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.
But recall Jerry Fodor who caused a bit of a stir a couple of years ago with an esay questioning Darwin without being a Creationist. Here's a quote that sets a ball rolling ( boy it annoyed everyone) 'It’s a commonplace that Darwin constructed the theory of natural selection with an eye to what breeders do when they choose which creatures to encourage to reproduce. This reading of Darwin is by no means idiosyncratic. Darwin ‘argues by example, not analogy,’ Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker in October last year. ‘The point of the opening of “The Origin” isn’t that something similar happens with domesticated breeds and natural species; the point is that the very same thing happens, albeit unplanned and over a much longer period.’ It’s true, of course, that breeding, like evolution, can alter phenotypes over time, with consequent effects on phylogenetic relations. But, on the face of it, the mechanisms by which breeding and evolution operate could hardly be more different. How could a studied decision to breed for one trait or another be ‘the very same thing’ as the adventitious culling of a population? Gopnik doesn’t say.
The present worry is that the explication of natural selection by appeal to selective breeding is seriously misleading, and that it thoroughly misled Darwin. Because breeders have minds, there’s a fact of the matter about what traits they breed for; if you want to know, just ask them. Natural selection, by contrast, is mindless; it acts without malice aforethought. That strains the analogy between natural selection and breeding, perhaps to the breaking point. What, then, is the intended interpretation when one speaks of natural selection?'You can find it at :-http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/fodo01_.html
Even if the biologists had an answer, surely economists have to treat this argument a bit more seriously because intention and intension are key concepts for economics etc where in biology they (maybe) aren't. ( eg is a polar bear white because what is selected is its whiteness or its ability to blend in to its background? etc may not be totally problematic for the 'blind watchmaker' darwinist but an anologous question relating to an adaption of choice relating to banking, for example, is. ) Using Darwin in the context of intentionality and intensionality really does look like a genuine problem that Fodor alerts us to.
The Fodor essay sounds well worthwhile. I'm never sure how far one can compare the blind watchmaker and the invisible hand but – subject to reading Fodor and thanks for the link – am sure 'rational self-interest' in economics and 'selfish' genes are ineluctably related.
Give more details regarding the investment bankers.
flooring