ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the main parallels and divergences in economic and sociobiological reasoning. The field variously called population biology, sociobiology, or ecology is concerned to explain the observed interrelations among the various forms of life—organisms, species, and broader groupings and communities—and between forms of life and their external environments. The idea that selective pressure of the environment can do the work of conscious optimizing has also received some controversial discussion in the economics literature. In the very recent period a number of biologists have come to make significant use of tools and approaches of economics. Michael T. Ghiselin has urged fellow biologists to adopt the “methodological individualism” of economics in preference to the open or disguised “teleologism” of assuming optimizing behavior on the part of higher-level groupings and species. Modern neoclassical economics has forsworn any attempt to study the source and content of preferences, that is, the goals that motivate men’s actions.
