Multilevel Population Thinking The History and the Use of the Concept in Economics

The concept of multilevel population thinking suggests looking at evolution of any system of entities as at a multilevel process with selection forces operating on populations of units as well as on populations of groups of these units. The concept has allowed explaining some phenomena in biological evolution, but it has not deserved much attention from the majority of adopters of evolutionary theory in economics. There are many reasons for that, and some of them are definitely related to the weakness of the theoretical base developed for studying the statistical properties of complex evolving systems. Moreover, the formal tools already developed to support the concept, being not enough general to describe coexistence of evolutionary processes along the diverse complex structures, unfortunately tend to narrow the generality of the approach. This essay aims to review the history of the development of the idea of multilevel population thinking, to look at the applications of the approach in economics, and to give a critical view on the formal tool, namely, the Price’s equation, that has become common to economists, who analyze complex evolutionary structures.