Adaptation and progress – connections between micro- and macroevolution

Abstract

The theory of evolution as developed for the biological sciences has provided very inspiring concepts that have found more or less literal use in a number of different fields of science. Evolutionary analogies are also found in economics, where they function as very accurate analogies or loose metaphors, depending on the specific approach. Although the phenomena of biological evolution appear to be far from economic reality, some evolutionary concepts, when used to describe socio-economic systems and processes, prove to be a very suitable tool. This paper discusses selected similarities of adaptation and progress. These processes analysed independently from one another can be regarded as separate phenomena. Adaptation takes place rather on a scale of single individuals and strives to achieve the best fit to the environment through appropriate tuning of behaviour. On the other hand, progress occurs on the scale of whole societies and leads to changes in the environmental conditions. Both the processes take place on different scales of time, range extent and number of individuals involved. However, both phenomena are based on a common foundation of self-replication, the basic process which ensures continuity, diversity and flexibility of biological systems and also systems created by man in natural, non-technological way. Replication of almost exact copies of the same elements repeated incessantly allows to maintain the continuity of the system in spite of inevitable decline and ageing of its components. At the same time, minor deviations from perfect precision of replication allow the whole system to achieve gradual progress in subsequent generations. The development of an individual and the progress of the entire system are closely related and must occur in such a way that all the stages coexisted with each other at any time, otherwise the ability of the system to regenerate can be lost.