The transmission of the selected characteristics of political development is basically

In a very long historical perspective, political development has followed the same general pattern: the forms of political organisation employed by different groups of human beings have varied, and those forms that were more successful, meaning those that could generate greater military and economic power, displaced those that were less successful. At this high level of abstraction, it is hard to see how political development could have proceeded in any other way. What is more important is to understand that the units of political evolution are rules and their embodiments as institutions, rather than the genes of human evolution. Although human biology facilitates the formulation and following of rules, it does not determine their content, and that content can vary enormously. Rules are the basis for institutions that confer advantages on the societies employing them, and are selected over less advantageous ones through the interaction of human agents. Second, in human societies, variation among institutions can be planned and deliberated, as opposed to random. Human beings can rarely plan for unintended consequences and missing information, but the fact that they can plan means the variance in institutional forms they create is more likely to produce adaptive solutions than simple randomness. The third way political development differs from human evolution is that the selected characteristics, institutions in one case and genes in the other, are transmitted culturally rather than genetically. Cultural traits, whether norms, customs, laws, beliefs or values, can at least in theory be altered within the space of a single generation, as in the spread of literacy among the Danish peasantry in the sixteenth century.