Michael,
      In Marx, classes disappear rather than change.  In Marshall, firms disappear rather than change.  In Schumpeter, technologies disappear rather than change.  In all of these Darwinian evolution can occur following the law of natural selection.  This is quite separate from some arbitrary definition of what occurs during "development."
________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Michael Nuwer [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2015 9:07 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] QUERY: Social Darwinism in America

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.
>
>