How Evolutionary is Evolutionary Economics?

Werner Callebaut
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research

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     Last modified: February 15, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 4:00 PM in ROZH 105
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Abstract
Intended session: "Topics in Evolutionary Epistemology"

Contrary to, say, many evolutionary epistemologists or advocates of “universal Darwinism,” evolutionary economists tend to be quite cautious in assimilating concepts and mechanisms originally developed in evolutionary theory, eschewing any kind of “biological reductionism.” In their classic presentation, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982), Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter stated that they were “pleased to exploit any idea from biology that seems helpful in the understanding of economic problems,” yet insisted that “we are equally prepared to pass over anything that seems awkward, or to modify accepted biological theories radically in the interest of getting better economic theory (witness our espousal of Lamarckism).” More recently, Nelson (2005), writing as “an empirically oriented social scientist who has found an evolutionary theory useful in his empirical work,” has expressed the belief (shared with David Hull) that “many of the recent attempts to extend Darwinian theory to human culture have stayed too close to biology, and indeed a narrow perspective on biology.” In the same vein, Ulrich Witt (2003) grants that there is an “ontological continuity”but emphasizes that “the mechanisms and regularities of cultural evolution differ from those of natural evolution.”

In this talk I (i) propose to view evolutionary economics as an interfield (Darden and Maull 1977) between economics and evolutionary biology; (ii) assess, from this perspective, evolutionary economists’ practice of using biological analogies selectively, and their justification of this practice; (iii) argue that an “embodied” interpretation of Darwin’s principles (“heritable variation in fitness”) à la Wimsatt allows a deeper rapprochement between biology to economics than evolutionary economists have hitherto envisaged; and (iv) contrast the progress of evolutionary economics with the stagnation of evolutionary epistemology.

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
The Justificatory Role of (Evolved) Moral Intuitions
Evolutionary Biology and the Epistemology of Metaphysical Modality
Kissing Cousins: Mental Representation and Biological Mimicry
Sexual Selection and the Evolution of Moral Belief