Introduction
David Sloan Wilson's paper advances the argument that scientific paradigms should be understood not merely as epistemic frameworks for interpreting reality but, in the social sciences, as elements of evolutionary selection environments. Paradigms differ across scientific domains in the extent to which they interact with, influence, and co-evolve with the objects they study. While paradigms in the physical sciences remain largely external to the phenomena they explain, paradigms in the biological and especially the social sciences increasingly participate in feedback loops that shape behavior, institutions, and collective outcomes.
The core claim of the paper is that multilevel selection provides a powerful framework for understanding why paradigms in the social sciences are historically consequential, why they compete for dominance, and why paradigm change often coincides with large-scale social and economic disruptions. Economic paradigms, in particular, are shown to function as cultural traits that influence institutional design and collective problem-solving capacity. The paper proceeds by first clarifying how the meaning of “paradigm” varies across the sciences, then introducing multilevel selection as an explanatory lens, before applying this lens to paradigms in the social sciences and, in detail, to economics.
Paradigms across the Sciences: Physical, Biological, and Social Domains
The concept of a scientific paradigm takes on systematically different meanings across the physical, biological, and social sciences, reflecting fundamental differences in the relationship between theory and object of inquiry.
In the physical sciences, paradigms are strictly epistemic constructs. They organize observation, experimentation, and explanation, but they do not affect the behavior or properties of the objects they describe. Electrons, planets, and chemical compounds are indifferent to the theories formulated about them. As a result, paradigm change in physics operates through internal scientific criteria—explanatory power, predictive accuracy, and coherence with empirical evidence. There is no feedback loop between the paradigm and the physical systems under study.
In the biological sciences, paradigms engage with objects that themselves evolve. Organisms, populations, and ecosystems change through evolutionary processes, and biological theories aim to explain these dynamics. However, biological paradigms generally do not alter evolutionary trajectories directly. Except in applied contexts such as medicine, conservation, or agriculture, theories of evolution do not feed back into reproductive success or natural selection. Consequently, paradigms in biology primarily track evolutionary change rather than co-evolving tightly with it.
In the social sciences, the situation is qualitatively different. Social theories influence beliefs, norms, policies, and institutional arrangements. These, in turn, reshape incentives, identities, and patterns of interaction. Paradigms in economics, sociology, and political science thus enter into reflexive feedback loops with the social realities they seek to explain. They do not merely interpret social systems; they help constitute them. For this reason, paradigms in the social sciences cannot be understood solely as epistemic frameworks; they are also forces within historical and institutional change.
Multilevel Selection and the Evolution of Paradigms
Multilevel selection theory holds that selection operates simultaneously at multiple levels of organization, such as individuals, groups, organizations, societies, and, in some contexts, global systems. Traits, behaviors, or institutional arrangements that are advantageous at one level may be disadvantageous at another. For example, individual-level strategies that maximize short-term personal gain can undermine group-level cooperation and long-term viability, while group-supporting norms may constrain individual advantage but enhance collective performance.
This framework is particularly useful for understanding phenomena in the biological and social sciences because it highlights how adaptive success depends on alignment across levels. In biology, multilevel selection helps explain phenomena such as cooperation, sociality, and the emergence of higher-level organization. In the social sciences, it illuminates why societies with institutions that align individual incentives with collective goals tend to outperform those that do not.
Applied to paradigms, multilevel selection implies that theories and frameworks are themselves subject to selection pressures. Paradigms that legitimize institutions capable of solving collective problems, sustaining cooperation, and maintaining social cohesion are more likely to persist and spread. Paradigms that systematically privilege one level of selection—most commonly the individual—at the expense of higher-level coordination may generate persistent collective failures and eventually lose credibility. Multilevel selection thus provides a unifying explanation for both the emergence and the decline of dominant paradigms in the biological and social sciences.
Paradigms in the Social Sciences
In the social sciences, paradigms are part of the selection environment within which social practices, institutions, and forms of organization emerge, persist, or disappear. In evolutionary terms, paradigms shape which kinds of explanations are regarded as legitimate, which institutional arrangements are considered viable, and which patterns of behavior are encouraged, rewarded, or sanctioned. These judgments influence what is taught in universities, funded by research agencies, adopted in policy, and replicated across organizations. Over time, paradigms therefore act as selective forces, favoring some social practices and institutional forms while marginalizing others.
This perspective connects naturally to multilevel selection theory, originally developed in evolutionary biology and subsequently extended to cultural and institutional evolution. From this viewpoint, paradigms are not merely intellectual frameworks; they are cultural traits that structure the environments in which economic and social actors adapt.
Economics as a multilevel evolutionary system
This co-evolutionary perspective has particularly far-reaching implications for economics. The traditional neoclassical paradigm implicitly assumes that selection operates primarily at the individual level, that preferences are fixed and exogenous, and that social outcomes emerge from the aggregation of individual choices rather than from group-level organization or institutional design. From a multilevel selection perspective, this constitutes a systematic blind spot. By privileging individual-level efficiency, the neoclassical framework struggles to account for situations in which individually rational behavior undermines collective performance or long-term viability.
Persistent collective failures—such as climate change, financial instability, rising inequality, and institutional erosion—are difficult to explain within a framework that treats social norms and institutions as constraints rather than as evolving adaptive systems (North 1990; Hodgson 1999). In response, a range of emerging paradigms—variously described as institutional, evolutionary, behavioral, or explicitly multilevel—can be understood as adaptations to selection pressures operating at higher levels of organization.
Climate change selects for coordination mechanisms at national and global scales; digital platforms select for governance structures that transcend atomistic market models; and recurrent financial crises select for institutions capable of managing systemic risk rather than merely optimizing individual portfolios. From this perspective, a new economic paradigm is not simply a superior analytical framework, but a cultural adaptation that enhances a society’s capacity to survive and flourish under changing conditions (Nelson and Winter 1982).
Paradigms as multilevel traits
Paradigms themselves exhibit the defining characteristics of multilevel selection. They replicate through education systems, professional norms, policy advice, and international organizations. They vary across countries and institutional contexts. They are selected on the basis of their ability to solve collective problems, maintain legitimacy, and sustain cooperation across scales. Societies whose dominant economic paradigms fail to align individual incentives with collective needs tend, over time, to become less stable, less resilient, and less competitive.
Multilevel selection theory helps explain a robust empirical regularity emphasized in both evolutionary economics and institutional analysis: groups with institutions that suppress free-riding, foster trust, and align incentives outperform groups that do not (Bowles and Gintis 2011; Wilson, Ostrom, and Cox 2013). Economic paradigms that legitimate and support the design of such institutions are therefore selected at the societal level, even when they constrain certain forms of individual advantage. This helps to explain why paradigms emphasizing social norms, institutional design, collective agency, and long-term sustainability gain traction during periods characterized by large-scale coordination challenges.
Paradigm change as evolutionary transition
From this evolutionary perspective, major shifts in economic thought resemble evolutionary transitions rather than purely intellectual revolutions. They involve a movement from individual-centric selection toward multilevel coordination, from short-term efficiency toward long-term viability, and from fragmented governance toward nested, scale-appropriate institutional arrangements. This parallels biological transitions, such as the emergence of multicellular organisms, in which lower-level autonomy is partially constrained in order to achieve higher-level functionality.
Economic paradigms that recognize and institutionalize multilevel selection are therefore best understood not as ideological innovations, but as evolutionary responses to changes in the scale, complexity, and interdependence of human societies.
Synthesis: paradigms, selection, and economic transformation
Taken together, these arguments suggest that paradigms in the social sciences are not neutral descriptions of an external reality, but evolving cultural traits embedded in multilevel selection processes. Multilevel selection provides a unifying framework for explaining why some paradigms persist while others fail, and why paradigm change tends to occur when existing frameworks no longer enable societies to solve collective problems at the relevant scale. Economics, viewed through this lens, is not a timeless mechanics of individual choice, but a science of institutional evolution under multilevel selection. The contemporary shift toward institutional, evolutionary, and multilevel approaches thus reflects not merely intellectual progress, but the selection pressures of a world in which prosperity and survival increasingly depend on coordinated collective action across levels of social organization.
References:
Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. (2011). A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691158167/a-cooperative-species
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (1999). Evolution and Institutions: On Evolutionary Economics and the Evolution of Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781840640138.xml
Nelson, Richard R., and Sidney G. Winter. (1982). An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674272289
North, Douglass C. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808678
Wilson, David Sloan, Elinor Ostrom, and Michael E. Cox. (2013). “Generalizing the Core Design Principles for the Efficacy of Groups.”Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90, S21–S32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.010
