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This makes it hard to characterize “population thinking” as a third conceptual innovation
wholly distinct from Darwin’s better-known ideas.
If this is right, then this form of “population thinking” is unlikely to offer us any new
set of conceptual resources not already implicit in the ideas of natural selection and
common ancestry. So if we are already unimpressed by the contribution these two ideas
can make to understanding technological change, we should not expect much additional
insight to follow from using this form of population thinking. To see this, remember that
on Darwin’s view species are “tolerably well-defi ned objects” in virtue of the corralling
forces of local environments, which discipline the tendencies of individuals to vary, and
thereby maintain coherence over time at the level of the population. This population-level
coherence is achieved in spite of differences constantly being introduced among individu-
als, not because of something shared by all individuals.
What would it mean to apply this way of thinking to a technological lineage? It
would involve explaining technical trajectories in terms of the corralling forces of
local market environments instead of in terms of the shared internal properties of token
artifacts. The problem is not that this is an inappropriate way of explaining technical
change. The problem is that it is too obviously an appropriate way. We are quite used to
thinking that the absence of some kinds of artifact and the concentrated presence of others
owes itself primarily to discontinuities in market demands. There are no chocolate teapots,
not because they are impossible to construct, but because teapots made from chocolate
would be useless. To the extent that Darwin’s population thinking is novel, he does not so
much devise a new way of thinking as show how the general modes of explanation avail-
able for the form of artifacts can be plausibly applied to the explanation of organic
form.
14.4 A Place for Typological Thinking
“Typological” styles of explanation are not, as I have been discussing them, genuinely
incompatible with “populational” styles of explanation. It is possible to explain the popula-
tion-level coherence of an organic lineage by appealing to a combination of characteristic
biasing forces affecting the range of variation that can be produced in that lineage, and by
the winnowing effects of local environmental forces. This mixed stance is the one held by
many workers in contemporary evolutionary developmental biology (often abbreviated to
“EvoDevo”). It is, for example, precisely the stance expressed in Wallace Arthur’s “biased
embryos” program (Arthur 2004).
If population thinking is too obviously applicable to technical change, we might think
a “typological” style of explanation is the place to look for surprising results in the history
of technology. Typological styles of explanation would seek to discover characteristic
forms of bias on the variants that arise in technical lineages. This may mean looking to