Well, I agree there’s philosophical disagreement about what counts as a model or a theory in science. But that’s a giant quibble or a semantic dodge, isn’t it? Call it a dominant framework, if you like, a set of empirical assumptions that guides the science’s inquiries. In biology it’s natural selection, in cosmology it’s the Big Bang theory/framework, in physics it’s the standard model/framework, etc.

What’s the equivalent of those frameworks in economics?

It's no good saying that economies behave differently, so there can be no such economic framework. Species, too, behave differently, yet the concept of natural selection applies to all of them. (Your shifting of the topic from the mechanisms of natural selection to the more general concept of evolution was odd, by the way.)

The relevant answer that you’ve given, then, is the one about instrumental rationality and our sensitivity to external and internal incentives.

Now let’s proceed a step further with this question: Is that economic framework falsifiable? Could an experiment show that a person or a population isn’t susceptible to incentives?

Again, it’s no good saying there are unfalsifiable parts of the natural sciences since we’re not talking about methods or tools now, but about theories/models/frameworks—call them what you like, but natural selection, the Big Bang theory/framework, and the standard model/framework of particles are all falsifiable.

Is the dominant theoretical framework in economics falsifiable?