We welcome the debate that our article ‘Dismantling Lamarckism: Why Descriptions of Socio-Economic Evolution as Lamarckian Are Misleading ’ (Hodgson and

has inspired. A purpose of our article was to clarify the nature of the processes that are supposedly captured by the notion of Lamarckism. This topic relates to a wider set of issues on the agenda of evolutionary thinking in economics, business studies and the social sciences more broadly. As our focus in this paper was Lamarckism, the article did not engage with this broader set of issues relating to general advances in evolutionary theories of economic and cultural change.1 Richard Nelson raises a number of important points in his commentary to our article. There are several points of agreement, including his remark that socio-cultural evolution involves the generally unplanned selection of entities and the whole process is thereby ‘Darwinian in spirit.’ His criticisms can usefully be grouped in two sets. Firstly, disagreement as regards the notion of Lamarckism and nature of the empirical processes this term is supposed to characterize. Secondly, a skeptical assessment of our perspective— elaborated not in Hodgson and Knudsen (2006b) but principally in other works—on the broader set of issues relating to evolutionary thinking in economics, busines