Recently evolutionary economists started to pay attention to ontological issues in theirown subfield. Two projects dominate the discussions: Generalized Darwinism(henceforth: GD), promoted by Geoff Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen, and theContinuity Hypothesis (henceforth: CH), put forward by...

This paper incorporates aspects of humans’ evolved cognition into a formal model of culturalevolution and scrutinizes their interactions with population-level processes. It is shown how thebiased transmission of different kinds of behavior via cultural learning processes influencesagents’...

This paper is a follow-up on two earlier debates I was part of. One debate is documentedin a special issue of The Journal of Economic Methodology, edited by Matthias Klaes andcalled Symposium: Ontological Issues in Evolutionary Economics (2004) The other oneis reported in a special issue of The...

The debate on the ontological foundations of evolutionary economics has reached a stagewhere discussions of these foundations are increasingly leading to the conclusion that there isa need to move from considerations of the general principles of evolutionary theory to thedevelopment of concrete...

An evolutionary perspective on economic behavior has to account for the influences that thehuman genetic endowment has on the choices the agents make. Likely to have been fixed intimes of fierce selection pressure, this endowment is presumably adapted to the livingconditions of early humans. If...

Inspired by Peter Godfrey-Smith's book Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009), the paper seeks to develop a view on Darwinizing evolutionary economics that differs from the view espoused in Hodgson and Knudsen project of Generalized Darwinism. It is argued that on Hodgson and...

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