Sunday, July 12, 2009

Homo sapiens, not economicus   posted by Razib @ 7/12/2009 03:43:00 PM
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Robert Frank is promoting his idea that Charles Darwin will become more important than Adam Smith as an intellectual forebear of future economics in The New York Times. That is fine as it goes but I suspect that the bigger issue in the sciences of humanity is that there will be problems with relying on only one disciplinary framework and one general model. For example Frank points out that evolutionary fitness is generally conceived of in a relative sense (population mean fitness being the baseline), but the same dynamic crops up in neuroscience due to biophysical computational efficiencies from relative heuristics as opposed to a laundry list of absolute fixed preferences. R. A. Fisher famously wished to lay the seedbed for a thermodynamics of evolution in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Whether one can envisage this in evolutionary genetics, it seems even less likely in the human sciences, at least to the extent of making a generalization which is not trivial. The rut which orthodox evolutionary psychology has found itself in is probably due to this assumption that our species is at some biobehavioral equilibrium due to an exceedingly unrealistic model of evolutionary dynamics.

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