Book Description
In recent years, evolutionary theorists have come to recognize that the reductionist, individualist, gene-centered approach to evolution cannot sufficiently account for the emergence of complex biological systems over time. Peter A. Corning has been at the forefront of a new generation of complexity theorists who have been working to reshape the foundations of evolutionary theory. Well known for his Synergism Hypothesis—a theory of complexity in evolution that assigns a key causal role to various forms of functional synergy—Corning puts this theory into a much broader framework in Holistic Darwinism, addressing many of the issues and concepts associated with the evolution of complex systems. Corning's paradigm embraces and integrates many related theoretical developments of recent years, from multilevel selection theory to niche construction theory, gene-culture coevolution theory, and theories of self-organization. Offering new approaches to thermodynamics, information theory, and economic analysis, Corning suggests how all of these domains can be brought firmly within what he characterizes as a post–neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis.
Customer Reviews:
Keeps getting better.......2006-09-09
This work states the case for the importance of synergy across biology and economics much more solidly than his prior work. It is surprising that the book has not gotten a review until now. I wish that works like this were getting more attention than the intelligent design vs. evolution debate. Corning assembles a lot of evidence to point towards the "new evolutionary paradigm." I cannot think of another work which marshalls so many parallel lines of research to where a new synthesis might be coming. Readable, sometimes polemical, informative, and clear. At some point, though, there is almost too much thrown into his case. Four sections packed in a lot: Synergy and evolution, Bioeconomics, Thermodynamics of life, and Evolutionary ethics. The thermodynamics section was a gem on the often confused subject of how biology meets thermodynamic theory. His idea: "In sum, the development of novel bioenergetic technologies in the evolutionary process has had little to do with entropy or dissipative structures and much more to do with engineering--design improvements in the ability of living systems to capture and utilize available energy. It is the organized use of available energy in evolved, informed (cybernetic) structures that has been the key, as noted earlier. And the explanation for these changes lies in their economic advantages, as Lotka long ago suggested." (p. 351)
A great read; a passionate and encylopedic collection of current ideas assembled into an intriguing hypothesis. I look forward to other reviews of his work.
Book Description
`After the crisis of neo-classical theory, Darwin and Marx have re-emerged as the two key figures who can show the way to be followed to understand the great transformations of our time. Hodgson offers a superb account of the limitations and the insights of Marx and shows how Darwin's theories can help to explain evolution well beyond the realm of natural history. His book is not only a major contribution to the understanding of the roots of institutional economics, it is also a very original contribution to modern institutional theory.'
- Ugo Pagano, University of Siena, Italy
`Once again, Geoffrey Hodgson has underlined the importance of deeper awareness of the origins of ideas employed in current economic debates. He shows that current understanding is incomplete without a detailed exploration of the historiography of terminology and its use in primary sources. In this respect, the implications of his comparisons and contrasts between Marx and Darwin extend well beyond modern economics. In my own research field, Hodgson's work has been valuable in enhancing my sensitivity to narratives and metaphors underlying historical accounts of the economy of the Roman Empire. Furthermore, his discussion of habits, routines and institutions in the context of evolutionary theory is pertinent to the study of technology from prehistoric to modern times.'
- Kevin Greene, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
`Almost 150 years after their major works were published Darwin and Marx stand alone as the premier theorists of the evolution of complex living systems. Hodgson's unique contribution in these essays is to capture the spirit of these two great thinkers in their ability to see universal principles in particular contextual frameworks. Using an evolutionary and institutional approach to examine a variety of theoretical issues Hodgson avoids both the postmodern disease of extreme relativism and the rigidity of insisting on "one true religion" for economic theory. This book is a major contribution to the current revolution in economic theory.'
- John M. Gowdy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US
Economics in the Shadows of Darwin and Marx examines the legacies of these two giants of thought for the social sciences in the twenty-first century.
Darwin and Marx stand out as the supreme theorists of structural change in complex living systems. Yet their analytical approaches are very different, and the idea that Darwinism has application to the social sciences is not widely appreciated. This collection of essays establishes the importance of Darwinism for economics and other social sciences, and compares the Darwinian legacy with that of Marx. Critical realism is just one of the tendencies within economics influenced by Marxism that is dissected here. The final part of the book adopts a Darwinian evolutionary approach to the analysis of institutions and routines.
Geoffrey Hodgson's book will be warmly welcomed and received by evolutionary and institutional economists, methodologists of economics and other social sciences, heterodox economists as well as other social scientists including economic sociologists, organisation scientists and political scientists.
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Sociobiology and Bioeconomics: The Theory of Evolution in Biological and Economic Theory (Studies in Economic Ethics and Philosophy)
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 3540653805 |
Book Description
The theory of evolution and Neo-Darwinian biological theory extend their analysis in sociobiology from the life sciences and the animal societies to human societies. Sociobiology as a unifying theory of the social interaction within and between species has led to an integration of economic analysis into biology. The economy of nature has become the subject of bioeconomics which in turn transferred biological analysis to the human economy. Evolution, competition, selection, and cooperation are phenomena common to the economy of nature and human economy. The inclusion of economic and cultural theory in evolution theory raises the question whether the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis with its exclusive concern with somatic heredity is able to incorporate developmental systems of the human economy and of cultural heredity. A new synthesis of the natural and the social sciences is in the making.
Customer Reviews:
evolutionary theory gone wrong.......2007-01-06
I would really recommend reading books on evolution by people who know how to apply the theory, and that would be scientists. Mr. Browne is a law professor who clearly opposes certain discrimination laws and thus has his own motives and bias in the subject. I doubt his credibility in understanding and applying evolutionary theory, especially since these days many people assume they are experts in the subject without having the proper credentials.
Far too simplistic and deluded........2006-11-06
I am very much in support of evolutionary psychology and the need to understand our biological predispositions but it is also a sad fact that that when it is presented so simplistically as this it loses much of its potential to really enable full understanding of immensely complex issues. There are so many unanswered questions here and so many omissions that it would take a book to deal with them all and I can only hope people who are impressed, or otherwise, by the simplicity of Kingsley Browne's argument actually read more widely and especially read books by female evolutionary psychologists that will provide greater balance and insight.
As Browne says himself, masculine traits cause men to be self-deluded with regard to their own competences and he must be included in this. He also does not seem to be aware of the naturalistic fallacy nor the fact that traits that were once adaptive can become maladaptive and sometimes fatal to a species.
Two quick points:
If women are risk-averse why do they seek to place the lives of themselves and their children in the hands of men who take the biggest risks?
If women do not want to relocate why do they seek men who will relocate and therefore end up forced to relocate anyway?
Most evolutionary theory makes an assumption that human females selected male traits. Unlikely. Humans inherited the mating system where females leave the group to breed (only females therefore ever 'relocated' and males stayed in their birth groups with their kin). Humans are unique in that fathers and brothers had authority over daughters and sisters. A man wanting a wife needed to be attractive to her male relatives, not the woman herself. This puts a very different slant on who is selecting male traits in our evolution, and still in much of the world today. This mating system plus sexual dimorphism, strong male kin bonding, masculine traits etc put females in an impossible position as far as having a voice or an input was (and still often is) concerned - only perhaps through their sons could women exert influence which again meant they were forced to put forward male (their son's) self-interest.
As far as the labour market goes, how might that have evolved in a sytem where women themselves were 'market goods' - breeders bought, exchanged or kidnapped for the group. Any wealth a woman produced would go to her husband. Only men had purchasing power so it would be this purchasing power that laid the foundations for what goods and services would become worth eg weapons that men value are worth a lot. Men are obviously willing to pay far more for what matters to them eg tickets to a football game, than what women provide or care about eg childcare or nursing which traditionally came free once the women were bought or acquired as wives - like milk comes free once the cow has been bought. A labour market based on what men value is hardly going to value women and female traits without a fight.
When Browne says that on the kibbutz men ended up doing the high-status farming and women the teaching and nursing it begs the question of why farming has more status than nursing and teaching. If we understand the relative status of the sexes in our evolution, that women themselves were traded goods and worked for free, that only men held wealth and had purchasing power and how men therefore determined the market value of goods and services and naturally rewarded themselves for what was valued and attractive to them as men, then it is hardly surprising that women are still struggling to acquire the resources, value and status they are actually worth.
This is harder thinking then Browne would have us do with the simplistic 'man the hunter' excuse for everything. It goes further to explain why women are less satisfied with their supposed 'nature' than men are with theirs and why women are often dissatisfied with masculinity when women are (falsely) presumed to have selected male traits. It also helps to explain why it is so hard for men to see a perspective other than their own and specifically that of women when their own perspective was never challenged until recently and remains so hard to challenge.
Finally, when more and more women are not having children because the costs of motherhood are too high those costs will eventually have to be addressed. It's all very well working with our nature but when human females have had less freedom to act naturally than the females of any other species we need to first rediscover what the nature of human females not owned and controlled by men actually is. The massive demands of human offspring forced women into accepting a position more constrained than females of any other species experience. Just as men have not evolved true instincts for life-long monogamy or for fathering on the same level as mothering, so women have not evolved true instincts for resource dependency on a man and all the problems it entails.
Kingsley Browne has written a more recent and expanded version of this book which perhaps should be read though I doubt if he has thought any more deeply about what happened to human females as we evolved. There is far far more than I have been able to raise here and if anyone thinks this is just getting too complicated then at least have the decency not to merely swallow interesting but simplistic justifications for the way things are and the supposed 'nature' of women. If it was our nature then we would no more want to change things than a cat would want to bark. Any sense today of women not feeling disadvantaged or inferior is thanks to changes forced by feminists. Evolutionary psychology, when it involves some realistic thinking and not merely male self-delusions, has much to offer us all, including feminists. Don't make the mistake of thinking that what men like Browne profess to be biological facts leave nothing more to be said. It's just the beginning.
first rate.......2000-07-30
I enjoyed this original and highly readable work enormously. Through its reliance on facts and logic, it makes a compelling case against the victim mentality of radical feminism. The author shows females to be as capable as males of making the choices most consistent with their interests and values--and that these often (though not always) differ between the sexes for reasons best explained by the science of evolutionary psychology.
I share the concern echoed by other reviewers regarding the bizarre comment submitted by a "reader from Northeast USA." Any reasonable person who has read one of Kingsley Browne's many papers or heard him speak at conferences on evolutionary law will realize that his only agenda is to call the facts and their policy implications as he sees them. This is a scholarly agenda--unlike anonymous ad hominem attacks, a classic tactic of those whose agenda is truly political in nature.
science, not politics.......2000-07-15
Over the past three decades, western societies have been spectacularly successful in eliminating many forms of discrimination against women. In some important areas of the workplace, however, women as a group have not enjoyed a high level of success. For example, there are relatively few female firefighters, female fighter jet pilots, and, more importantly, relatively few female top executives. In Divided Labours, Kingsley Browne suggests that the under-representation of women in certain risky professions is consistent with evolutionary theory and should not be assumed without serious proof to be the result of social or individual discrimination. Professor Browne is an excellent writer and provocative thinker. Over the past decade, he has written extensively on law and biology issues and has presented his research at many academic conferences in the United States and abroad. This book presents that research in understandable terms to a larger audience.
I note with some astonishment that an anonymous reviewer on this website has characterized Professor Browne as a marginal academic who has written little and who does not separate his science from his politics. These claims are worse then nonsense - they constitute libel, pure and simple. The topic on which Browne writes is a sensitive one. Some people seem to believe, falsely in my opinion, that an evolutionary explanation of temperamental differences between men and women will lead to a letdown in the political drive to eliminate discrimination against women in the workplace. The anonymous reviewer may be libeling Browne in the hope of discrediting the scientific theories presented in Browne's book. This individual is spitting into the wind.
Shifting Burdens of Proof.......2000-07-13
Many social scientists now admit that 20th century emphasis on nurture to the exclusion of nature was overdrawn. With the success in the mapping of the Human Genome and the emergence of evolutionary biology from the shadow of the so-called hard sciences the pendulum now seems to be moving back. How do we keep our balance on these shifting and ideologically charged sands?
Peter Singer in A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation (also reviewed by me) suggests some principles that a new Darwinian Left adopt. One is not to deny the existence of a human nature nor assume that it is "infinitely malleable". Another is not to assume "that all inequalities are due to discrimination, prejudice, oppression or social conditioning". It is in the spirit of attempting to apply these principles that I believe Divided Labours should be read.
The author is a law professor and his book reads like a legal brief. That said the writing is very clear and seemingly fair as far as it goes. He is particularly careful in specifying the limitations of what can be inferred from some of his evolutionary facts. He also provides some good examples of the kind of population thinking necessary for understanding many of these kinds of issues. He mentions that at the height of five-feet-ten the ratio of males to females is 30:1. A six-foot, only two inches taller, it is 2000:1. Understanding the implications of these kinds of facts is crucial and I wish he had included a chapter emphasizing the importance and differences of population thinking versus concentrating on the individual.
So what is the books brief? For me it is to attempt to shift what he calls "a gross asymmetry in burdens of proof" (page 62) in the area of woman and work where the "proponents of social construction" have had an advantage over biological explanations in public policy debates. Merely to show a group difference in result is not to show that it has not resulted from free individual choice and that a theoretician can know what the proper or just ratio ought to be, let alone assume 50:50. Thus he marshals his evidence concerning gender differences and notes their possible impact on the different choices individuals might make and plays the ball back into his opponents court. Nowhere does he imply that individual women ought to be denied the right or opportunity to make the same choices as men.
There are however some problems with this book. I too (along with another Amazon reviewer) was troubled by the age of some of the references as well as the fact that the author was a law professor and not a scientist. I do know that many of his references were considered authoritative in their time but I can't say whether they reflect the latest evolutionary thinking. However the tone of the author and the reputation of the editors, the press and other authors in the series would cause me to give him the benefit of the doubt over the facts he reports. That leads to a second and more serious concern, though possibly not the author's responsibility.
Lying outside of his brief is non-biological evidence that might weaken his case. As my wife pointed out, what about the fact that women who try to adopt so-called male strategies are often called "bitches" and otherwise impeded in accomplishing their goals. Simply because many woman freely make traditional choices doesn't mean that the number of women in a particular category isn't decreased unfairly by coercion and other sexist attitudes. It is left as a question whether that kind of male (and even female) response may also have evolutionary roots.
Finally he notes an inconsistency in what he calls "feminist" arguments that bear on Singer's principle about the kind of institutions a Darwinian left ought to create. Feminists "reject the male obsession with status, competition, and acquisition of resources, " [rightly in this reviewers opinion] "but they measure women's position in society solely along this male dimension. Then they conclude that women are disadvantaged without incorporating into their measurement the attributes that woman value"(page 61-62). At least as regards the glass ceiling in the corporate world this is an important point. When Lenin pointed out that a capitalist would willingly sell the rope that would be used to hang him, it doesn't seem to me a great advance in Human Rights if the capitalist is now a woman especially when I'm going to be on the receiving end of the rope. I would rather use my time and effort in the creation of new institutions with different values that would have a better chance of overcoming our shared biological inheritance.
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Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics
John Nightingale John Laurent
Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 1840642092 |
Book Description
Darwinism is fast becoming an orthodoxy of modern thought, a framework within which a wide range of knowledge communities conduct their discourse. Ever since its formation, Darwinian theory has experienced a close, though not always comfortable, association with economics. Evolutionary economists now appear to show little concern for the consistency of knowledge in their embrace of Darwinism.
Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics brings together contributions from eminent authors who, building on Darwin's own insights and on developments in evolutionary theory, offer challenging views on how economics can use evolutionary ideas effectively.
This collection of critical essays provides a thorough examination of the application of Darwinian theory to economic thought, and will appeal to evolutionary economists and all those with an interest in Darwin, innovation and evolutionary science.
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Kigyo "idenshi" shinkaron: Daifukyo dakara koso, seizon kyoka hanei no michi ga aru !
Kuehiko Yamada
Manufacturer: Tokuma Shoten
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ASIN: 4198600414 |
Book Description
Total Relationship Marketing provides a genuinely unique new view of the meaning of marketing management and a complete introduction to the rapidly evolving field of relationship marketing.
A major contribution to marketing thought internationally, this new edition of Gummesson's seminal title presents a powerful and in depth analysis of modern relationship marketing. Highly informative, practical in style, and packed with examples and cases from real companies, it is an essential resource for all serious marketing practitioners as well as both undergraduate and postgraduate students.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a key feature throughout this newly revised edition
Comprehensive coverage on the Internet, e-Business and one-to one marketing
New examples, cases, concepts and references have been added to aid the reader
Book Description
The strategic emphasis in Relationship Marketing is as much on keeping customers as it is on getting them in the first place. The aim is to provide unique value in chosen markets, sustainable over time, which brings the customers back for more.
Relationship Marketing emphasizes quality, customer service and marketing and how these can be managed towards closing the `quality gap' between what customers expect and what they get.
The authors explore the process of developing and implementing relationship strategies and in so doing, signal a radical shift in marketing practice involving first the co-ordination of external (customer) markets and second, collaboration within
internal (staff) markets in order to get the marketing mix right. The book is intended for all marketing managers coming to terms with doing business in turbulent markets and facing up to strategic quality and customer services issues.
Well-presented comprehensive text
Full of practical ideas, techniques and examples
Emphasis is as much on keeping customers as it is on getting them in the first place
Book Description
Total Relationship Marketing provides a genuinely unique new view of the meaning of marketing management and a complete introduction to the rapidly evolving field of relationship marketing.
The author shows that relationship marketing represents a dramatic change in marketing thinking- a paradigm shift. As an alternative to the 4Ps of traditional marketing management (Product, Price, Promotion and Place) the book offers thirty relationships, the 30Rs, that are fundamental to the marketing activities of every business.
The authoritative treatment covers the key relationships businesses experience; from those with customers (both internal and external) and competitors, to government and the media. The book is-
· Highly informative and practical in style.
· A powerful analysis of modern relationship marketing
· An in depth analysis of each key relationship
· Packed with examples and cases from real companies
A major contribution to marketing thought internationally the book has already won the Swedish Marketing Federation's award for best marketing book of the year. It is an essential resource, text and reference for all serious marketing practitioners as well as both undergraduate and postgraduate students.
Total Relationship Marketing is not a description of relationship marketing techniques and strategies but a broader analysis of marketing management seen as relationships, networking and interaction
Encyclopaedic in coverage providing a wide overview of the present state of thinking in this field making it ideal as both a text and a manual
Written by one of Europe's leading marketing thinkers
Books:
- In Search of Shareholder Value: Managing the Drivers of Performance (2nd Edition)
- Instant Productivity Toolkit, The
- Integrated Account Management: How Business-To-Business Marketers Maximize Customer Loyalty and Profitability
- Interest Rate Models - Theory and Practice: With Smile, Inflation and Credit (Springer Finance)
- Kansas Health Care in Perspective 2001: A Statistical View of Health Care in the Sunflower State (Kansas Health Care in Perspective)
- Landmarks in Modern American Business (Magill's Choice)
- Legal Reasoning And Legal Writing: Structure, Strategy, And Style
- Litigation Under the Federal Open Government Laws (FOIA) 2004: Covering the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act, the Government in the Sunshine Act, and the Federal Advisory Committee Act
- Mad Reader Book 1 (Mad Reader)
- Managing a Consumer Lending Business
Books Index
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