Darwin (Part 2): The Impact Beyond Biology

TW: Continuing excerpts from Economist, these focus on how evolutionary thought impacts a wide range of other scientific pursuits.

From the Economist:
"...many aspects of modern science could not work without accepting evolution. Darwin’s ideas touch every corner of biology and medicine. They have also had an impact farther afield, in areas from art to politics. And their impact has been practical as well as theoretical. Both software engineers and drug developers, for example, often make use of evolutionary thinking when designing their products.

Economics, too, may be helped by Darwin. Ideas about “rational” economic man are being overturned by new ones from a discipline called behavioural economics. Rather than assuming that individuals faced with economic decisions will comport themselves in what “classical” economists regard as a rational manner—ie, to maximise their future wealth—behavioural economics tries to study how real people actually behave.

What is surprising is the degree to which human beings are not rational, and how the reasons for this are likely to involve Darwinian explanations. Take, for example, a phenomenon called the endowment effect, which is the tendency most people have to value objects they already own more highly than similar ones they have never owned—and, consequently, to be more reluctant to trade them than a classical economist would predict.

Because this effect has been observed in three primate species, most recently in a study of chimpanzees, it suggests this effect has evolutionary roots. Its strength seems to relate to the evolutionary salience of the item in question. People may be reluctant to trade goods related to food and mating because in the recent evolutionary past it meant parting with a known object in exchange for an uncertain proposition.

Another example of economic behaviour that may have deep evolutionary roots is the “herd” mentality that contributes to financial bubbles. In the past, copying the neighbours would have been helpful—in order to avoid danger or to find food. In today’s financial systems, however, it can create instability. The instinct to follow the herd can be rationalised as rational, so to speak, since everybody benefits in the short term by forcing the price up. But it does not look so rational when the instability is exposed by an external shock and the market crashes. In fact, at least part of what seems to be going on is that everyone instinctively feels compelled to copy the others, rather than making an independent assessment of the situation.

Whether the mystery is why people are so averse to risk, unable to estimate the time needed for a given task, or give different answers to the same question depending on how it is framed, there is a fair chance that the explanation will, at some point, involve evolution. To understand human behaviour properly, the world needs Darwin. Some have said it is the best idea that anyone ever had. If it isn’t, it certainly comes close.

Despite so much evidence, evolution remains difficult to accept because it implies everything living is largely accidental. Stephen Jay Gould, an American evolutionary biologist, who died in 2002, argued that misunderstandings about Darwinism were rife not because the theory is difficult to understand but because people actively avoid trying to understand it. He thought a misunderstanding about progress was the problem.

People are comforted by the idea of a designed and harmonious natural world, with themselves at the top. It is hard to accept that such harmony has arisen as an accidental consequence of a brutal system with no principles beside the one that every individual is striving for reproductive success. It is depressing to think that life is purposeless and that evolution has no higher destination"