Evolution and the Dynamics of Technological Change

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Variation, selection, inheritance—evolution by natural selection explains the tree of life, but is that process, suitably translated, also responsible for technological change? Joel Mokyr, in The Lever of Riches, says yes, and no. Natural selection, in the standard model, makes slow, incremental improvements; and the history of technology is certainly full of that. Some existing technique is in established use (the “parent”); here and there, pushed by that most human urge to fiddle and experiment, some people try something new (the diverse offspring); if one of these variants makes, say, plowing slightly faster, or more efficient, then others will copy it, abandoning the old technique—selection killing the unfit. Allow a few centuries to go by, and you may be surprised by how much more food you can grow. Human seafaring abilities were another case:

The eighteenth-century ship was significantly different from the early fifteenth-century ship, yet with few exceptions these changes were the result of cumulative microinventions.

In technological as in biological evolution, the fruits of this process depend on what is actually tried, not on what easily could have been, but was not. For decades if not centuries, wheeled suitcases were a short step from existing luggage techniques, a twenty-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. Yet I can remember heaving and dragging a monstrous hard-shell clam-case across the quad and to the bus.

Impressed by the power of natural selection, acting gradually, to produce the myriad complex life-forms around us, some historians adopted a gradualist view of the evolution of technology. Mokyr demurs, asserting that the accumulation of microinventions, powerful as it is, cannot fully explain the history of technological change. Some changes were huge jumps, “saltations”: macroinventions, “an invention without clear-cut parentage, representing a clear break from previous technique.” Mokyr regards “punctuated equilibria” models of the evolution of life as evidence for this view, but there’s no reason gradualism about technological change must stand or fall with gradualism about the biological variety. The analogy already breaks down at many points—variation among living things is generated blindly, by mutation and by the chromosomal shuffling that is, from Nature’s point of view, the true joy of sex; but we tinkerers are aiming (even if poorly) for improvement, when we dream up and try out something new.

So macroinventions drove The Industrial Revolution. Without them, microinvention would have continued, but would have hit the limits of its power to improve: