Evolutionary Ideas and What It Means for Politics

There appears to be a broad consensus that ideas evolve.  Ideas and beliefs emerge, die off, replicate, and mutate within our society, yet whether they are part of a grand evolutionary scheme is still hotly debated.  It mostly comes down to how literally we want to talk about evolution in the biological sense and how we want to describe mechanisms that contribute to evolution.  We’ll first have to figure out what we actually mean by evolution, then look at how various scholars have described the evolution of ideas under a rational system like science, and then look at how it might work under an irrational system like politics.

What is Evolution?

The problem with defining evolution is that the word was used in the lexicon far before Darwin’s theory.  Just as Copernicus more accurately described the orbit of the Earth around the sun by building on the previously-conceived notion of orbits, Darwin merely gave a better explanation for an already established notion of evolution.