“Variation and selective retention” as an evolutionary epistemology: were Donald Campbell's life histories sufficient?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Campbell's “evolutionary epistemology” is used more frequently to refer to extensions of Darwinism than other phrases, and his description of it as “variation and selective retention” is highly cited. However, we can still ask whether it is sufficient. The evidence from his classic essay is that he understood it to include somatic maintenance and reproductive growth, but omitted somatic growth and reproductive maintenance. We describe some of the complexity of the evolutionary ecology of life histories, including ecological and ecological versus social density-dependence and scale-dependence, and find that, interestingly, understood as a distinction between spending and investing, the traditional r versus K density-dependence distinction yields the same pattern of expected life history traits as does scale-dependence (although there should be other ways of distinguishing them). We then use this to fill in the missing somatic growth and offspring maintenance of Campbell's model of sociocultural evolution. In concluding, we emphasize the degree to which not only the evolutionary ecology of life histories but also the logic of population genetics and tree-building have been found relevant to the social sciences. Donald Campbell and David Hull, both now deceased, will be remembered as early modern pioneers of the theory of Darwinian sociocultural evolution.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it