A plug for my friend Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's new book, The Settler's Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food, published by Portobello Books in early March. Yasmin is an outstanding cook, and the book covers the entire cultural range of her culinary experience, so I can heartily and hungrily recommend it.

In honour of Darwin's 200th birthday yesterday, this week I've been reading Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish (out now in Penguin paperback, the title a reference to his discovery of our semi-fishy fossil ancestor Tiktaalik). It's a terrifically good read for all economists who are, like me, evolutionary biology junkies. While writing my last book, The Soulful Science, I read a lot of the work of evolutionary economists, dating all the way back to Marx, Veblen and Schumpeter, who to varying degrees saw the parallels between their thinking about the economy and evolution – and of course Darwin himself had been prompted by Malthus. The interweaving has continued with the importance of the idea of game theoretic equilibrium in modern evolutionary biology. Paul Krugman gave a talk in 1996 about why evolutionary biology interests many economists, setting out several reasons for the important parallels. Of these, the idea of purposeful self-interest seems the most significant to me. Behavioural economics gives us many examples of non-rational decision-making due to the characteristics of our brain and psychology, but nevertheless there is a deep biological truth in the claim made by economics that people act in a self-interested manner. The overlap between discoveries in evolutionary biology and psychology, cognitive science and economic modelling is an incredibly exciting area.

Coming tomorrow for Valentine's Day, an interview with the Romantic Economist himself.