Counterpoint from the archives: "No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices"

Thanks for bringing up the link, I wanted to mention it, but I didn't find it on Overcoming Bias (for some reason I thought the piece was written by Robin Hanson).

I would say No and Yes, respectively: it is not useful to think of markets as a special case of evolution. It's true that an English-language description of both processes is likely to involve the word competition, but the underlying details are very different. Evolutionary theory concerns itself with things that replicate and the consequences thereof, whereas economics concerns itself with agents that trade and the consequences of that.

It is I assume also not useful to think of markets in terms of intelligence, at least no more than one could speak of intelligence in the process of evolution.