Generalized Darwinism inEvolutionary Economics:The Devil is in the Details

This paper is a follow-up on two earlier debates I was part of. One debate is documentedin a special issue of The Journal of Economic Methodology, edited by Matthias Klaes andcalled Symposium: Ontological Issues in Evolutionary Economics (2004) The other oneis reported in a special issue of The Journal of Evolutionary Economics edited by UlrichWitt and called Evolutionary Concepts in Economics and Biology (2006), which is (asWitt notes in his Editorial) mainly about the appropriateness and fruitfulness of UniversalDarwinism (or, following Hodgson and Knudsen, I henceforth refer to GeneralizedDarwinism) in and for evolutionary economics.2 The present paper is meant to be afurther contribution to this latter debate...