Chapter 9 studies the U.S.-China rivalry, which has strengthened since the early 2010s. From an evolutionary perspective, strategy is defined as a phenotype or playbook and strategic rivalry as a contest of different phenotypes in the larger ecological environment. International relations are thus fundamentally defined by competition and selection. Competition may lead to divergence among units, and the mechanism of selection indeed requires different types. The United States and China represent two different types of political systems, although there has also been mutual learning. The U.S.-China rivalry is consequential for East Asia and the world because they are currently the two greatest powers, with the sources of their power constructed and adapted over years. The chapter demonstrates how the United States and China have been in different stages since the founding of the United States in 1776, experiencing ups and downs in their bilateral interactions since 1784.

This chapter first addresses the question of whether latecomer firms will catch up with and eventually overtake the incumbent by merely imitating the incumbent or by initiating innovation different from those of incumbents. Section 3 deals with the coevolution of firms and surrounding institutions in the context of post-reform China where firms with diverse ownership have emerged. Productivity of locally owned enterprises is shown to eventually catch up with foreign-owned enterprises, because institutions developing over time were better exploited by the former than the latter. It suggests that private firms cannot prosper without sound institutions, and institutional development may be useless unless there are private firms that can benefit from this institutional development. Section 4 will elaborate the case of one region, Hsinchu City, in Taiwan to show that its long-term trajectory of upgrading is driven by the rise of a leading big business, namely TSMC. The final section finds that the behavior of Korean firms earlier corresponded with that of typical catching-up firms (e.g., prioritizing growth over profitability, borrowing and investing more, and specializing in short-cycle technologies) but currently show radical changes in their behavioral pattern to show signs of convergence toward the behavior of mature firms in the US.

This book explores the coevolution of firms, sectors, regions, and national economies in the Global South and explains their economic performance as a dynamic outcome of interactions between the multiple levels of innovation systems. This book counters prevailing views on economic development and offers a unique contribution to the literature on economic catch-up. Whereas the traditional linear view of development has taken a “more is better” approach, this book advocates that latecomers should pursue detours or leapfrogging, which conforms with a “less is better” approach. Instead of the conventional prioritization of manufacturing, this book proposes prioritizing domestic ownership and knowledge in specific sectors and regions and asserts that no country has successfully developed a high-income economy without generating a certain number of globally recognized big businesses. Instead of placing priority on free markets as the Washington Consensus does, this book argues that economic catch-up is only possible with active and planned government interventions, which are needed to overcome latecomers’ disadvantages regarding barriers to entry at the middle-income stage.

Darwin and Wallace proposed that natural selection is the process responsible for the evolution of adaptive features. Mutations provide the raw material of evolution. Interacting species influence each other’s evolution through coevolution. Evolution offers insight into many past and current controversies including Proximate (extrinsic) and ultimate (intrinsic) factors influence species’ vulnerability to extinction. Going through a bottleneck results in low genetic diversity and the high risk of becoming extinct due to inbreeding, catastrophes, and fluctuations in birth and death rates and the sex ratio. The theory of island biogeography states that extinction risk is high in small, isolated populations. Understanding evolution has practical implications for managing the evolution of resistance to pesticides, problems from hybridization, and populations at risk of extinction.

This chapter explores how China’s authoritarian underpinnings may affect the trajectory of its environmental regulation. It examines whether rising environmental consciousness and a shift in social and economic norms will push China towards an era of greener growth, even if institutions take time to catch up. It then assesses how the regime’s current preference for a flexible, adaptive mode of governance will impact the future of pollution control. Will this spur on a process of “coevolution,” where local policy experimentation eventually produces an unexpected but effective set of institutions that can enforce sustainable solutions to pollution? Or will the regime’s deep-rooted principal–agent problems – combined with the bureaucracy’s growing wariness of experimentation – drive the leadership towards a pervasive “short-termism” in environmental governance?

The interdisciplinary field of animal studies owes much to Darwin’s work, particularly in the Descent of Man, where he claims that mental and emotional capacities ranging from an ability to reason to an aesthetic sense exist in other animals besides humans. This chapter examines the significance of Darwin’s work for animal ethics, the science of animal behavior, theories of companion species, and the age of mass extinction. Activists, scientists, humanists, and environmentalists continue to find new uses for Darwin’s work as they pursue greater knowledge about the animal kingdom and more just ecological communities.

Sexual conflict arises from differences in the fitness interests of males and females. A trait that is beneficial for the reproductive success of one sex reduces the fitness of the other sex, resulting in opposing selection pressures on the two sexes. The two sexes need each other for reproduction, but their dependence is asymmetric. Males benefit from a higher mating rate than females, as their reproductive success is usually constrained by the number of receptive mates, while female reproductive success is limited by egg production. Sexual conflict can occur at any stage of reproductive interactions – before or during copulation, or after insemination – and over almost any aspect of reproduction, from the decision to mate to the investment into parental care. The conflict results in a perpetual tug of war between the sexes. Each sex attempts to maximize its fitness at a cost to the other sex, which results in sexually antagonistic selection. This can cause the rapid evolution of sexual traits, and ultimately results in the diversification of traits, and possibly even in speciation. Sexual conflict can manifest in two ways, intra- and interlocus sexual conflict. Intralocus sexual conflict occurs when a trait expressed in both sexes (determined by alleles in the same locus in the two sexes) has opposite effects on male and female fitness. Interlocus sexual conflict occurs when the conflicting traits are determined by alleles in different loci in the two sexes and the optimal outcome of male–female interactions differs between the two sexes. Intralocus sexual conflict generates a genetic tug of war between the sexes over the optimal trait expression, while interlocus sexual conflict can lead to open-ended cycles of sexually antagonistic coevolution. Sexual conflict before mating has resulted in a diversity of tactics and strategies that males use to overcome female unwillingness to mate, from forced copulations and sneaky fertilization to the emission of love darts. Sexual conflict after mating has favored the evolution of male traits that increase success in sperm competition, such as postcopulatory mate guarding, toxic seminal substances that destroy the sperm of other males, mating plugs that prevent other males from mating with the female, and morphological and physiological traits that harm females, such as spines on the intromittent organ that pierce the reproductive tract of the female. Females have evolved cryptic choice of sperm to influence which males fertilize her ova. Whether the sexual conflict between males and females can be resolved depends on the type of conflict. Several mechanisms may reduce the strength of intralocus conflict, such as sex-limited expression of traits, but the interests of males and females are unlikely to become aligned when it comes to interlocus conflict. The relative influence of sexual conflict on the fitness of organisms, and the degree to which it can be resolved, are open questions.

In this introductory chapter, we outline some conceptual building blocks for an ecosocial view of the co-construction of mind, brain, and culture. The brain is the organ of culture; mind and experience are processes located in loops of active engagement of brain and body with the social world. This engagement occurs on multiple time scales, from evolution and co-evolutionary adaptation to humanly designed niches, through the cultural history of populations and communities, to individual developmental trajectories, narratives of the self, and moment-to-moment engagements with social contexts. We are born biologically equipped to acquire culture and, across our lifespan, we become attuned to particular social and cultural environments. The niches we inhabit are cooperatively constructed and presented to us as cultural affordances that enable our cognitive capacities, sense of self, adaptive skills, and meaning-making capacity. The rewiring of brain circuits, synaptic plasticity, and underlying changes in gene regulation only make sense in relation to the particular resources, affordances, and adaptive tasks presented to us by specific cultural environments. Answering the question of what makes us human then turns out to involve not just an evolutionary story in deep time, but also cultural and individual stories in historical, developmental, and biographical time.

Niche construction theory, popular in evolutionary biology, can help us understand the lag between economic growth and political reform in highly interconnected states, where competition for resources drives adaptation via the selection of strategic opportunities, ranging from the predatory and parasitical to the symbiotic. A rugged or smooth fitness landscape, created by the system’s topology, determines how a society makes choices on the path toward its own fitness peak. No two societies will start from the same point or follow the same path to its local or global optimum. This makes it difficult to simply transfer strategies, norms, or institutions across cultures. Evolutionary social psychology (ESP) teaches that individuals and societies alike exhibit bounded rationality, practice heuristics, and imitate local models and cultures they know. ESP may also help explain why China’s developmental experience can be a more familiar starting point than a Western alternative, and more easily copied by other emerging nations. Nevertheless, disordered activity may keep the overall global system in balance.

This chapter, presenting the main theoretical statements on social evolution, stems from the hypothesis of a sudden rise of spoken, syntactic language in Northeast Africa, 70,000 years ago. The youth among a small population of Founders formed a cohesive group through the shared efforts of developing agreed-upon syntax and vocabulary, and then formed a community of roughly 150 persons to sustain their language. These were the initial social institutions. These institution led to creation of others, such as for ritual and migration, and enabled processes of social and institutional evolution: innovation (through representation or modeling as a source of variation), inheritance (through social reproduction and regulation), and the assessment of the fitness of institutions for the community. These processes brought into existence the Human System. At the multiple scales of family, community, and cross-community networks, it underwent coevolution among biological, social, cultural, and environmental influences, yielding a “group-level human nature” that relied on emotions at group as well as individual levels.