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the suggestion that while the Darwinian notion of natural selection is only one form
in which evolution occurs in nature, it is that form which 'historically, has shaped the
ground and still dei nes the constraints for man-made, or cultural evolution' (Witt, 2003,
p. 15). Somewhat between these two dif erent viewpoints other authors have suggested
that concepts such as variety, natural selection, inheritance and the like, do not have to
carry over strict biological connotations when used as in economics, but can be used to
identify 'generic' features of evolution that can be given specii c meaningful economic
interpretation (see Metcalfe, 1998; Witt, 1999). And so the discussion continues. All in
all, it seems to us that the jury is still out on the question of whether a viable evolutionary
economics - and thus by implication, a viable evolutionary economic geography - can be
based solely on principles drawn from evolutionary biology.
It is not our intention to pursue this intriguing issue further here, however (for two
such discussions, see Essletzbichler and Rigby, 2007; and Frenken and Boschma, 2007).
Instead, our aim is to explore the potential scope - and limits - of a second approach to
constructing an evolutionary perspective within economic geography, one based on what
we shall call 'complexity thinking'. Interest in complexity and complex systems goes back
at least to the 1940s,
but in the 1970s and 1980s work on the dynamical properties and
structural transformation of non-linear, 'far-from-equilibrium' systems in the natural and
physical sciences led to the development of a new i eld that quickly became labelled as the
'science of complexity' or 'complexity theory' (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977, 1989). Over
the past two decades or so, this area of research has developed apace, focusing on, among
other things, the evolutionary behaviour of 'self-organising systems', 'self-regenerating
('autopoietic') systems', 'complex adaptive systems', and 'complex evolutionary systems'
(for example, Bak, 1996; Holland, 1992, 1995; Kauf man, 1995; Schweitzer, 1997). At the
same time, 'complexity thinking' and 'complexity ideas' have dif used into several areas
of the social sciences (Byrne, 1998), including not only economics (Anderson et al., 1988;
Arthur et al., 1997; Metcalfe and Foster, 2004; Ramlogan and Metcalfe, 2006), but also
economic and social history (Frenken and Nuvolari, 2004; McGlade, 2006), archaeology
(Bentley, and Maschner,
2001, 2003), political theory (Rosenau, 1995), organisational
and management theory (Stacey et al., 2000), and computing science (Bullock and Clif ,
2004).
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It has had less impact on human geography, although recently it has begun to
receive attention there too (for example, Gattrell, 2005; Harrison et al., 2006; Manson
and O'Sullivan, 2006; Plummer and Sheppard, 2006; Thrift, 1999).
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Such has been the
growth of the i eld that some talk of a new episteme that challenges conventional episte-
mological and ontological assumptions about the nature and behaviour of natural and
social phenomena (Wolfram, 2002).
This expanding interest and increased participation in the 'discourse of complex-
ity' has not yet resulted in any clear, precise or generally agreed dei nition of the term,
however; and to refer to complexity 'theory' is perhaps to exaggerate the degree of con-
ceptual coherence and explanatory power associated with the notion. The main reason
for this is that by its very nature as a holistic concept the notion of complexity resists easy
reduction to a set of law-like statements or universal theoretical principles. As its two
leading exponents put it, 'complexity is one of those ideas whose dei nition is an integral
part of the problems that it raises' (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1989, p. 36). Nevertheless,
there are some apostles of complexity who believe there are general principles that apply
to all complex systems and that eventually it should therefore prove possible to construct
