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86 Chapter 6 SELECTION, SECURITY, AND EVOLUTIONARY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS GREGORY P. DIETL Alfred North Whitehead (1925, 179) once remarked that “change is inherent in the very nature of things.” Despite the undoubted truth of this statement , many political scientists treat economic entities, such as states, as static and unproblematic units that move across the international stage, not unlike chess pieces (Cederman 1997). Change (new patterns of interaction among entities) through time is thus presented as merely the differential outcome between particular moments in time, which essentially “freezes” change within a static and comparative conceptual framework that is more descriptive than it is explanatory (see Kerr 2002). After the sudden and dramatic end of the Cold War, however, some theorists , recognizing the inability of traditional conceptual frameworks of security studies in international relations to explain change, have turned to an evolutionary approach for insight (Modelski 1996; Thompson 2001). An evolutionary framework places the very concept of change as central, does not treat agents and their identities as fixed and given, and does not “privilege a type of actor or a type of problem as the core foci” (Thompson 2001, p. 2). An evolutionary approach in international relations theory is not expected to solve all problems or lead to a “perfect” system of thought, but, rather, to provide new ways of looking at old problems. While an evolutionary framework that focuses on change as an ongoing dynamic process holds advantages over static approaches to agency, the field of evolutionary international relations is still in its infancy about what an evolutionary paradigm should look like. One obstacle facing the research program is “What kinds of units . . . generate variations, are subject to selection pressures, adapt or fail to adapt, and demonstrate change that can be made more intelligible by an evolutionary perspective” (Rapkin 2001, 52)? The units of analysis problem in international relations theory is not new (Waltz 1959; Singer 1969), but in the context of an evolutionary framework a new wrinkle emerges in this issue because there is a set of criteria that any material configuration must meet to merit designation as an evolutionary “individual” that can participate in a process of selection (Gould 2002)—that is, when properties of a relevant individual interact with the environment in a causal way to influence the relative representation of future generations. According to George Modelski, “the starting point for evolutionary analysis [in international relations] is the global political system viewed as a set of policies (or strategies). These policies may (conceptually) be carried by a variety of actors or agents. . . . [T]he emphasis at this point is not on actors . . . but on the policies themselves viewed as sets of instructions, or programs. The instructions embodied in global politics provide the basis for the standard operating rules, or routines, of the global political system” (Modelski 1996, 331). This quote implies that the objects of selection in evolutionary international relations studies are fundamentally units of information. At bottom, then, evolution boils down to a competitive game to maximize representation of one variant version of information over another (Eldredge 1995). Given the intellectual roots of international relations theory and its emphasis on actors (human beings, states, groups of states, etc.), this view may seem vastly oversimplified (or perhaps even logically incoherent), because it effectively reduces actors or agents to mere vehicles that house information . When we consider the character of selection as a causal economic process, however, it becomes evident that this conceptualization is incomplete : it confuses a need for measuring the results of selection by counting differential increase of some informational attribute with the mechanism that produces relative “reproductive” success. Biologists, too, are not immune to these conceptual errors. The unit of selection problem in biology has been an intellectual minefield. Confusion, it seems, has stemmed largely from the ways in which biological phenomena have been conceptualized (Hull 1988a). It is probably fair to assume then that the fledgling field of evolutionary international relations is bound to make some of the same conceptual mistakes. In this chapter, my comments are directed mainly toward efforts in the developing “macrolevel” evolutionary world politics research program in international relations (Modelski 1996, 2001). My comments about the selection process, however, are of a general nature, such that they also apply to other developing research programs in the evolutionary international relations paradigm (e.g., the biobehavioral point of view; see Falger 2001; Thayer 2004). This chapter, therefore, drawing mainly on lessons learned by biologists in their own intellectual...

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