My eye was caught this morning by a review of Darwin's Conjecture by Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjorn Knudsen. The reviewer, Morgen Witzel in the Financial Times, says it is “a scholarly and profound work of relevance to all the social sciences” and adds:

'Key Darwinian ideas such as mutual aid, sympathy and co-operation have
often been ignored by later writers on business and economics. The
authors remind us of these overlooked theories, and challenge the idea
that Darwinism offers such easy solutions as “survival of the fittest”.'

These truer ideas taken from Darwinism are more aligned to what I would regard as a truer version of economics, one which refers back to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as his Wealth of Nations. Whatever you think about the specifics of 'evolutionary economics' (and Geoffrey Hodgson is the author of many books in this branch of the discipline, including The Evolution of
Institutional Economics and How Economics Forgot History), I firmly believe it must be true that human behaviour in the economic sphere must be consistent with our behaviour as natural beings, and that there are bound to be ties between economics and evolutionary theory. Economic agents are 'selfish' in the same way that genes are 'selfish' – the word isn't in fact an accurate choice, and 'self-interested' might be better, but in any case, there must be a commonality. In fact, economists and evolutionary theorists have long influenced each other – Malthus and Darwin, Darwin, Marx and Veblen, or more recently game theorists and evolutionary biologists such as John Maynard Smith.

There's a chapter in my book The Soulful Science on this, and I'm looking forward to reading this new book by Hodgson and Knudsen.