Social Science Paradigms as Evolutionary Selection Environments

Prof. Dennis J. Snower | 2 February 2026

Social science paradigms don’t just explain society — they shape it, acting as selection environments for institutions and behavior

Introduction

David Sloan Wilson's paper advances the argument that scientific paradigms should be understood not merely as epistemic frameworks for interpreting reality but, in the social sciences, as elements of evolutionary selection environments. Paradigms differ across scientific domains in the extent to which they interact with, influence, and co-evolve with the objects they study. While paradigms in the physical sciences remain largely external to the phenomena they explain, paradigms in the biological and especially the social sciences increasingly participate in feedback loops that shape behavior, institutions, and collective outcomes.

Read the full article published for ProSocial World.

About the Author

Dennis J. Snower is Co-President of The New Alignment and Honorary Professor at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. He is the Founding President and a Fellow of the Global Solutions Initiative, Berlin; Professorial Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford University; Non-resident Fellow at Brookings. Previously, he was Program Chair at The New Institute, President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and Professor of Economics at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. Dennis J. Snower earned a BA and MA from New College, Oxford University, an MA and a PhD at Princeton University. He is an expert on labor economics, socio-economics, public policy and inflation-unemployment tradeoffs. He is currently working on a new paradigm for economics with David Sloan Wilson. He is the author of a major report on digital governance with reform with Paul Twomey.