We are beginning to see where the Darwinian paradigm is going wrong, and also the way it characteristically confuses the issue of economic activity with evolution, resulting in the typical ideological cast of its formulation. Questions of ideology stalk Darwinian theory but are concealed by the relative sophistication of Darwinists in evading the fallacies of Social Darwinism. Darwin's confusion in this area is often shunted off to Spencer. We should note that the confusion of biological and social evolution arises at the beginning of Darwinism, and the work of Spencer is a giveaway clue to the suspicious resemblance of classical liberal and biological theory. Most especially the influence of classical liberal economics on Darwin's thinking is, or should be, transparent, along with the frequent metaphors of economic self-organization applied to evolutionary processes.   

S. J. Gould in his The Structure of Evolutionary  Theory states the unwitting confusion with especial clarity, “I would advance the even stronger claim that the theory of natural selection is, in essence, Adam Smith’s economics transferred to nature”. 

Karl Marx is, of course, the classic critic of this tendency of nineteenth century thought to be colored by ideological bias. Marx’s theories have themselves suffered this very fate, but he was the first to really attempt to grapple with the disguises of ideology that are rife in the legacy of Adam Smith. Marx’s insight is so simple, and yet it has been nearly lost even in the leftist use of his work. The application of lawful generalizations in the social sciences attempts to foist the character of natural or physical law into a normative justification of social practices of exploitation. We are so mesmerized by Darwinian mythology that we fail to see the presence of the ideological factor at work in his thinking The point is completely obvious with someone like Malthus, whose work had a conservative banner to wave in the throes of the French Revolution itself. Almost equally so with the figure of Adam Smith, even given the 'real' Smith’s genuine concerns about the misuse of his economic corpus behind the stereotyped figure that goes by his name in subsequent literature. Adam Smith, in any case, was an economist. Whatever the status of his views on the nature of markets, it does not follow that we can transfer these to questions of evolution. There seems to be an obvious analog, but the comparisons are misleading and require a very careful consideration of both history and the nature of historical theories. It is very difficult to grasp this point until we actually see an example of evolution, 'evolution of some kind', that is different from the selectionist scenario.  

Natural selection, most suspiciously, makes a good foil for the claims of revolutionary change. The issue of revolution is almost the mirror image cousin of the Darwin debate. The Burkean gloom that settles over conventional nineteenth century social philosophy disposes Darwin to his conversion to the mythologies of slow change. An almost equal set of confusions is arising in the antithetical tenets of the place of revolution in history, indeed, as a 'dialectical' process in nature. Here Marx, despite his brilliant expose of the place of theory in the processes of legitimation, produces an ambiguous legacy in his casting of revolution as some driving force in history.  The issue of revolutionary change is so discredited now by the outcome of leftist catastrophes in the twentieth century that we can no longer easily discuss the issue of revolution in an evolutionary context. And yet the connection must be direct, if only we can get the matter straight. Here Marx’s thinking is an unstable hybrid of contradictory elements that condemned his successors to an immense amount of theoretical confusion. Marx appears in the spectacular yet brief tide of Hegelian philosophy, just at its climax, and just before its sudden collapse. Moving rapidly between completely different worlds of discourse, Marx carries the elements of a philosophy of history in its classic mode to the attempted scientific study of the economic evolution of society. There the combination of Hegelian notions of dialectic seem to become fused with the legacy of French revolutionary politics to produce a theory of the place of revolution as the historical agent of development. The problem with Marx is that he is right and wrong at the same time. The leftist misreading of the French Revolution produces an expectation of the place of revolution as such in the dynamics of history.