There has been a remarkable growth in evolutionary economics since the 1980s. But despite this outward success there has been inner disagreement on fundamental issues including the building blocks of evolutionary theory and the very meaning of "evolution" itself. This essay provides a...

The intellectual histories of economics and evolutionary biology are closely intertwined because both subjects deal with living, complex, evolving systems. Because the subject matter is similar, contemporary evolutionary thought has much to offer to economics. In recent decades theoretical...

In a recent paper, Matthias Kelm (1997) accepts that `Schumpeter's definition of evolution does not contain any Darwinian mechanism such as natural selection or any other biological concept' and that Schumpeter `made no such attempt' to apply `Darwinian theory to economic evolution'. However,...

Several social scientists, including `evolutionary economists', have expressed scepticism of `biological analogies' and rejected the application of `Darwinism' to socio-economic evolution. Among this group, some have argued that self-organisation is an alternative to biological analogies or...