Evolution of institutions

One of the themes from the post on religion below is that institutions can profitably be regarded as evolved entities in their own right. This echoes group selection theory, but I don't really intend it that way. An evolutionary theory to account for modern human behavior needs to include the concept that individual humans are (or can be) members of several communities at once, which may have conflicting hierarchies. It is not clear to me that the usual formulations of group selection consider humans in this way. Besides which, the success of an institution is not necessarily linked to its ability to create copies of itself - often, stability over a long time period is intuitively a better measure of an institution's success. The generally declining marginal contribution of additional group members to group success (which is an assumption frequently made in economics to describe why firms eventually stop growing or shrinking) suggests that group selection theory must ultimately favor the creation of new groups. This is not necessarily true of institutions.

Institutions, to me, can be described more or less as basins of attraction. I say this with some reservation, because I'm not well enough versed in the mathematics to be precise. I understand a basin of attraction as a concept in dynamical systems, used to describe more-or-less regular trajectories through the space under consideration. For example, the trajectory of astronomical bodies (planets, stars, etc.) are well described by differential equations - astral body acceleration at any instant depends on the body's position and mass, and the position and mass of any other astral bodies nearby. Without getting too deep into it, this dependence of acceleration on the positions of several mobile bodies makes modeling the motion of the planets actually quite a bit more complex than one might naïvely expect (see the N-body problem for details). The orbits of the planets within the solar system are regular to the extent that they are caught within the solar system's basin of attraction. (I'm happy to be corrected on this.) Incidentally, "adaptive peaks" on Sewall Wright's "fitness landscape" are themselves essentially basins of attraction... As are other evolutionary scenarios, such as rock-paper-scissors games described by Maynard-Smith (in which an individual is committed to a strategy at birth - in this case, there is no ESS. nevertheless, the path through time is quite regular: scissors is replaced by rock is replaced by paper is replaced by scissors. I've wondered if this scenario perhaps accounts for nuptial-gift patterns in insects, which I may expand on later).

This sounds excessively complicated, it probably is excessively complicated. But that doesn't mean that this sort of thinking isn't useful. Ecology in general is considered by those who study it as a very complicated dynamic system. Adaptation is considered to follow a trajectory on a fitness landscape defined by the entities in the ecosphere, which is a very complicated beast. Studies of biological adaptation, however, greatly simplify this picture by considering a denuded subset of the ecosphere, and model but a few variables of interest.

What I am trying to get at can be expressed much more simply: a successful institution will select for (that is, recruit and/or develop) the individual or individuals best suited to carry out a role in that institution. The method of selection is a property of the institution, and of the available "talent pool", and will also reflect interactions with other institutions in the cultural web. Understanding the evolution of institutions is a question of how these institutions' mechanisms for selecting or cultivating new individuals in different roles change over time, and understanding the adaptations of institutions will mean describing the circumstances under which different forms of selection or cultivation tend to be more or less successful.

It's probably hubris, but I suspect that research following such a program would do better describing behavior on a global scale than any approach which treats institutions as mere epiphenomena.

I hope to unpack some of this discussion later.