Social tinkering is real, but is it enough?

Abstract

We are sympathetic to the target article's emphasis on directed innovation and coordinated problem-solving as the microfoundations of emergent social order. Nevertheless, the authors' framing of social tinkering as a middle ground between extremes of deliberate design and selection on random variation risks caricaturing reasonable scientific positions and obscuring the question of which processes (one-shot innovation, incremental tinkering, and additional processes like cultural group selection) contribute most to complex cooperative institutions.