Topic: Biology

Quotes

Arthur Robson, “The Biological Basis of Economic Behavior” (2001)

• The term “utility” is not popular in biology. Usually, direct appeal is made to the evolutionary optimality of behavior itself without intermediation by preferences.#

Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (1994)

• The impulse to think that environmental sources of difference are less threatening than genetic ones is natural but illusory.#
• The more we succeed in giving every youngster a chance to develop his or her latent cognitive ability, the more we equalize the environmental sources of differences in intelligence. The irony is that as America equalizes the circumstances of people’s lives, the remaining differences in intelligence are increasingly determined differences in genes.#

Roger Koppl, Big Players and the Economic Theory of Expectations (2002)

• Agents with bounded rationality are guided by general rules and rules of thumb. They have, nevertheless, some cunning and the disposition to seek out and follow their incentives. Natural selection can turn this cunning disposition into a good approximation of rational maximizing, but only in the right institutional setting.#

Douglas Whitman, “Hayek Contra Pangloss on Evolutionary Systems” (1998)

• The real debate in biology, then, is not selection of individuals versus selection of groups, but selection of genes versus selection at multiple levels of a hierarchy.#
• Individuals are not units of selection upon which selective forces operate, except insofar as an individual may be perceived as a conglomeration of multiple memes and genes. What is essential for a methodologically individualist account of the evolution of cultural outcomes is that individuals constitute a filter (i.e., a selective mechanism) through which memes must pass before they can begin to have systemic effects.#

D.W. Stephens, “Discounting and Reciprocity in an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma” (2002)

• There is still no single unambiguous case of stable nonhuman cooperation in a verifiable prisoner’s dilemma.#

Gordon Tullock, The Economics of Non-Human Societies (1994)

• Human beings have both an economy and a government. Social insects and other social species normally have only an economy, but no government. . . . One might say that the great flexibility which the large brain gives human beings provides problems which the government is necessary to solve. Less flexible social species can get by without it.#