to give fitness any kind of strong evolutionary reading, the term
has to reflect, in some sense, the expectation that an artefact, or perhaps the plan,
techniques or ideas that give rise to an artefact, will persist or proliferate in some
community. From this perspective, one cannot agree with Zimans claim (Ch. 4) that:
. . . there is nothing to say that variants need to be selected directly on their own
adaptive merits. In practice . . . they are most often retained preferentially through
the agency of selectors using surrogate criteria of fitness. (p. 43)

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What this implies is that because of the whims and fallibility of the agents who use
or consume technology, the true fitness or adaptedness of a technology may not be
reflected in its evolutionary fate. Yet this is surely a mistake. The criteria of selectors
simply determine, in the sense relevant to evolutionary theory, what artefact adaptedness consists in, and hence what the mathematical expectation is that some type
of artefact will proliferate in some society.
A similar example of such confusion comes in an essay by Constant (Ch. 20):
direct technological selection, if it is presumed to be based on some sort of fitness,
is an iffy business at best (p. 296). Selection can only be based on fitness. That is
not to say that, in an engineers or connoisseurs sense, the best artefact is always
the one most likely to proliferate. It certainly is an iffy business whether the best
artefact for some job is also the fittest in that situation. It is also, of course, an iffy
business trying to reconstruct from scant data what the primary selection pressures
on some set of artefacts are. Yet it is unclear to me what the claim that selection is
an iffy business could mean. Perhaps Constant means, justifiably, that populations
of artefacts may be subject to random drift (that is, chance fluctuations in population
composition that do not reflect fitness), so that the fittest artefacts are not always
those that survive. In any case, his conceptual equation, a little earlier, of the better
Dreadnought fleet and the fitter Dreadnought fleet (p. 292) suggests confusion.
A related mistake is made by Mokyr (Ch. 5): [i]n economics, there are no selfish
memes: there are only objective functions of economic agents operating through
markets or other aggregators (p. 62). Regardless of ones scepticism about the existence of memes, their selfishness is not undermined by the existence of economic
agents with objective functions (see Aunger, 2001, for some useful papers on
memes). Whatever the criteria of choice may be of these agents, those criteria determine memetic fitness, hence they determine which memes will proliferate over
others. To say that some meme type is selfish is simply to say that its proliferation
turns on the ability of memes of that type to get copied. Although the shift to the
memes-eye view leads us to think from the perspective of artefacts (what kind of
makeup would an artefact need to proliferate in a marketplace containing agents
with such and such preferences?), rather than the perspective of agents (what kind
of products will agents with such and such preferences tend to choose?), there is
no incompatibility between explanations offered by the two perspectives.

2. Lamarckism
The volumes contributors suggest in their joint-authored summary that discussing
the contrast between technological and organic evolution in terms of Lamarckian
versus Darwinian inheritance is likely to be a waste of time; however, most cannot
resist considering the question of whether technological evolution, because its fruits
come from the actions of intelligent agents, is indeed Lamarckian.
I suspect that the meaning of Lamarckian is itself too vague, and invites too
many further questions, for the term to be of much use as a description of technological evolution. It has at least two distinct senses, which are sometimes run together.

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The first regards the possible directedness of variation. The second regards the question of whether changes acquired during the development of one generation are
inherited in subsequent generations. Both of these senses stand in need of further
disambiguation, but it suffices to note here how different they are from each other.
It is possible, for example, that genetic mutations tend almost always to produce
beneficial mutations. In this sense we might say that genetic mutations are not blind
but directed. This says nothing about whether evolution also proceeds by the inheritance of acquired variation. It could be that giraffes living in areas where foliage is
just out of reach of their necks tend to give birth to offspring with mutations directed
in favour of longer neck length. Still, those giraffes which strive during their lifetime
to reach the higher trees, and whose necks grow longer as a result, may not pass
these changes on to their offspring. So there is no inheritance of acquired traits.
Equally, if acquired variation is passed on to offspring, this is not to say that these
changes are directed. The two senses of Lamarckism are entirely independent of
each other.
The first caution against use of the term Lamarckian, then, is not to confuse
these two senses. Yet they are sometimes run together, as when Jablonka (Ch. 3)
writes: [s]pecific epigenetic variations are often induced by distinct environmental
or developmental changes, and can thus be said to be directed or acquired (p.
36). Suppose we focus on the second meaning of Lamarckian the claim that
changes made to the adult over the course of its life can be read back into the germline so as to produce offspring with those traits. What could this mean in the case
of technological evolution? The problem comes when we ask what is the technological germ-line. We know that genes are reliably copied across generations in part
because of a complex array of gene-reading machinery that is able to check for
copying mistakes, root out errors, and so forth (see Keller, 2000, for an accessible
presentation). That, in part, is why the configuration of germ-line DNA is reliably
preserved across generations. It is also true that alterations to germ-line DNA, made
during the life of an organism, are sometimes acquired by the offspring. Why is this
not a Lamarckian process? Simply because the typical understanding of Lamarckian
assumes that the issue at stake is the question of which alterations to an organism
are reliably copied. In other words, the substantive question regarding Lamarckism
turns on the question of what kinds of copying mechanisms or reading mechanisms
there are, and what items they range over. Alter some parts of a cell wall, or some
portions of DNA, and these are copied. Alter a zebras nose, and it is not.
Put this way, we can see why thinking of cultural evolution as Lamarckian is a
hindrance. Suppose an artefact acquires some new capacity by accident that improves
its functioning. Can this be copied? Yes, because humans are able to observe its
better functioning, infer that this owes itself to the alteration, and construct a new
item with that alteration. Is this change Lamarckian? Not if one understands alterations to artefacts by analogy with alterations to germ-line DNA. Mutations to germline DNA can be copied by means of complex machinery without that counting as
a Lamarckian process precisely because copied alterations to the germ-line cannot
be Lamarckian in the sense in question. If we choose to think of artefacts as part

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of the technological germ-line, then the role of complex machinery in ensuring that
alterations to the germ-line are copied cannot make this copying Lamarckian.
The problem with the vocabulary of Lamarckism in the cultural context should
now be clear. Our capacities for abductive reasoning allow us to observe a great
variety of entities, infer how they have been altered, and go about reproducing those
alterations. Our minds give us reading and copying machinery that is able to reproduce changes that occur not simply to finished artefacts, but to processes, techniques,
behaviours and ideas. With so many different types of entity thus making some claim
to form part of the technological germ-line, and with such complex machinery
responsible for the reproduction of such entities, there is little utility in discussing
cultural evolution by reference to Lamarckism.
In fairness, many of the contributors to this volume seem to be aware of these
problems. Many are clearly influenced by the essays by Jablonka (Chs. 2 and 3), in
which she draws attention to research within biology suggesting that there are many
biologically significant inheritance systems other than the purely genetic. By analogy,
she suggests that no evolutionary theory of culture should assume that only one
inheritance system operates in the technological realm. I am extremely sympathetic
to this line of thinking; however, I also think that it serves to reinforce the general
problem I have tried to highlight in this essay. Part of the appeal of an evolutionary
theory of technology comes from the promise of simplicity. Perhaps we can find
some discrete set of entities ideas, or memes, say which will turn out to be
the sole cultural replicators, and which might form the focus of all technological
analyses and models. If we stress that patterns of technological reproduction are
likely to be maintained by many interacting systems of cultural inheritance drawing
on the diverse and perhaps shifting contributions of ideas, artefacts, institutions, techniques and so forth, then we rob the evolutionary account of another part of its promise.
At the end of the volume, the contributors remark:

From an evolutionary point of view, material artefacts cannot be considered in

isolation from their cognitive and social correlates. Their making and use are
closely linked with various bodies of human knowledge and with the collective
activities of various human groups . . . As the artefact changes, so does the cloud
of ideas and social activities that surround it. An anthropologists thick description of what evolves would necessarily include numerous entities in these other
domains. (p. 314)

The end result of an impressive effort to refine the evolutionary conception to reflect
the complexities of cultural reproduction is a series of observations that will surely
not surprise any anthropologist or historian of technology. This collection shows, I
think, that the evolutionary conception can be cast in terms abstract enough to be
true of technological change; what it does not yet show is that it offers us anything
novel or surprising. Plus c a change, plus cest la meme chose.

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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Robert Aunger, Nick Hopwood, Nick Jardine, Peter Lipton and
Martin Kusch for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

References
Aunger, R. (Ed.). (2001). Darwinizing culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Basalla, G. (1988). The evolution of technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2000). The replicator in retrospect. Biology and Philosophy, 15, 403423.
Hull, D., Glenn, S., & Langman, R. (2001). A general analysis of selection. In D. Hull (Ed.), Science
and selection (pp. 4993). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Keller, E. F. (2000). The century of the gene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lewens, T. (in press). Adaptationism and engineering. Biology and Philosophy.
Marx, K. (1967). Capital, Vol. 1 (S. Moore, & E. Aveling, Trans.). New York: International Publishers.
Sober, E. (2001). The two faces of fitness. In R. Singh (Ed.), Thinking about evolution (pp. 309321).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.