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...

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...

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,...

Economic policy making is discussed from three different angles: the political economy of actual policy making (“what policy does do”), the analysis of policy instruments for given ends (“what policy could do”), and the debate on policy goals and their legitimization (“what policy...