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‘The Mecca of the economist lies in economic biology rather than in economic dynamics’, the great economist Alfred Marshall famously wrote in 1920, in the preface to the eighth edition of Principles of Economics.‘But biological conceptions are more complex than those of mechanics’, he continued,‘a volume on Foundations must therefore give a relatively large place to mechanical analogies; and frequent use is made of the term “equilibrium,” which suggests something of statistical analogy’(Marshall, 1920, p. 19). Inspired by these words of Marshall’s and the work of other foundational figures in the field of economics who similarly perceived a fundamentally biological order in the evolution of the economy, 1 economists have for decades sought to represent the adaptive dynamics evident in economic systems. 2 A second celebrated passage in Marshall’s Principles relates to the localization of economic activity:‘When an industry has thus chosen a locality for itself, it is likely to stay there long: so great are the advantages which people following the same skilled trade get from near neighbourhood to one another. The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously.’Emphasizing the central role of invention and innovation in geographical localization, Marshall continues,‘Good work is rightly appreciated, inventions and improvements in machinery, in processes and the general organization of the business have their merits promptly discussed: if one man starts a new idea, it is taken up by others and combined with suggestions of their own; and thus it becomes the source of …