Complex adaptive systems have historically been studied using simplificatio
ns that mandate deterministic interactions between agents or instead treat
their interactions only with regard to their statistical expectation. This
has led to an anticipation, even in the case of agents employing inductive
reasoning in light of limited information, that such systems may have equil
ibria that can be predicted a priori, This hypothesis is tested here using
a simulation of a simple market economy in which each agent's behavior is b
ased on the result of an iterative evolutionary process of variation and se
lection applied to competing internal models of its environment. The result
s indicate no tendency for convergence to stability or a longterm equilibri
um and highlight fundamental differences between deterministic and stochast
ic models of complex adaptive systems.