A great piece. I learned a lot. It is good to remember Boyle's (and the invisible college's) call for "open alchemy."

I do wonder how much evolution is involved in the interplay of demes. There are open contests, there is flowering and fading, collusion, the opportunity for non-zero-sum outcomes; there is learning and path dependence; there are a lot of dynamics (very much like the forces in Foucault's discourses--although demes do not seem to be power-laden), but there probably is not an evolutionary force here. There are unknowns that become new frontiers. But these are occupied strategically perhaps more than by adaptation. I don't (yet) agree that Ostrom "showed that the way to understand institutions that resolve collective action problems is to see them as developing through a process of evolution." Instead I see reflective learning organizations. More Giddens... Perhaps some kind of Lamarkian intellection-based-style evolution? Certainly not Darwinian.

I would also think that Benkler's three tensions might also be of value here [See Rich Bartlett's notes here on these: .
Getting back to conservative science, back to Merton or-somthing, could also provide some normative and practical heuristics to avoid these tensions.