Evolutionary economics is a paradigm for explaining the transformation of the economy. To achieve its goal, it needs being founded on a proper theory of economic behavior. The paper discusses these foundations. It is argued that the historical malleability of economic behavior is based on the...

Until a few generations ago, humans made their living by foraging, like other animals. We have therefore inherited genes that allowed our ancestors to thrive as hunters and gatherers. Thriving in a modern economy requires very different behaviours but we cope because the human brain evolved to...

The purpose of this article is to analyse the way economists interested in social and economic evolution cite, mention or refer to Darwin. We focus on the attitude of economists towards Darwin's theory of social evolution - an issue he considered as central to his theory. We show that economists...

A characteristic feature of economic development is the ever changing structure of consumption patterns. Reducing the explanation of this phenomenon to changing prices, finally caused by changes in the availability of goods (or characteristics), would neglect a major force driving this change,...

This paper incorporates aspects of humans' evolved cognition into a formal model of cultural evolution and scrutinizes their interactions with population-level processes. It is shown how the biased transmission of different kinds of behavior via cultural learning processes influences agents'...

It has been suggested that, by generalizing Darwinian principles, a common foundation can be derived for all scientific disciplines dealing with evolutionary processes, especially for evolutionary economics. In this paper we show, however, that the principles of such a Generalized Darwinism are...

Recently evolutionary economists started to pay attention to ontological issues in their own subfield. Two projects dominate the discussions: Generalized Darwinism (GD), promoted by Geoff Hodgson and Thorbjorn Knudsen, and the Continuity Hypothesis (CH), put forward by Ulrich Witt. As a first...