“They, economics and evolution, are both examples of a larger process, which has been at work in this part of the universe for a very long time. This is the process of the development of structures of increasing complexity and improbability. The evolutionary process always operates through mutation and selection and has involved some distinction between the genotype which mutates and the phenotype which is selected. The process by which the genotype constructs the phenotype may be described as "organization". Economic development manifesto itself largely in the production of commodities, that is, goods and services. It originates, however, in ideas, plans, and attitudes in the human mind. These are the genotypes in economic development. This whole process indeed can be described as a process in the growth of knowledge. What the economist calls "capital" is nothing more than human knowledge imposed on the material world. Knowledge and the growth of knowledge, therefore, is the essential key to economic development. Investment, financial systems and economic organizations and institutions are in a sense only the machinery by which a knowledge process is created and expressed.”

—  Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1977) Economic Development as an Evolutionary System, Fifth World Congress of the International Economic Association, Tokyo, Aug.-Sept. 1977.
1970s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "They, economics and evolution, are both examples of a larger process, which has been at work in this part of the univer…" by Kenneth E. Boulding?
Kenneth E. Boulding photo
Kenneth E. Boulding163
British-American economist 1910–1993

Related quotes

John Gray photo

“The most important feature of natural selection is that it is a process of drift. Evolution has no end-point or direction, so if the development of society is an evolutionary process it is one that is going nowhere.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 78)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Ursula Goodenough photo

“We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone.”

Ursula Goodenough book The Sacred Depths of Nature

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 75

Carl Sagan photo

“Note that in all this interaction between mutation and natural selection, no moth is making a conscious effort to adapt to a changed environment. The process is random and statistical.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 2, “Genes and Brains” (p. 28)

Richard Dawkins photo

“What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, whereas chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 153

“Speech is an acoustic reality, writing a visual one. Performance of the former has been perfected through a million years of natural selection in the evolutionary process. The latter is a trick which we began to learn only yesterday (in terms of evolutionary time). To "hear" language (and to "say" it) is programmed in our genes; to "see" it (and "read" it) is not.”

Eric A. Havelock (1903–1988) 1903-1988, British classical philologist

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)

“It is essentially to the very idea and concept of organization that we there must be a process, formal in character, through which the supreme co-ordinating authority operates throughout the whole structure of the organized body. This process is not an abstraction; it is a tangible reality observable in every organization. It appears in a form so distinct and characteristic that it practically names itself, — hence the term Scalar Process.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 31

“Each mountain ridge in this landscape has a distinct contour, with various peaks whose heights reflect evolutionary time. That is, within humankind's evolutionary landscape there are several naturally selected systems that contribute to channeling human experience toward religious paths. In the processing of human experience, these systems, and their components, interact and develop interrelated functions - as do geological, hydrological, and organic systems in the drainage process.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 11
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Friedrich Hayek photo

“All economic activity is carried out through time. Every individual economic process occupies a certain time, and all linkages between economic processes necessarily involve longer or shorter periods of time.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

"Intertemporal Price Equilibrium and Movement in the Value of Money" (1928)
1920s–1930s

“It is generally assumed that… register data are more representative than court data, which are the result of a long selective process of complaint, arrest, arraignment and prosecution.”

Albert K. Cohen (1918–2014) American criminologist

Source: Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, 1955, p.40

John Allen Paulos photo

“For the record, natural selection is a highly nonrandom process that acts on the genetic variation produced by random mutation and genetic drift and results in those organisms with more adaptive traits differentially surviving and reproducing.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Part 1 “Four Classical Arguments”, Chapter 2 “The Argument from Design (and Some Creationist Calculations)” (p. 19)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)

Related topics