Editors’ note: Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013), a valued friend and contributor to The New Criterion, delivered a version of the following remarks to the Mont Pelerin Society in the Galapagos Islands in June. He died suddenly on his return trip.
Here in the Galapagos, the abstraction that must haunt our imaginings is evolution. But the term has two distinct meanings. Here is one genealogy, from Hayek:
Of course the theory of cultural evolution [sometimes also described as psycho-social, super-organic, or exsomatic evolution] and the theory of biological evolution are hardly identical.
Here is another, from Matt Ridley:
Evolution is clearly a powerful word. The problem is that neither of these meanings has much to do with Darwinian natural selection which, by contrast with these meanings, is a blind process in which random mutations constantly generate new versions of a species that deals more successfully with the environment than its fellows. My concern by contrast is with the emergence of our free civilization, which has no blind random processes in it, though it may well be that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” might
