96-J-10. Fujimoto, Takahiro, "Applying the Concept of Evolution to Empirical Social Science", Apr. 1996.

This paper discusses an application of the concept of `evolution' or the evolutionary theory to empirical researches of social systems.

While the modern evolutionary theory originated from C. Darwin's work on the origins and changes of living systems, such a framework has also been applied to the cases of social, economic and managerial systems. The notion of evolution, however, has been rather elusive and equivocal in the field of empirical social science, which tended to create much confusion and misunderstandings among the researchers.

The present paper proposes an evolutionary perspective for social systems that shares the basic logical structure to today's dominant evolutionary theory for living systems, or the Neo-Darwinism, in which the existence of the existing living systems is explained by emergent processes of mutation - selection - retention, rather than by ex-ante-rational plans by omnipotent decision makers. Thus, current paper insists that we should not take the evolutionary perspective for the mere progressivism, in which evolution is regarded simply as changes toward something that is ex-ante good.

At the same time, however, the social science version of the evolutionary theory is not a simple and direct application of Neo-Darwinism, in that the former allows certain ways of explaining system changes that the latter does not accept, such as non-random (or even purposeful) behaviors to change the systems. Thus, the social system version of evolutionary theory has a broader perspective than the prevalent evolutionary theories for living systems (i.e., Neo-Darwinism). The current paper also rejects a crude interpretation of `survival of the fittest' by so-called Social-Darwinism.

Thus, the social system version of the evolutionary concept should be broad enough to include non-random human decision making, but it should be specific enough to share certain minimal logic with today's Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory that is based on the advancement of molecular biology.

The paper also argues that the evolutionary perspective in social science explicitly separates the explanation of an observed entity based on the logic of system emergence and that based on the logic of system functions. Thus, the social system version of the evolutionary theory distinguishes emergent views and functional views for the existing systems. This dichotomy is one of the essence of the evolutionary perspective that is applied to empirical researches of social systems.