Ray Murr
Article Summary 1
White, Michael C. Marion, Daniel B. Brazeal, Deborah V. Friedman, William
The evolution of organizations: Suggestions from complexity theory about the interplay between natural selection
and adaptation. Human Relations. November 1997. pp. 1383-1401.
This article compares the reasons that there have been many differences in opinion between the Neo-Darwinists and the
Adaptationists. The authors use their ideas about the different theories to bridge the gap between the two views about
how organisms adapt to their changing environment. The neo-Darwinism perspective, genes mutate randomly, has been
questioned recently by the results of experiments, by biologist, that do not show the same results that the scientist,
Salvador Luria claimed to be true. The results of this experiment has reaffirmed the original position of the Adaptationists,
the existence of evolutionary drivers that direct evolution in self-organizing systems. The role of self-organizing systems is
proposed, by the authors, to be a unifying link between the neo-Darwinists and the Adaptationists because of the similarity
between organizational evolution and natural selection.