There is a long history of sharing models between evolutionary biology and economics. Most famous is of course the introduction of game theory from economics into biology, which was then transformed into evolutionary game theory and re-imported into economics (Grüne-Yanoff 2011). Another area where both biology and economics have things to say is on cooperation. Both evolutionary biology and ra...

How much of its resources should an individual invest in a costly immune system? In this article, we apply an evolutionarily stable strategy analysis to an epidemic model to answer this question. On the one hand, an investment in immune function confers protection to infectious agents by reducing host susceptibility, pathogen virulence, or the length of the infectious period. On the other hand,...

It is often argued that Richard Nelson and Sydney Winter’s evolutionary theory an alternative to neoclassical economics compatible with or complementary Veblenian economics. This article subjects such arguments critical examination. I argue while provides a more realistic account of the firm behavior than Marshallian-neoclassical does, it in much same sense as Marshall’s quasi-evolutionary, “ne...

The „selection arguments‟ advanced by Alchian (1950) and Friedman (1953) were clearly meant to boost confidence in neoclassical economics. But whereas Friedman didn‟t show the slightest reservation, Alchian warned economists “not to push their luck too far” in relying on the argument. Alchian‟s warning spurred some economists (such as Nelson and Winter) to engage with evolutionary theorizing in...

Evolutionary economics has developed into an academic field of its own, institutionalized around, amongst others, the Journal of Evolutionary Economics (JEE). This paper analyzes the way and extent to which evolutionary economics has become an interdisciplinary journal, as its aim was: a journal that is indispensable in the exchange of expert knowledge on topics and using approaches that relate...

In this paper, we review the development of artificial adaptive economic agents in evolutionary economics. The review starts from a 1986 paper by Robert Lucas, a Nobel Prize laureate in economics. From there, we shall see how the idea of economic adaptive agents was enriched and implemented by Holland’s two books on genetic algorithms (Holland 1975) and on classifier systems (Holland, et al. 19...

Evolutionary linguistics is going to clarify the evolutionary process of language and evolutionary economics is clarifying the dynamics of economic phenomena. In this paper, we consider the relevance between these two fields. In evolutionary linguistics, the origin of language is thought of as the biological evolutionary process of language capacity of humans and the evolution of language the p...