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Alfred Marshall is usually viewed as the founding father of evolutionary economics. Indeed, he is the first major economist to explicitely refer to biology to explain economic evolution. Since several years, an epistemological controversy is born. Its stake is to evaluate the relevelancy of biological analogies scattered in his work, in order to know whether they are simple stylistic figures of speech or they underlie a true evolutionary model. For us, Marshall has understood the power of such a reasonning. the purpose of this article is to reveal the conditions required to succeed in building a real evolutionary model, and that are at work in Marshall's Principles: the understanding and the integration of darwinian philosophical matrix in his general economic approach.
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