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Richard Lewontin offers a useful definition of evolution that
differentiates it from development. By that definition, Marx, Marshall
and Schumpeter are not applying evolutionary thought.
"Development is a transformational theory of change. In transformational
theories the entire ensemble of objects changes because each individual
object undergoes during its lifetime the same law-like history. ... In
contrast, the Darwinian theory of organic evolution is based on a
variational model of change. The ensemble of individuals changes, not
because each individual is undergoing a parallel development during its
life, but because there is variation among individuals and some variants
leave more offspring than others." (The Triple Helix, pp. 8-9)
Michael Nuwer
On 1/21/2015 3:47 PM, Rosser, John Barkley - rosserjb wrote:
>
> Let us be clear that applications of Darwin’s ideas and evolutionary
> thought are not the same thing as “social Darwinism,” the latter being
> a very small subset of the former. To mention a few people who took
> Darwin and evolutionary thought seriously during the heyday but who
> were not “social Darwinists,” let me mention Karl Marx, Alfred
> Marshall, Thorstein Veblen, and Joseph Schumpeter, and that is far
> from a complete list, but does show a bit the diversity of those
> involved in this.
>
>
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