Evolutionary Instability

The recent sociobiology debate has raised fundamental and previously unresolved conceptual problems. Evolutionary Instability - Logical and Material Aspects of a Unified Theory of Biosocial Evolution - offers approaches for their solution. The scientific applications comprise the dynamics and evolutionary instability of hierarchically organized systems, especially systems of interacting behavioural phenotypes in animals and man. The technical apparatus is thoroughly explained in intuitive terms within the text, and illustrated by numerous familiar examples and graphical representations, supplemented by an informal summary and discussion. The analyses offer new theoretical perspectives to such diverse fields as philosophy of science, evolutionary biology, general system theory and sociology. §Die hier dargelegte Theorie läßt sich bei der Untersuchung vieler komplexer Systeme hilfreich anwenden. Über die biologisch-evolutionären Fragestellungen hinaus ist sie auch auf andere Fragestellungen der Biosoziologie und der Philosophie übertragbar. The scope of this book can be described best as a compilation of papers presented to an imaginary interdisciplinary conference on philosophical and material problems of biosocial evolution. The conference is espe cially designed to discuss unifying theoretical approaches to pheno mena of both increasing structural complexity ("natural self-organi sation") and biosocial adaptation. Among the contributors to the confe rence are mathematical system theoretists, philosophers of science, theoretical population biologists, and social scientists. The only diffe rence to a real conference of this kind is that all contributions are deli vered by one and the same author, who also tries to integrate them to some higher degree than can normally be attained in conference papers. Technically, this integration amounts to the embedding of the biobeha vioural concepts of evolutionarily stable and unstable strategies into the framework of the structure and stability of hierarchical systems. When embarking on my work on philosophical and interdisciplinary problems of the life sciences about 6 years ago, I decided not to contri bute to the obscurantist talk of - horribile dictu - "emergence" , "onto logical reductionism" and the like contaminating the recent sociobio logy debate. I rather found it a genuinely philosophical task to analyse this talk, and so I attempted to recast the relevant concepts and princip les into a form allowing for definite conclusions. Among other things, which I hope the reader will find more pleasant, this attempt had some unfortunate effect, however.