Not only is the idea of evolution older in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences, I would even be prepared to argue that Darwin got the basic ideas of evolution from economics. As we learn from his notebooks, Darwin was reading Adam Smith just when, in 1838, he was formulating his own theory (see Appendix A below).1 In any case, Darwin’s work was preceded by decades, indeed by a century, of research concerning the rise of highly complex spontaneous orders through a process of evolution.
