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Can we gain new insights about the human economy, its long term development, and its future by putting on the looking glasses of the theory of evolution? More than a century ago, when the Darwinian theory of natural selection began to thrive, Thorsten Veblen (1898) suggested to do just this. In the study of the life sciences in general and the study of human behavior in particular, the Darwinian theory indeed provides a fruitful and by now generally accepted, overarching frame of reference for research (see Brown and Richerson 2014). Not so in economics. Canonical economic theory is committed instead to the rational actor model and the theory of general equilibrium (see, for example, Mas-Colell et al. 1995). Both notions are rooted in classical, Newtonian mechanics (Mirowski 1989) which pre-dated the Darwinian revolution in the sciences. Not surprisingly, in the canonical economic perspective, the economy is usually seen as a sphere of reality for which the theory of evolution has little, if any, significance. Can such a perspective do justice to the observable unfolding of the economy, its growth and incessant transformations? As a matter of fact, ever new products, technologies, organizations, institutions are thought up and tried out. They fuel an endless competitive struggle in which earlier vintages are outcompeted and the extant natural and social environment is transformed. New firms, industries, and markets emerge and grow while others stagnate or decline. In a relentless collective adaptation, institutions are designed and redesigned under economic and political pressures and made new. All this looks like a process of evolutionary change, albeit one that has a genuine new quality: it is cultural evolution. Under the influence of human creativity and deliberation it transforms the economy at a much higher pace than natural selection could do. Indeed, in cultural evolution, reproductive success under natural selection is only a long term shaping force or – in the language of multi-level selection theory – selection criterion (see Wilson 2015). In the short run, other, human-made forces shape the unfolding of the economy. Several questions thus arise when an attempt is made to use the looking glasses of an evolutionary theory for gaining new insights on the economy. What are the principles governing economic change? What relevance does the Darwinian theory have for these principles? How can these principles help to improve economic theory? The chapters in the present volume seek to provide answers to these and other questions, which an evolutionary approach to economics faces. To pave the ground for the discussion, Part I of the book (Chapters 1 to 4) addresses three challenges confronting the application of evolutionary thinking in the economic context. First we need to come to grips with the fact that, in the literature, a variety of sometimes incommensurable interpretations of an evolutionary approach to economics exist. A second, albeit related, challenge is to identify what particular conditions characterize economic evolution. Do these conditions imply that the overarching

Introduction: The Evolutionary Way of Thinking in Economics