This paper agrees that a suitably generalized Darwinism may help understand socioeconomic change, but finds the most publicized generalization by Hodgson and Knudsen unsuitable. To do better, it generalizes the extension of Neo-Darwinism into evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo"),...

This paper suggests that feedback effects between technological progress and human longevity lie at the heart of their common emergence in human history. It connects two major research questions. First, the long life span after menopause is a unique but puzzling feature of humans among primates....

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of economic informality and its application in the rural context of developing and transitional economies, applying Keith Hart's (1987) notion of informality as a 'remedial concept'. Some remedy is needed to make sense of the many 'palpable...

Social and biological systems, as open dissipative systems, need to extract low entropy from the environment to compensate for continuous dissipation. This process can be represented by lognormal processes, with a deterministic representation of a thermodynamic equation. From here, we develop an...

Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually-administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the...

This paper argues that an evolutionary approach to policy-making, which emphasizes openness to change and political variety, is particularly compatible with the central tenets of classical liberalism. The chief reasons are that classical liberalism acknowledges the ubiquity of uncertainty, as...

Our thesis is that the reason many of us today are inclined toward socialism (explicit cooperation) and against laissez-faire capitalism (implicit cooperation) is because the first type of behavior was much more genetically beneficial during previous generations of our species. There is,...

Languages and cultures are mediums of transmitting information. Their value rests on their ability to lower variable costs in communication. Lower variable cost systems entail higher fixed costs. Each culture or language has evolved to adapt to the local environment. As the environment changes,...