One of the earlier advocates of using evolutionary biology in economics was Jack Hirshleifer, a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Hirshleifer was author of The Dark Side of the Force: Economic Foundations of Conflict Theory, which includes evolutionary analysis of cooperation and conflict, and some discussion of the unification of law, economics and evolutionary biology. The subject of this post is his 1997 article Economics from a Biological Viewpoint from the Journal of Law and Economics.

Links this week: An excellent review of Paleofantasy. Ross Douthat in the New York Times on the marriage premium, and Bryan Caplan’s thoughts. When the debate popped up a year ago, I wrote this piece. A few months ago, Andrew Gelman wrote a blog post on Ashraf and Galor’s paper on genetic diversity and economic development (the comments are worth reading). Gelman has extended that post for publication in Chance.

Underlying much of Ashraf and Galor’s analysis of genetic diversity and economic development is a Malthusian model of the world. The Malthusian model, as the name suggests, originates in the work of Thomas Malthus (pictured). Malthus had the misfortune of providing an excellent description of the world across millennia, just at the point at which the model (apparently) lost much of its predictive power. The Malthusian model rests on the assumption that any increase in income generates population growth.

In another great section from the The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, R.A. Fisher argues that the free exchange of goods and private property rights are triumphs of human organisation: [F]rom the earliest times of which we have knowledge, the hereditary proclivities, which undoubtedly form the basis of man’s fitness for social life, are found to be supplemented by an economic system, which, diverse as are the opinions which different writers have formed about it, appears to the writer to be one of the unconscious triumphs of early human organization.

Links this week: Ed Yong on Swarms. The New York Times on whether the decline of two-parent households has caused the decline in male incomes. It still astounds me that some academics can discuss this without mentioning selection effects. A critical review by Miki Ben-Dor of Marlene Zuk’s Paleofantasy. On the flipside, Christina Warinner “Debunking the paleo diet”.

I’m excited that I can finally announce the Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference. **First announcement** The Cooperation and Conflict in the Family conference will be held at UNSW in Sydney, Australia from February 2-5 2014. We will bring together leading economic and evolutionary researchers to explore the nature of conflict and cooperation between the sexes in the areas of marriage, mating and fertility. The conference provides an opportunity for researchers to discuss the economic and evolutionary biology approaches to these issues, explore common ground and identify collaborative opportunities.

Rafe Sagarin blogs at the Harvard Business Review: All of Earth's successful organisms have thrived without analyzing past crises or trying to predict the next one. They haven't held "planning exercises" or created "predictive frameworks." Instead, they've adapted. Adaptability is the power to detect and respond to change in the world, no matter how surprising or inconvenient it may be. While there’s much chatter in the management world about the need to be adaptable, only a few creative companies and innovative managers have probed the natural world for its adaptability secrets.

Links this week: Razib Kahn encourages academics to get on the blogging bandwagon (and, my post on my experience). David Barash on “evolutionary existentialism”, my favourite piece this week. Paleo or not, we all get heart disease. Also on the paleo front, Peter Turchin reviews Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet’s Perfect Health Diet; and John Hawks reviews Marlene Zuk’s Paleofantasy. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year or two reading material on Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson’s paper The Evolution of Eusociality, the trigger for the latest round of the group selection wars.

In a paper in Economic Letters (ungated version here), Ying Bai and James Kung test Spolaore and Wacziarg’s hypothesis on genetic distant and economic development: Since 1949, trade and economic ties as well as the physical movement of people between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland had been banned. Given this disconnection, one would naturally expect the relative genetic distance – operating presumably via the diffusion of technology or institution – from Taiwan to have no effect on the income differences among provinces in the Chinese mainland.

Links this week: Andrew Berry guest blogs at Why Evolution is True on Alfred Russel Wallace’s unfortunate end to his Amazon expedition. The equivalent of accidentally erasing your PhD thesis the day before submission? I am enjoying some of the press coming out about Marlene Zuk’s new book Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live (and the reactions to it); this week an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books.