Darwinism and Economics: (233 The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics series)

This volume offers outstanding works of recent scholarship on Darwinism covering three major fields of enquiry: How Darwinism affects our conception of human nature and challenges long-standing assumptions such as self-interested behaviour. Analysis of the nature of socio-cultural evolution, its differences from biological evolution and whether it is Lamarckian. The possibility of generalizing core Darwinian principles to cover evolving entities in the economic and social world, as well as in biology. Exploring the huge potential impact of Darwinism on the social sciences, this collection is an insightful reference tool for scholars and others recognising the importance of new developments in this discipline.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Acknowledgements Introduction Geoffrey M. Hodgson PART I HUMAN NATURE, RATIONALITY AND GROUP SELECTION 1. Herbert A. Simon (1990), ‘A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism’ 2. Paul A. Samuelson (1993), ‘The Economics of Altruism: Altruism as a Problem Involving Group versus Individual Selection in Economics and Biology’ 3. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1994), ‘Better than Rational: Evolutionary Psychology and the Invisible Hand’ 4. Donald T. Campbell (1994), ‘How Individual and Face-to-Face-Group Selection Undermine Firm Selection in Organizational Evolution’ 5. Ulrich Witt (1999), ‘Bioeconomics as Economics from a Darwinian Perspective’ 6. Alexander J. Field (2001), ‘Prologue: The World’s First Prisoner’s Dilemma Experiment’ 7. Jack J. Vromen (2001), ‘The Human Agent in Evolutionary Economics’ 8. Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis and Richard McElreath (2001), ‘In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies’ 9. Theodore C. Bergstrom (2002), ‘Evolution of Social Behavior: Individual and Group Selection’ 10. Arthur J. Robson (2002), ‘Evolution and Human Nature’ 11. Joseph Henrich (2004), ‘Cultural Group Selection, Coevolutionary Processes and Large-scale Cooperation’ 12. Viktor J. Vanberg (2004), ‘The Rationality Postulate in Economics: Its Ambiguity, its Deficiency and its Evolutionary Alternative’ 13. Herbert A. Simon (2005), ‘Darwinism, Altruism and Economics’ 14. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (2005), ‘Can Self-interest Explain Cooperation?’ PART II DARWINISM, LAMARCKISM AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION 15. Joseph Fracchia and R.C. Lewontin (1999), ‘Does Culture Evolve?’ 16. Dan Sperber (2000), ‘An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture’ 17. John S. Wilkins (2001), ‘The Appearance of Lamarckism in the Evolution of Culture’ 18. Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen (2006), ‘Dismantling Lamarckism: Why Descriptions of Socio-economic Evolution as Lamarckian are Misleading’ PART III GENERALISED DARWINISM 19. John Nightingale (2000), ‘Universal Darwinism and Social Research: The Case of Economics’ 20. J.W. Stoelhorst (2007), ‘The Naturalist View of Universal Darwinism: An Application to the Evolutionary Theory of the Firm’ 21. Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen (2006), ‘Why We Need a Generalized Darwinism, and Why a Generalized Darwinism is Not Enough’ 22. Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen (2006), ‘The Nature and Units of Social Selection’ 23. Richard Nelson (2006) ‘Evolutionary Social Science and Universal Darwinism’ 24. Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen (2008), ‘Information, Complexity and Generative Replication’ Name Index

About the Author :
Edited by Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Emeritus Professor, Loughborough University London, UK