Innovation and Population 245
regarding the relative importance in technological explanation of social, economic, psy-
chological, material, and other factors can be articulated and discussed, without this evo-
lutionary framework itself offering adjudication regarding these issues.
In this chapter I focus on a different way of responding to skepticism about the ability
of evolutionary models to explain technical innovation. This response denies that Darwin’s
great contributions number just two. One of the many seminal claims that we owe to Ernst
Mayr is the view that Darwin “replaced typological thinking with population thinking”
(1976: 27). According to Mayr, population thinking is Darwin’s third great contribution
to biology. Whatever “population thinking” is, it is supposed to be distinct both from the
hypothesis of evolution and from the principle of natural selection. Hence if we are unim-
pressed by the contribution that common descent and natural selection can make to the
study of technology, we might be more impressed by the contribution made by population
thinking.
14.3 Mayr’s Population Thinking
Evolutionary anthropologists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson have championed the view
that population thinking is the key to an evolutionary understanding of culture (e.g., Boyd
and Richerson 2000; Richerson and Boyd 2005). Although their work looks at cultural
evolution in general, they count technology as part of culture (2005: 29), and some of their
discussions focus on technological change. They explain their stance succinctly at the
beginning of an important recent work:
Eminent biologist Ernst Mayr has argued that “population thinking” was Charles Darwin’s key
contribution to biology.... Population thinking is the core of the theory of culture we defend in this
book. (Richerson and Boyd, 2005: 5)
I argue in this section that “population thinking,” in Mayr’s core sense of that term, does
not in fact offer much of interest to the evolutionary theorist of technological change. From
section 14.5 onward I argue that Boyd and Richerson’s rather different brand of population
thinking is far more promising.
Mayr defi nes population thinking by contrast with typological thinking (Mayr 1976).
The typological thinker believes there is some small number of stable “types” or “forms,”
which explain the observed patterns of diversity in the biological world. The “vertebrate
archetype” of Richard Owen, for example, was an effort to represent a common structural
plan, modifi ed to various degrees in particular species, which underlies all vertebrates. We
can think of “types” as explanatory posits: some forms are seen rarely or not at all because
there is no corresponding type. Others are seen frequently because they are variations on
an underlying type (see Sober 1980; the following presentation is adapted from Lewens
2006: ch. 3).