ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the aspects of modern evolutionary economics. It examines Richard Nelson, Geoffrey Hodgson and Ulrich Witt's evolutionary approaches. The chapter analyzes evolutionary economists' thought from the point of view of their adherence or not to universal Darwinism. The seminal work and starting point of modern evolutionary economics is Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter's 1982 book An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Evolutionary economics, when applied to specific economic topics, has developed freely without close links to biology and Darwinism; at most, it has used some metaphors with biological resonances. Dawkins's ideas are part of an extended wave of applications of the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution theories, which constitute the specific way in which the present materialist ethos explains biological and social processes. Hodgson has developed his ideas about evolutionary economics in relation to the old institutional economics associated with Thorstein Veblen.
