Descendance and Social Genealogies: Toward an Evolutionary Conception of Economic History
pattems found in biology are prevalent in economics as well and that, therefore, they are accessible through the same set of instruments. A metaphor, by contrast, serves mainly as inspiration for the development of theories original to the social sciences. Metaphors transfer ideas stemming from one discipline on to a completely different context, leading to the development of theories with elements alien to the original context. 4. In the literature, there appears to be some confusion about the term causal-genetic. Veblen introduced this term in order to describe his approach of using social genealogies. However, today this term appears to be used with a slightly different meaning (as for example in Robin Cowan and Mario Rizzo (1996)), where any cause-consequence relationship based on planned human behavior is subsumed under the term causal-genetic. Thus, this use of the term implies that all laws based on the assumption of planned behavior can be called causal-genetic. As the discussion of social genealogies shows, however, this was not Veblen's reasoning when he introduced the term causal-genetic. For him, this term was a clear reference to historically oriented research taking the complexity of human behavior