Ontological issues in evolutionary economics:The debate between Generalized Darwinismand the Continuity Hypothesis

Recently evolutionary economists started to pay attention to ontological issues in theirown subfield. Two projects dominate the discussions: Generalized Darwinism(henceforth: GD), promoted by Geoff Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen, and theContinuity Hypothesis (henceforth: CH), put forward by Ulrich Witt. As a first and crudeapproximation (to be refined below), GD entails the view that abstract and generalDarwinian principles suit the study of biological evolution and of economic evolutionequally well. The CH entails the view that ongoing economic evolution proceeds on thebasis of, and is still influenced by the outcomes of preceding processes of biologicalevolution. At present, GD and CH are vying for hegemony in the community ofevolutionary economists. GD and the CH sometimes are pitted against each other as ifthey were mutually excluding rivals. This paper investigates to what extent (and if so, inwhat sense) GD and the CH are rivals...