ABSTRACT
Whilst most people think of evolution as a way of understanding the complexity of biological systems, its potential to explain and predict economic systems has been discussed for well over 100 years (12). At fi rst, much of this work saw biological evolution as a metaphor for economic evolution; it’s not diffi cult to see how the ‘survival of the fi ttest’ seems to fi t with typical free-market thinking. But metaphors have their limitations, and evolutionary theory didn’t start to infl uence academic thinking signifi cantly until the 1980s, when the power of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and the great advances in our understanding of biological evolution gave new impetus to evolutionary economics.
