ABSTRACT
Introduction The approach in terms of population thinking is the cornerstone of Darwinian biology. As a matter of fact, modern evolutionary economics is based from the outset on population thinking. This has been done in an implicit way, as in the case of Nelson and Winter (1982), who focus on the diversity of firms without referring explicitly to population thinking. But this has also been done in an explicit way by the scholarship, openly claiming the revolutionary implications of population thinking for life and social sciences (e.g., Metcalfe, 1989; Hodgson, 1993). Could population thinking be the Mecca of evolutionary economist and social scientists? I will argue throughout this chapter that things are far more complicated. Even in biology and in its philosophy the notion of population thinking has led to important tensions that have been underplayed by evolutionary economists.
