Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

North’s Theory of Cultural Evolution

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The New Institutionalist Economic History of Douglass C. North

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought ((PHET))

  • 542 Accesses

Abstract

In the final stages of his New Institutionalist Economic History, Douglass North developed an elaborate theory of cultural evolution. Drawing on the work of Hayek, North sought to explain where institutions come from and how humans can cooperate sufficiently to produce and sustain them. In this chapter, Krul provides for the first time a systematic discussion of this theme in North’s work. As he shows, North rejected Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order, preferring to see culture as a unique case of an intentional evolutionary process, but one brought about by biologically given limits on our cognitive abilities. However, North’s attempt to find a non-Darwinian process of cultural evolution is insufficiently grounded in an understanding of evolutionary concepts to be viable or to explain cooperation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Here the references are to the work of Ulrich Witt (1992) and Geoffrey Hodgson (1993), as well as Arthur Denzau, with whom North had collaborated on exploring ideology before (Denzau and North 1994). It is curious that the references are so far before the publication date of UPEC and ignore subsequent work by these influential evolutionary economists. One gets the impression that North decided fairly early on that the evolutionary economics paradigm did not work for him, and perhaps ignored the literature after that.

  2. 2.

    It is an irony of language that the concept of the meme has since then become more commonly used in a context where it is explicitly metaphor, as demonstrated on the internet today. And yet the widespread distribution of this particular metaphor could, at a meta-level, be taken as an example of the applicability of memetic theory. See Burman (2012) for a discussion.

  3. 3.

    Unfortunately, there is no space in this book for a lengthier discussion of the intellectual influences on North beyond those discussed briefly in the respective thematic chapters. An intellectual biography of North should certainly note the importance of Alchian and Demsetz for North’s ideas about the interaction between uncertainty, path dependence, and the transaction cost economics paradigm.

  4. 4.

    The excessive efficiency assumptions in Hayek’s functionalism are criticized by Vanberg (1986), a work that influenced North’s own distancing from Hayek on this point (North 2005: 51).

  5. 5.

    Although I cannot represent it fully here, for my thought on this subject I have drawn upon a wide literature, including Camerer and Thaler (1995), Fehr and Gächter (2000, 2002), Fischbacher, Gächter, and Fehr (2001), Henrich et al. (2004), Gintis et al. (2005), Bowles and Gintis (2011).

  6. 6.

    This literature is vast and goes back to Darwin himself. Some works I have drawn on for the present discussion include: Lumsden and Wilson (1981), Sober and Wilson (1998), Boyd and Richerson (1985, 2005), Richerson and Boyd (2005), Field (2001), Hodgson (2013), Sterelny et al. (2013).

  7. 7.

    Interestingly, North himself indicates that his account is partially inspired by Boyd and Richerson’s work on gene -culture coevolution (North 2005: 66n3). But his own explanatory framework does not seem to rest much on their arguments in practice.

  8. 8.

    A longer treatment of the same argument is found in Krul (2016).

  9. 9.

    Sober and Wilson (1998: 53–54) even argue that the emphasis on using ‘cooperation’ rather than ‘altruism’ as the term for the relevant explanandum of human sociality appears in the literature because the former sounds more contractarian, more a matter of self-interest, and therefore better fits preconceived ideas about the nature of sociality and institution-building.

  10. 10.

    Hammerstein (2003). See, however, Carter and Wilkinson (2013).

References

  • Alchian, Armen A. 1950. Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory. The Journal of Political Economy 58 (3): 211–221.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alchian, Armen A., and William R. Allen. 1983. Exchange & Production: Competition, Coordination and Control. Belmont: Wadsworth.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alchian, Armen A., and Harold Demsetz. 1972. Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization. The American Economic Review 62 (5): 777–795.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aldrich, Howard E., et al. 2008. In Defence of Generalized Darwinism. Journal of Evolutionary Economics 18 (5): 577–596.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aoki, Masahiko. 2001. Towards a Comparative Institutional Analysis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Axelrod, Robert. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Becker, Marcus C. 2004. Organizational Routines: A Review of the Literature. Industrial and Corporate Change 13 (4): 643–677.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blackmore, Susan. 2000. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Costs and Benefits in Hunter-Gatherer Punishment. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (1): 19–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. 2011. A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson. 1985. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2005. The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boyd, Robert, et al. 2003. The Evolution of Altruistic Punishment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100 (6): 3531–3535.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Burman, Jeremy Trevelyan. 2012. The Misunderstanding of Memes: Biography of an Unscientific Object 1976–1999. Perspectives on Science 20 (1): 75–104.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Camerer, Colin, and Richard H. Thaler. 1995. Anomalies: Ultimatums, Dictators and Manners. Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (2): 209–219.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carter, Gerald G., and Gerald S. Wilkinson. 2013. Food Sharing in Vampire Bats: Reciprocal Help Predicts Donations More Than Relatedness or Harassment. Proceedings of the Biological Sciences 280 (1753): 20122573.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clark, Andy. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cloak, F.T. 1975. Is a Cultural Ethology Possible? Human Ecology 3 (3): 161–182.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dennett, Daniel C. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.

    Google Scholar 

  • Denzau, Arthur T., and Douglass C. North. 1994. Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions. Kyklos 47 (1): 3–31.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Earle, Timothy. 1997. How Chiefs Come to Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eggertsson, Thrainn. 1990. Economic Behavior and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Eshel, I., and L.L. Cavalli-Sforza. 1982. Assortment of Encounters and Evolution of Cooperativeness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 79 (4): 1331–1335.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fehr, Ernst, and Simon Gächter. 2000. Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity. Journal of Economic Perspectives 71 (1): 159–181.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2002. Altruistic Punishment in Humans. Nature 415 (6868): 137–140.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Field, Alexander J. 1979. On the Explanation of Rules Using Rational Choice Models. Journal of Economic Issues 13 (1): 49–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1981. The Problem with Neoclassical Institutional Economics: A Critique with Special Reference to the North/Thomas Model of Pre-1500 Europe. Explorations in Economic History 18 (2): 174–198.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2001. Altruistically Inclined? The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fischbacher, Urs, Simon Gächter, and Ernst Fehr. 2001. Are People Conditionally Cooperative? Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment. Economics Letters 71 (3): 397–404.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gintis, Herbert. 2009. The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gintis, Herbert, et al. 2005. Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hamilton, William D. 1964. The Genetic Evolution of Social Behaviour. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hammerstein, Peter. 2003. Why Is Reciprocity So Rare in Social Animals? A Protestant Appeal. In Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, ed. Peter Hammerstein, 83–93. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hayek, F.A. 1952. The Sensory Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1967. Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1983. Knowledge, Evolution, and Society. London: Adam Smith Institute.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henrich, Joseph, et al. 2003. In Search of Homo Economicus: Experiments in Fifteen Small-Scale Societies. The American Economic Review 91 (2): 73–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2004. Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hodgson, Geoffrey M. 1993. Economics and Evolution. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1994. Hayek, Evolution, and Spontaneous Order. In Natural Images in Economic Thought: Markets Red in Tooth and Claw, ed. Philip Mirowski, 408–447. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1998. The Approach of Institutional Economics. Journal of Economic Literature 36: 166–192.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities: An Evolutionary Economics Without Homo Economicus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hodgson, Geoffrey M., and Thorbjørn Knudsen. 2010. Darwin’s Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hoffman, Elizabeth, Kevin A. McCabe, and Vernon L. Smith. 1998. Behavioral Foundations of Reciprocity: Experimental Economics and Evolutionary Psychology. Economic Inquiry 36 (3): 335–352.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hough, Jerry, and Robin Grier. 2015. The Long Process of Development: Building Markets and States in Pre-Industrial England, Spain, and Their Colonies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hull, David L. 1980. Individuality and Selection. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 11: 311–332.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, Allen W., and Timothy Earle. 2000. The Evolution of Human Societies. 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kelly, Raymond Case. 1985. The Nuer Conquest: The Structure and Development of an Expansionist System. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krul, Matthijs. 2016. Markets, Institutions and the Polanyian Challenge: A Theoretical Study of the New Institutionalist Economic History of Douglass C. North. PhD Dissertation, Brunel University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lloyd, Elisabeth. 2012. Units and Levels of Selection. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta. Winter 2012 ed. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/selection-units/.

  • Lumsden, Charles J., and Edward O. Wilson. 1981. Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nelson, Richard R., and Sidney G. Winter. 1982. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • North, Douglass C. 2005. Understanding the Process of Economic Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • North, Douglass C., John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sober, Elliott, and David Sloan Wilson. 1994. A Critical Review of Philosophical Work on the Units of Selection Problem. Philosophy of Science 61 (4): 534–555.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1998. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Soltis, Joseph, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richerson. 1995. Can Group-Functional Behaviors Evolve by Group Selection? An Empirical Test. Current Anthropology 36 (3): 473–494.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sterelny, Kim, et al., eds. 2013. Cooperation and Its Evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. 1992. The Psychological Foundations of Culture. In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, 19–136. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trivers, Robert L. 1971. The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1): 35–57.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tuck, Richard. 2008. Free Riding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vanberg, Viktor. 1986. Spontaneous Market Order and Social Rules. Economics and Philosophy 2 (1): 75–100.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Veblen, Thorstein. 1898. Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science? Quarterly Journal of Economics 12 (4): 373–397.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vromen, Jack J. 1995. Economic Evolution: An Enquiry Into the Foundations of New Institutional Economics. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, Edward O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Witt, Ulrich. 1992. Explaining Process and Change: Approaches to Evolutionary Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Berlin, Germany

    Matthijs Krul

Authors
  1. Matthijs Krul
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Krul, M. (2018). North’s Theory of Cultural Evolution. In: The New Institutionalist Economic History of Douglass C. North. Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94084-7_5

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94084-7_5

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-94083-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-94084-7

  • eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation