Journal of Bioeconomics

When traditional measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, stature and the body mass index (BMI) are now widely-used measures that reflect economic conditions. However, little work exists for late 19th and early 20th century women’s BMIs in the US and how they varied over time. Women’s BMIs stagnated throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After controlling for characteristics, African-American women had higher BMIs than lighter complexioned mixed-race and white women. Women from the Southwest were taller and had lower BMIs than women born elsewhere within the US. Alternatively, women’s BMIs did not vary by socioeconomic status.

This paper questions the common view that Darwinian biology is a straighforward extension of classical political economy. Our analysis contrasts the economists’ classification scheme – whereby all humans were presumed natural kinds, to be equally competent for economic and political decision making – with the post-Darwinian classification scheme that developed. When the tools of political economy were imported into biology, the presumption of homogeneity of competence was denied. Charles Kingsley played a significant role in the transition from one sort of classificatory scheme to another, in the overthrow of the economists’ notion that humans are the same in their capacity for trade and moral judgment. Darwin sent Kingsley a presentation copy of Origin of Species and quoted him in the second edition as the ‘celebrated author and divine’ who had sketched a theology in which Providence used natural selection in the creation process. The economists’ doctrine that all people form a natural kind had many opponents. Biologists agreed with economists that, whatever differences existed between races of people, none put a person outside the protection of law. Other opponents, e.g., Thomas Carlyle, criticized both the economists’ premise and their conclusion regarding protection under the law. Kingsley moved from a Carlylean to a Darwinian opposition to natural kinds.

The social and economic sciences are grounded on the basic assumption that social life, decision-making behavior, and consciousness are classical physical and therefore material phenomena. Quantum social science, a new research area, which refers to the knowledge and interpretations of quantum physics, is challenging this assumption. This paper gives an overview of quantum social science and explains quantum decision theory on the one hand with a focus on the cognitive biases first elaborated by Kahneman & Tversky, and on the other hand by Darwin´s theory of evolution.

The paper emphasizes two flaws in mainstream economics: the failure to understand actual human behavior in many real contexts and the failure to take account of transaction costs. By emphasizing the role of knowledge, institutions, transaction costs and path dependence, new institutional economics has provided a powerful answer to these shortcomings. Nevertheless, a number of questions remain open. In particular, path dependence is far from being a continuous process. Its dynamics and its irregularities are by and large unexplained. Hence, a strong need for a convincing evolutionary theory of environmental change. This article does not deny the validity of the Darwinian view applied to the theory of the firm and of competition in a free-market economy. The paper, however, maintains that the natural-selection process that characterizes the Darwinian approach is ill suited to describe economic evolutionary processes. It is shown that a combination of functional analysis and natural selection may indeed be a better solution, for it solves some of the puzzles raised by public choice theory without violating the fundamental tenets of the new institutional economics approach. Still, although this combined view may well explain why the institutional features are retained by the system, it does not clarify why they are introduced in the first place. A third possibility is put forward in the second part of the paper, where a new evolutionary theory is suggested. Within this framework, agents are assumed to behave according to their preferences within the existing rules of the game. At the same time, new ideas and sometimes new ideologies may influence their behavioral patterns. The combination between needs and ideologies generates environmental change, especially if so-called ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ are able to transform latent and shared beliefs into an institutional project and enforce it.

Attempts to use evolutionary ideas in finance have often neglected mathematical population genetics. Population genetics provides a natural approach to certain problems in finance that involve the relative wealth that accrues to competing investment strategies. In our model, competing investment strategies differ only in their allocation to a risky asset versus a riskless asset. Here we use results from the population genetics of natural selection to find the investment strategy that maximizes the expected increase in relative wealth. Though we focus on single-period analysis, some of our key findings are reminiscent of those from the growth optimal portfolio literature, e.g., the Kelly criterion.

A single cell – an egg – cannot be in the same stabilized state as a differentiated multicellular embryo or reproducing adult. The entire ontogeny must, therefore, consist of a sequence of stabilized states. Ontogeny of a phenotype cannot progress gradually but is a saltatory homeorhetic system, proceeding via natural thresholds from one self organized state to the next, hierarchically ever more complex and specialized. The natural boundaries of ontogeny – the far-from-stabilized thresholds – represent also states when changes can be easiest inserted or induced, and especially in the early ontogeny, from the intervals where evolution (change) can occur. As a result, ontogeny can also be divided into distinct life-history intervals called periods, be it embryo, larva (infant, pup), juvenile, adult and senescence, each divided in turn into phases, and each of these into natural steps. It is left to the imagination of scholars in social sciences to find parallels of saltation in economics and history.

We consider competing functional groups of tree species and develop a model of network response dynamics in order to measure the impacts of perturbations on the population distribution and diversity. The analysis of the equilibrium states relies on the connection between mean field game dynamics and replicator dynamics. We simulate our theoretical results from the data inventoried in French Guiana. Our results show that different types of disturbances modify the competitive interactions by affecting the evolutions of group densities. At the high regimes of disturbance, the canopy shade-intolerant species supplant the canopy shade-tolerant species. Tropical forest managers can thus take advantage of the competitive interactions between the functional groups to stimulate the abundance of marketable timber species. We also validate the hypothesis of maximum diversity at the intermediate disturbance levels.