J Evol Econ DOI 10.1007/s00191-010-0178-0 REGULAR ARTICLE Evolutionary developmental economics: how to generalize Darwinism fruitfully to help comprehend economic change Pavel Pelikan © Springer-Verlag 2010 Abstract Darwinism is shown possible to generalize fruitfully to help com- prehend economic change by drawing on evolutionary developmental biology (“evo–devo”)—its recent version, less concerned with replication of genes than with genomic instructing of development of organisms. The result is a conceptual model with multilevel applications, generalizing development as instructed self-organizing with inputs from environments, and evolution as experimental search for instructions making the development successful. Its economic interpretation suggests to unite several existing fields into evolution- ary developmental economics, where economic change can be studied compre- hensively as development instructed by actual institutional rules, intertwined with the evolution of these rules. Keywords Instructed development · Evolution of instructions · Multilevel evolution · Evolution of institutional rules · Development of economies JEL Classification A10 · D02 · K10 · O10 · P50 · Z10 1 Introduction There is a broad agreement that no version of Darwinian evolutionary biology is directly applicable to the evolution of human economies and societies. But evolutionary economists still disagree on whether or not some general- ization of some version of Darwinism might nevertheless be helpful. These P. Pelikan (B ) Department of Institutional Economics, Prague University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: pelikanp@vse.cz