American biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky is famously known in the world of biology for having written that “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” If he had been familiar with the work of F.A. Hayek he would have dropped the “in Biology” and come up with a far more profound and sweeping statement. In Hayek’s words:

“We understand now that all enduring structures above the level of the simplest atoms, and up to the brain and society, are the results of, and can be explained only in terms of, processes of selective evolution…”

To Hayek and like-minded thinkers, selective evolution was the indispensable concept needed to properly explain not just the biological world of “living” things most of us are familiar with, but that of society as well and the key institutions it is composed of like language, religion, law, economics, etc.. Hayek wasn’t the first to attempt to explain the functioning of the entire world using an evolutionary process of course. One of the greatest and most influential intellectuals of all time, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, who Charles Darwin once referred to as “twenty times my superior” and whose book Social Statics was referred to by Murry N. Rothbard as “the greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written”, probably did as good a job at showing how the whole world was the result of an evolutionary process as anyone could have possibly done at the time. By coming into his own 50 years after Spencer’s death and having access to key evolutionary and economic insights by economists like Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, Hayek had better access to the concepts needed to really complete the all encompassing evolutionary framework.

If Spencer’s and Hayek’s evolutionary approach is ultimately correct, then we can expect the evolutionary framework to continue to out-compete other ideas and spread. Although the ‘Austrian School of Economics’ is quickly gaining popularity in large part thanks to the publicity it got due to the 2008 and 2012 presidential runs of Dr. Ron Paul, F.A. Hayek and the all encompasing evolutionary approach he represents is still relatively unknown even within libertarian circles. Although Dr. Paul gives Hayek credit for being one the the key thinkers that led him down the path to libertarianism, Dr. Paul is a Christian and thus ultimately somewhat at odds with the all ecompasing evolutionary approach. Many of the authors behind the world’s most popular libertarian website www.lewrockwell.com and the most popular economics learning resource www.mises.org are also Christians and thus more likely to reject or at least overlook Hayek’s evoutionary approach and favor Murray N. Rothbard’s ‘Natural Law’ approach. This has been a bit of a double edged sword. Dr. Paul would not have been as popular as he was, especially within the “conservative” Republican Party, should he have not been a Christian and preached an evolutionary worldview, so the great interest in ‘Austrian Economics’ he created might not have come about as quickly. But the current growth in Libertarianism and interest in Austrian Economics nonetheless gets people’s minds closer to Hayek and ultimately to contagion by his evolutionary approach.

The evolutionary worldview within the social sphere is not just being approached by the growth of Libertarianism. It is also being approached by a more mainstream biological establishment. Perhaps the most exciting poof of this is the great success of biologist Matt Ridley’s wonderful book “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” which became a New York Times bestseller and is full of references to Hayek. The bottom line is that all roads lead to an evolutionary world view and eventual familiarity with great thinkers like Spencer and F.A. Hayek. For a complete overview of how Spencer’s and Hayek’s evolutionary approach can be used to get a basic understanding of how the world works see my book “How the World Works: Natural Selection and the Evolution of Life, Society, the Economic Crisis, Hip-Hop, and F.A. Hayek’s Coming Intellectual Revolution”