Eat Grubs and Live: The Habit-Instinct Problem in Institutional Evolutionary Economics

Clifford S. Poirot

Journal of Economic Issues, 2008, vol. 42, issue 2, 407-413

Abstract: This paper addresses a longstanding controversy in Institutional-Evolutionary Economics about whether or how Darwin’s theory of biological evolution can apply to social evolution. It compares and contrasts the view of Evolutionary Psychology with those of Veblen and places Veblen’s contributions in the context of 19th century Darwinism and turn of the century anthropology. It argues that Veblen explains social evolution through changes in the application of intelligent reasoning to the problems of material provisioning. An important implication of this paper is that while Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian concepts are relevant to cultural evolution, there are significant limits to their application.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00213624.2008.11507149 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mes:jeciss:v:42:y:2008:i:2:p:407-413

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MJEI20

DOI: 10.1080/00213624.2008.11507149

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Economic Issues from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().