Generic Features of Evolution and Its Continuity: A Transdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

Because of the intellectual attraction of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, its concepts are often borrowed to conceptualized evolutionary change also in non-biological domains. However, a heuristic strategy like that is problematic. An attempt is therefore made to identify generic features of evolution which transcend domain-specific characteristics. Epistemological, conceptual, and methodological implications are discussed, and the ontological question is raised how non-biological evolutionary theories can be accommodated within the Darwinian world view of modern sciences.

Austrian Economics and the Evolutionary Paradigm*

“…The "universal" or "generalized" Darwinism advanced by some (Dawkins 1983;Hull 2001;Hodgson and Knudsen 2010) is the strongest version of the claim that the general principles of evolution apply outside biology. 6 But Schumpeter took a different path (see Witt 2003) and offered an original theory of economic evolution/development.…”

Novelty and the bounds of unknowledge in economics

“…These are, in particular, the evolutionary sciences that face endogenously generated novelty. (Evolution can, in abstract terms, be characterized generically as a self-transformation process driven by the emergence and selective dissemination of novelty within a certain domain, see Witt 2003). For example, the potential emergence of genetic novelty makes it impossible to predict the future course of evolution in evolutionary biology.…”

Ontological Issues in Evolutionary Economics

“…Likewise, Witt [2003] argues that the Darwinian assumption of "blindness" or "randomness" in the processes of variation does not do justice to human intuition and creativity in cultural evolution. Thus unlike Darwinian biological evolution, in which mechanisms for creating new variation and mechanisms for selection are assumed to work independently of each other, cultural evolution is characterized by systematic feedbacks between selection and variation.…”