From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back: Set of 25 keywords, Adaptation

From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back: Set of 25 keywords, Adaptation PDF Author: Jean-Baptiste André
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783031087912
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the major key concepts common to economics and evolutionary biology. Written by a group of philosophers of science, biologists and economists, it proposes analyses of the meaning of twenty-five concepts from the viewpoint respectively of economics and of evolutionary biology -each followed by a short synthesis emphasizing major discrepancies and commonalities. This analysis is surrounded by chapters exploring the nature of the analogy that connects evolution and economics, and chapters that summarize the major teachings of the analyses of the keywords. Most scholars in biology and in economics know that their science has something in common with the other one, for instance the notions of competition and resources. Textbooks regularly acknowledge that the two fields share some history - Darwin borrowing from Malthus the insistence on scarcity of resources, and then behavioral ecologists adapting and transforming game theory into evolutionary game theory in the 1980s, while Friedman famously alluded to a Darwinian process yielding the extant firms. However, the real extent of the similarities, the reasons why they are so close, and the limits and even the nature of the analogy connecting economics and biological evolution, remain inexplicit. This book proposes basis analyses that can sustain such explication. It is intended for researchers, grad students and master students in evolutionary and in economics, as well as in philosophy of science.

From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back: Set of 25 keywords, Adaptation

From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back: Set of 25 keywords, Adaptation PDF Author: Jean-Baptiste André
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783031087912
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the major key concepts common to economics and evolutionary biology. Written by a group of philosophers of science, biologists and economists, it proposes analyses of the meaning of twenty-five concepts from the viewpoint respectively of economics and of evolutionary biology -each followed by a short synthesis emphasizing major discrepancies and commonalities. This analysis is surrounded by chapters exploring the nature of the analogy that connects evolution and economics, and chapters that summarize the major teachings of the analyses of the keywords. Most scholars in biology and in economics know that their science has something in common with the other one, for instance the notions of competition and resources. Textbooks regularly acknowledge that the two fields share some history - Darwin borrowing from Malthus the insistence on scarcity of resources, and then behavioral ecologists adapting and transforming game theory into evolutionary game theory in the 1980s, while Friedman famously alluded to a Darwinian process yielding the extant firms. However, the real extent of the similarities, the reasons why they are so close, and the limits and even the nature of the analogy connecting economics and biological evolution, remain inexplicit. This book proposes basis analyses that can sustain such explication. It is intended for researchers, grad students and master students in evolutionary and in economics, as well as in philosophy of science.

Darwin's Conjecture

Darwin's Conjecture PDF Author: Geoffrey M. Hodgson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226346900
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
A theoretical study dealing chiefly with matters of definition and clarification of terms and concepts involved in using Darwinian notions to model social phenomena.

The Handbook of Historical Economics

The Handbook of Historical Economics PDF Author: Alberto Bisin
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0128158743
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1002

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Book Description
The Handbook of Historical Economics guides students and researchers through a quantitative economic history that uses fully up-to-date econometric methods. The book's coverage of statistics applied to the social sciences makes it invaluable to a broad readership. As new sources and applications of data in every economic field are enabling economists to ask and answer new fundamental questions, this book presents an up-to-date reference on the topics at hand. Provides an historical outline of the two cliometric revolutions, highlighting the similarities and the differences between the two Surveys the issues and principal results of the "second cliometric revolution" Explores innovations in formulating hypotheses and statistical testing, relating them to wider trends in data-driven, empirical economics

Agents and Goals in Evolution

Agents and Goals in Evolution PDF Author: Samir Okasha
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192546732
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Samir Okasha approaches evolutionary biology from a philosophical perspective in Agents and Goals in Evolution, analysing a mode of thinking in biology called agential thinking. He considers how the paradigm case involves treating an evolved organism as if it were an agent pursuing a goal, such as survival or reproduction, and seeing its phenotypic traits as strategies for achieving that goal or furthering its biological interests. As agential thinking deliberately transposes a set of concepts--goals, interests, strategies--from rational human agents and to the biological world more generally, Okasha's enquiry firstly looks at the justification for this: is it mere anthropomorphism, or does it play a genuine intellectual role in the science? From this central question, key points are considered such as: how do we identify the 'goal' that evolved organisms will behave as if they are trying to achieve? Can agential thinking ever be applied to groups rather than to individual organisms? And how does agential thinking relate to the controversies over fitness-maximization in evolutionary biology? In addition, Okasha examines the relation between the adaptive and the rational by considering whether organisms can validly be treated as agent-like. Should we expect their evolved behaviour to correspond with that of rational agents as codified in the theory of rational choice? If so, does this mean that the fitness-maximizing paradigm of the evolutionary biologist can be mapped directly to the utility-maximizing paradigm of the rational choice theorist? All of these important questions are engagingly raised and discussed at length.

Complexity and Evolution

Complexity and Evolution PDF Author: David S. Wilson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262035383
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
An exploration of how approaches that draw on evolutionary theory and complexity science can advance our understanding of economics. Two widely heralded yet contested approaches to economics have emerged in recent years: one emphasizes evolutionary theory in terms of individuals and institutions; the other views economies as complex adaptive systems. In this book, leading scholars examine these two bodies of theory, exploring their possible impact on economics. Relevant concepts from evolutionary theory drawn on by the contributors include the distinction between proximate and ultimate causation, multilevel selection, cultural change as an evolutionary process, and human psychology as a product of gene-culture coevolution. Applicable ideas from complexity theory include self-organization, fractals, chaos theory, sensitive dependence, basins of attraction, and path dependence. The contributors discuss a synthesis of complexity and evolutionary approaches and the challenges that emerge. Focusing on evolutionary behavioral economics, and the evolution of institutions, they offer practical applications and point to avenues for future research. Contributors Robert Axtell, Jenna Bednar, Eric D. Beinhocker, Adrian V. Bell, Terence C. Burnham, Julia Chelen, David Colander, Iain D. Couzin, Thomas E. Currie, Joshua M. Epstein, Daniel Fricke, Herbert Gintis, Paul W. Glimcher, John Gowdy, Thorsten Hens, Michael E. Hochberg, Alan Kirman, Robert Kurzban, Leonhard Lades, Stephen E. G. Lea, John E. Mayfield, Mariana Mazzucato, Kevin McCabe, John F. Padgett, Scott E. Page, Karthik Panchanathan, Peter J. Richerson, Peter Schuster, Georg Schwesinger, Rajiv Sethi, Enrico Spolaore, Sven Steinmo, Miriam Teschl, Peter Turchin, Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh, Sander E. van der Leeuw, Romain Wacziarg, John J. Wallis, David S. Wilson, Ulrich Witt

Economics, Values, and Organization

Economics, Values, and Organization PDF Author: Avner Ben-Ner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521774116
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
A path-breaking analysis of the relationship between economic institutions and values.

The Emergence and Evolution of Religion

The Emergence and Evolution of Religion PDF Author: Jonathan H. Turner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135162069X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Written by leading theorists and empirical researchers, this book presents new ways of addressing the old question: Why did religion first emerge and then continue to evolve in all human societies? The authors of the book—each with a different background across the social sciences and humanities—assimilate conceptual leads and empirical findings from anthropology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary sociology, neurology, primate behavioral studies, explanations of human interaction and group dynamics, and a wide range of religious scholarship to construct a deeper and more powerful explanation of the origins and subsequent evolutionary development of religions than can currently be found in what is now vast literature. While explaining religion has been a central question in many disciplines for a long time, this book draws upon a much wider array of literature to develop a robust and cross-disciplinary analysis of religion. The book remains true to its subtitle by emphasizing an array of both biological and sociocultural forms of selection dynamics that are fundamental to explaining religion as a universal institution in human societies. In addition to Darwinian selection, which can explain the biology and neurology of religion, the book outlines a set of four additional types of sociocultural natural selection that can fill out the explanation of why religion first emerged as an institutional system in human societies, and why it has continued to evolve over the last 300,000 years of societal evolution. These sociocultural forms of natural selection are labeled by the names of the early sociologists who first emphasized them, and they can be seen as a necessary supplement to the type of natural selection theorized by Charles Darwin. Explanations of religion that remain in the shadow cast by Darwin’s great insights will, it is argued, remain narrow and incomplete when explaining a robust sociocultural phenomenon like religion.

From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back

From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back PDF Author: Jean-Baptiste André
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031087909
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the major key concepts common to economics and evolutionary biology. Written by a group of philosophers of science, biologists and economists, it proposes analyses of the meaning of twenty-five concepts from the viewpoint respectively of economics and of evolutionary biology –each followed by a short synthesis emphasizing major discrepancies and commonalities. This analysis is surrounded by chapters exploring the nature of the analogy that connects evolution and economics, and chapters that summarize the major teachings of the analyses of the keywords. Most scholars in biology and in economics know that their science has something in common with the other one, for instance the notions of competition and resources. Textbooks regularly acknowledge that the two fields share some history – Darwin borrowing from Malthus the insistence on scarcity of resources, and then behavioral ecologists adapting and transforming game theory into evolutionary game theory in the 1980s, while Friedman famously alluded to a Darwinian process yielding the extant firms. However, the real extent of the similarities, the reasons why they are so close, and the limits and even the nature of the analogy connecting economics and biological evolution, remain inexplicit. This book proposes basis analyses that can sustain such explication. It is intended for researchers, grad students and master students in evolutionary and in economics, as well as in philosophy of science.

Keywords for Environmental Studies

Keywords for Environmental Studies PDF Author: Joni Adamson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814724442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Introduces key terms, quantitative and qualitative research, debates, and histories for Environmental and Nature Studies Understandings of “nature” have expanded and changed, but the word has not lost importance at any level of discourse: it continues to hold a key place in conversations surrounding thought, ethics, and aesthetics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies. Keywords for Environmental Studies analyzes the central terms and debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across environmental studies, including the environmental humanities, environmental social sciences, sustainability sciences, and the sciences of nature. Sixty essays from humanists, social scientists, and scientists, each written about a single term, reveal the broad range of quantitative and qualitative approaches critical to the state of the field today. From “ecotourism” to “ecoterrorism,” from “genome” to “species,” this accessible volume illustrates the ways in which scholars are collaborating across disciplinary boundaries to reach shared understandings of key issues—such as extreme weather events or increasing global environmental inequities—in order to facilitate the pursuit of broad collective goals and actions. This book underscores the crucial realization that every discipline has a stake in the central environmental questions of our time, and that interdisciplinary conversations not only enhance, but are requisite to environmental studies today. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.

Holistic Darwinism

Holistic Darwinism PDF Author: Peter Corning
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226116336
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
In recent years, evolutionary theorists have come to recognize that the reductionist, individualist, gene-centered approach to evolution cannot sufficiently account for the emergence of complex biological systems over time. Peter A. Corning has been at the forefront of a new generation of complexity theorists who have been working to reshape the foundations of evolutionary theory. Well known for his Synergism Hypothesis—a theory of complexity in evolution that assigns a key causal role to various forms of functional synergy—Corning puts this theory into a much broader framework in Holistic Darwinism, addressing many of the issues and concepts associated with the evolution of complex systems. Corning's paradigm embraces and integrates many related theoretical developments of recent years, from multilevel selection theory to niche construction theory, gene-culture coevolution theory, and theories of self-organization. Offering new approaches to thermodynamics, information theory, and economic analysis, Corning suggests how all of these domains can be brought firmly within what he characterizes as a post–neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis.