Transmutability, generalised Darwinism and the limits to conceptual integration
探讨了演化生物学、认知神经科学与经济学之间概念整合的限度，指出将达尔文原理推广到制度现象是隐喻性理论化，因为社会现实具有可转变性，即人类能动性可以改变社会环境。
This article explores the limits to conceptual integration between evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience and economics. The new learning in the natural sciences supplies material to update and enrich the microfoundations of institutional economics—specifically, the instinct–habit psychology. The framing of social reality with evolutionary concepts is, however, misguided in important respects. Metaphorical modelling is the transfer of concepts developed for the understanding of one domain to another, ontological distinct domain. The argument is made that the generalisation of Darwinian principles to the phenomena of institutional persistence and change is theorising by metaphor, because there are crucial ontological differences separating the natural and social domains. Social reality has the property of transmutability—meaning the social environment, unlike the natural domain, is changeable by human agency. This article endeavours to explain how the generalisation of the natural selection principle evokes a fallacious conception of institutional reality. The idea that 'fitness' in the social/economic sphere is a matter of purposive adaptation by agents to exogenous conditions is misleading, because real success in business or politics is transformative and is achieved by catalysing and maintaining advantageous shifts of widely prevalent habits of thought and behaviour. Copyright , OUP.