The Evolving Fable of the Trees Population Thinking and Evolutionary Economic Analysis

It is increasingly recognised that population thinking is a basic characteristic of evolutionary economics. This paper demonstrates that there are several forms of population thinking. The most basic form is intra-population thinking for single populations, and this thinking easily extends to structured populations, where selection takes place at several levels. But there is also a need of applying interpopulation thinking to the co-evolution of populations and intra-to-inter population thinking to the emergence of new populations. To transform these forms of population thinking into evolutionary analyses, there is a need of simple analytical tools. The paper emphasises a simple and basic tool for intra-population thinking an its relevance for more complex forms of population thinking—Price’s equation. This little known equation provides a surprisingly powerful tool for the decomposition of short-term evolutionary change. The paper also explores additional tools for more complex forms of population thinking.