‘…our plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations.’

Invention of the term “living fossils”

‘These anomalous forms may almost be called living fossils; they have endured to the present day, from having inhabited a confined area, and from having this been exposed to less severe competition.’

‘Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity… which may be affected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection.’

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of industrial mutation--if I may use that biological term--that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism."

(2/2)

…Though I shall not even attempt to answer it in that form, a few further remarks about the possible absence of crises in the development of a social science may illuminate some part of what is at issue.’

…This raised for me the perennial, but perhaps not very important question about whether or not the social sciences are really sciences at all…

Professor Spengler expressed great interest in my concept of "crises" in the development of a science or of a scientific specialty, but added that he had had difficulty discovering more than one such episode in the development of economics…

In fact, the very definition of innovation is debated and it's easy to argue that we do not really have a great definition of it---same for obsolescence.

This and more we discuss in "Synthesis of innovation and obsolescence" arxiv.org/abs/2505.05182

3/n

It's important to recognize the #interdisciplinary nature of the problem; for example, the deep discussion in #evolutionary #biology #evobio all the way to the way that those forces are controlled or harnessed within firms, not just competition on the market.

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2/n

...Most of the time we never even get around to asking the question in such a form that it can have an answer."

McCulloch: "...what we need first and foremost is not a correct theory, but some theory to start from, whereby we may hope to ask a question so that we'll get an answer, if only to the effect that our notion was entirely erroneous...