In the past few years a curious flirtation has developed in the halls of academe between economists and Darwinian biologists. They borrow each other's techniques and come to similar conclusions. A new discipline of evolutionary economics is being born. Four representatives in the new discipline are presented. The common ground between economics and evolution is a focus on the individual. Researchers became convinced that you can understand what happens to groups, populations, nations or species only by understanding what motivates individual people and animals. Presents the view of some evolutionists and economists arguing that individuals do things for the good of the larger group only if it is also for the good of the individual. On the other hand, trust, co-operation and altruism can also be found in all part of human life. The "prisoner's dilemma" has been a favorite paradigm of economists since many years, for it illustrates a much more widespread phenomenon: how individual ambition can lead to collective misery. Economists have recently begun to rethink the lesson of the prisoner's dilemma. Some of them have done so under the influence-strangely-of biologists. Biologists are also interested in the prisoner's dilemma, but they see it rather differently. They ask the prisoners to confront the same situation again and again-and discover that it no longer pays each prisoner to talk. Or they allow the prisoner to choose his accomplice in advance, knowing the he might have to make a deal with him; that enables him to pick somebody he can trust. Robert Axelrod, a Political Scientist at U of M, ran a tournament to determine the winning strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma game. The winning strategy in the game: tit-for-tat. "Tit-for-tat" is essentially the same as what biologists call "reciprocal altruism". Kristen Kawkes' study found those men of the Hadza people in Tanzania who hunt large animals generally share the meat with many of their neighbors, including those who do not hunt for shore meat in return. Their rewards come in a different currency. They may gain kudos within the tribe, and kudos can be translated into other kinds of benefit later. They may have more affairs, win more wives and have more children. The pay-off for generosity may not be economic, but generic. This is the crucial difference between economics and evolution. For an economist, a man works so that he can buy things. For an evolutionist, he buys things in order to procreate. Economists have had difficulty making sense of people being nicer to their children than to strangers. But as the theory of "kin-selection" gained ground within evolutionary biology-a theory in which the survival not of the individual but of its genes became the criterion of fitness-so economists have learnt to adjust their utility functions to include not just people's own consumption but also their children's. Economists used to be puzzled by the way people continue saving right up to the ends of their lives. Now they recognize that "utility" includes leaving something to your children. The article discusses the implication of a theory of preferences, and noted, if the marriage between economics and evolutionary theory is consummated, then its offspring will be a science of human nature. The emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology sees the human mind as a set of specific instincts that are trained by experience and leaning, but are triggered by outside stimuli. This is different from the old view that instinct and leaning were mutually exclusive. These instincts are "designed" by natural selection to be expressed in certain environmental circumstances. The relevance of this research for economics is that it underpins the search for a predictable and characteristic pattern of human behavior. Economists believe in a typical human being, whose actions they can predict based on an assumption of what motivates him or her. Evolutionary psychologists find evidence that they are right.
Bibliography: Dec. 25, 1993 -Jan. 7, 1994 pp. 93-95 The Economist
