Beyond Selection

From evolutionary theory to a living grammar of economy

My understanding has been … evolving.

Part of that change has come from reading The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which gave me a deeper appreciation for how powerful Darwin’s basic grammar was for biology. Part of it has also come from attending David Sloan Wilson’s masterclass on rethinking the theoretical foundation of economics, where he has been presenting what they call a multilevel economic paradigm.

I have found both experiences deeply valuable. They have helped me see why evolutionary thinking still has such explanatory force, and why people are reaching for it again in economics. Variation, replication, and selection are elegant because they reveal broad patterns that are otherwise hard to see. They help explain how institutions persist, how behaviors spread, and how systems adapt over time.

But there is also something passionate I want to say here, especially for those who love Darwin and what he made possible.

Darwin did not remain in the armchair. He got on a boat. He went out into the living world. He watched closely. He compared forms of life in relation to their environments. He let observation disturb inherited theory. He did not make biology more scientific by retreating from life, but by encountering it more directly.

That spirit still matters.

If we care about cooperation, mutual aid, and social organisms, then surely we should be deeply interested in the communities that have remained intact for generations, sometimes hundreds of years. How do they do it? What are their actual practices? How do they remember commitments? How do they handle conflict? How do they share burden? How do they keep opportunism from tearing the social fabric? How do they pass on trust, norms, and reciprocal obligations across time?

These are not secondary questions. They are central.

And this is where I keep returning to the same intuition: while Darwin’s grammar remains useful at one level, it is not the best primary grammar for economics.

It is useful for describing long-run dynamics, but it feels too distant from the actual work of economic life. It does not begin where people actually live economy together. It does not start with how communities recognize value, set boundaries, remember commitments, repair breakdowns, or move obligations between one another in ways that keep life going.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

Variation, replication, and selection describe how patterns persist and change across time. But curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange describe how economic coordination is enacted from within. They point to what people are actually doing when they try to organize shared life consciously.

That is why I keep returning to the four functions we have been developing through Commitment Pooling: curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange.

These functions feel closer to the lived grammar of economy. They are not meant to replace familiar categories like production, distribution, or consumption. Nor are they meant to deny that economic systems evolve. They are meant to name four recurring coordination functions that appear whenever people try to steward value together: what counts, what matters, what must be bounded, and how commitments move.

They are observable in practice, normative in implication, and designable in institutions. Communities can discuss them, revise them, and live them.

They also seem minimal in a practical sense. Without curation, nothing is recognized. Without valuation, nothing is prioritized. Without limitation, systems are easily drained, captured, or dominated. Without exchange, commitments do not circulate, settle, or connect across people and groups.

A village, a savings group, a care circle, a labor network, or a federation can actually ask: What are we curating? How are we valuing? What limits are we setting? How is exchange happening?

Those are not abstract questions. They can be discussed around a table. They can be encoded in agreements. They can be revised when conditions change. They can be lived.

This matters to me because I increasingly think economics will only become a real science when it is willing to do what biology had to do: leave the armchair, enter the field, and study living systems as they are actually practiced.

Not just markets as models. Not just incentives as abstractions. Not just isolated individuals in hypothetical choice environments. But real communities, with memory, sanctions, obligations, grief, reciprocity, trust, repair, and bounded forms of exchange.

Economics becomes more scientific, not when it becomes more sterile, but when it becomes more observational, comparative, participatory, and accountable to lived reality.

That also means economics must become something we practice, not only something we analyze.

We should not only debate cooperation. We should try to build and steward it. We should not only write papers about reciprocity. We should participate in systems where commitments are made visible, tested, fulfilled, broken, repaired, and renewed. We should not only theorize commons. We should ask what it takes to keep one alive through drought, conflict, scarcity, and temptation.

I came to this view through practice before theory.

For more than fifteen years with Grassroots Economics, beginning in places like Kitui, Kenya, I have watched communities revive rotational labor practices such as Mweria during drought. People pooled time, seeds, tools, labor, knowledge, and effort so that no one would go hungry or thirsty. Those commitments did not stop at emergency survival. They extended into home repair, water catchments, caregiving, shared rebuilding, and trust.

What mattered there was not simply that some behavior got selected over time. What mattered was that people consciously recognized what counted, valued one another’s contributions, limited harmful extraction, and exchanged commitments in ways that kept life going.

That same pattern has appeared again and again in villages, informal settlements, refugee settings, savings groups, and labor associations. The commitment itself becomes a basic unit of coordination: a strong promise involving time, resources, labor, skill, or reputation. Trust grows through fulfillment, and through the relational memory that communities carry about who showed up, who followed through, and how people responded when strain appeared.

Seen from that perspective, economics begins to look less like the management of scarce commodities and more like the stewardship of commitments.

That does not make evolutionary thinking wrong. It simply places it at a different level.

Variation, replication, and selection still matter. They help explain what happens to practices and institutions over time. But when communities are trying to coordinate consciously, the more immediate questions are different. What are we recognizing? What are we reinforcing? What are we protecting against? How are promises moving, settling, and being renewed?

At that level, curation affects variation. Valuation affects reinforcement. Limitation shapes the selective environment. Exchange influences how commitments spread, stabilize, settle, and route.

So I do not see these grammars as enemies. I see them as describing different layers of the same reality.

Evolutionary grammar helps us observe broad adaptive dynamics. A coordination grammar helps us ask where reflection, judgment, and stewardship can enter the system.

That is where consciousness becomes important.

By consciousness I do not mean anything mystical. I mean the practical capacity of individuals and groups to notice, name, remember, deliberate about, and revise the conditions of their own coordination. More than that, I mean a kind of patterned social self-perception: the ability of a group to sense what is happening in its own flows of care, labor, debt, depletion, and obligation.

This matters because communities are not only shaped by outside pressures. They also participate in shaping the conditions that shape them. They notice what is breaking down. They revise norms. They protect what they value. They repair trust. They decide what must remain bounded. In that sense, they do not merely adapt. They also steward adaptation.

This is something high-level evolutionary framing can understate, especially when viewed from communities already living commons. An evolutionary account can help explain why cooperation persists. But communities practicing commons reveal something further: cooperation is not only selected. It is cultivated through memory, care, mutual limitation, and revisable protocols of stewardship.

That difference matters.

It matters because economics is not only the study of what survives. It is also the study of how people make life possible together.

If biology needed a minimal grammar for adaptation, economics may need a minimal grammar for coordination.

By minimal, I do not mean reductive. I mean the smallest set of functions that communities can actually observe, discuss, and revise together without losing the living complexity of what they are doing.

For me, curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange are a candidate for that minimal coordination grammar.

But these four functions do not stand alone.

They only become livable through memory, authentication, and repair. Communities must be able to remember what was promised, know who is responsible, contest misleading records, and restore relationship when fulfillment breaks down. Otherwise curation becomes arbitrary, valuation becomes opaque, limitation becomes coercive, and exchange becomes brittle.

This is where commons become especially important.

Commons theory has already taught us something essential: a commons involves a resource, a community, and a set of rules. But rules alone are not enough. They must be interpreted, monitored, remembered, revised, and repaired by people with situated judgment. The life of a commons is not only in its formal structure. It is in the ongoing work of stewardship.

That is why I am not trying to replace commons theory. I am trying to look more closely at the lived work inside it.

And following that line of thought has led me toward a claim I want to hold with both seriousness and humility.

If commons are not only things we share, but capacities we actively steward together, then one of the most prevalent and foundational forms of commoning may be socio-relational: the shared, collectively stewarded capacity for care.

I mean this in three linked ways.

First, care is everywhere. It is among the most common forms of everyday commoning.

Second, it is foundational. Without care, human flourishing becomes very thin.

Third, it is prior in a practical sense. Care underwrites other commons by enabling trust, coordination, maintenance, and the capacity to uphold rules over time.

Water, air, forests, and soils remain essential commons. But they do not steward themselves. Without care, without the shared capacity to notice, remember, coordinate, and protect, there is little reason to expect they will remain commons for long.

By care here I do not mean sentimentality. I mean the practical work of checking in, feeding, transporting, teaching, repairing, listening, witnessing, and making room for one another. The capacities that make care possible, such as time, attention, energy, trust, and social availability, are finite. In that sense they can be strained, overloaded, and depleted. But with good practice they can also be renewed and expanded. That makes care governable as a commons in a very real way.

A care commons exists when a group can name what care means here, knows who can ask and who can offer it, sets norms together, witnesses follow-through, addresses strain before resentment hardens, and connects with other circles when the need exceeds its own scale. It also requires boundaries, monitoring, and workable, ideally graduated and restorative, ways of responding to misuse or overload. Otherwise care remains a sentiment rather than a stewarded commons.

In practice, what we call a community is often not one bounded circle. It is a network of overlapping pools: care circles, savings groups, labor groups, learning groups, food-growing groups, watershed groups, and mutual aid networks. The overlap itself is part of what constitutes the community.

That overlap can be deeply generative. It allows trust, reciprocity, and accountability to move across domains of life. But it can also become confusing or extractive if there is no relational memory, no boundary clarity, and no way to reconcile obligations when they collide.

This is one reason Grassroots Economics has increasingly understood community economy as polycentric: not a single monolithic structure, but overlapping pools of stewardship that sometimes interoperate, sometimes negotiate, and sometimes need to refuse one another for the sake of their own integrity.

Seen from this perspective, many monetary systems begin to look secondary to the commitments they try to represent. Currencies may be useful interfaces. They may help denominate, settle, or route value. But they are not themselves the commons. The deeper economy lies in how communities curate, value, limit, remember, and exchange actual commitments across living groups.

That is why Commitment Pooling has focused on making commitments more legible without collapsing them into one generalized token. Its purpose is not simply to count or standardize. It is to support relational memory, reciprocity, visible limitation, and coordinated exchange across overlapping pools.

But here a caution becomes necessary.

The point is not to make everything visible. A living economy needs memory, but not total exposure. It needs coordination, but not reduction. Commitments may need to become legible enough for trust, routing, and repair, yet not so flattened that care becomes surveillance, obligation becomes scorekeeping, or communities become dashboards for outside control.

Every representation changes behavior. Once care becomes a metric, commitment becomes a score, or community becomes a dashboard, people begin adapting themselves to what the system can read. A healthy coordination grammar must therefore preserve what cannot be fully counted: dignity, secrecy, context, informal care, and the right to contest the record.

What communities need is not perfect visibility, but wise legibility. Enough visibility for stewardship. Enough privacy for dignity. Enough accountability for repair. Enough local judgment for the record to remain human.

This is also why grammar is not enough.

A grammar helps communities name recurring functions. But a grammar is not yet a constitution. It does not by itself decide membership, adjudication, enforcement, emergency powers, or what happens under stress. It does not determine who can revise the rules, how conflicts are handled, or how capture is prevented.

Durable commoning depends on constitutional questions as much as grammatical ones. Who belongs? Who decides? What happens when obligations fail? How are boundaries defended without becoming oppressive? How are records contested? How does a pool remain sovereign while still interoperating with others?

These questions become especially important once commitments begin to move across groups.

The four functions do not operate only inside a single village, circle, or association. They also shape how promises travel between overlapping, sovereign pools. A healthy economy is not one mega-market and not one mega-ledger. It is a network of readable routes, local stewardship, and interoperable commitments that can move without erasing the distinctiveness of the communities that hold them.

In that sense, exchange is not only a transfer. It is also a routing problem. How do commitments move across different pools without losing meaning, accountability, or trust? How do communities cooperate without being absorbed? How do they connect without surrendering sovereignty?

These are constitutional and relational questions as much as technical ones.

From one angle, all of this is economics. From another, it is healing.

When communities are fragmented, traumatized, or subordinated, the field of reflection narrows. Curation becomes exclusion. Valuation becomes price obsession or status competition. Limitation becomes coercion. Exchange becomes extraction. Under those conditions, the problem is not only material scarcity. It is also a damaged capacity to perceive, remember, and revise life together.

Healing is not separate from economy here. It is part of what restores a group’s ability to notice what matters, tell the truth about its own conditions, set workable limits, and move commitments in ways that regenerate trust.

That is why I find myself both grateful for evolutionary theory and unsatisfied by it when it is brought too directly into economics.

It tells us a great deal about how patterns survive. But economy, as lived by communities, is not only a survival pattern. It is a stewardship practice. It is people making life possible together through promises, memory, boundaries, repair, and exchange.

So I find myself wanting to say, as carefully as I can, that biology may have needed a minimal grammar for adaptation, while economics may need a minimal grammar for coordination.

And perhaps economics will become more worthy of the name science when it is willing to do what the best sciences do: observe carefully, compare honestly, participate humbly, revise openly, and remain accountable to reality.

That means studying communities that endure. It means learning from people who actually keep commons alive. It means treating villages, care networks, labor groups, and mutual aid systems not as quaint leftovers, but as living laboratories of economic intelligence.

It also means practicing economics.

Not only measuring it.

Not only modeling it.

Not only publishing about it.

Practicing it.

For me, that candidate grammar remains simple: curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange.

Not because it explains everything.

Not because it replaces evolution.

Not because it removes the need for constitutions, memory, repair, or care.

But because it may be the smallest useful way to name how people consciously steward value together, while leaving room for the deeper work of building economies that remain livable, sovereign, and humane.