ABSTRACT
Economics seeks to establish the laws of rational, self-interested human behavior. Evolutionary biology is more ambitious, concerned with both ends and means. Natural selection guarantees that individual organisms that attempt to achieve some other goal will be replaced by their more reproductively self-interested competitors. In economic theory, it is customary to separate ends from means. Human preferences are taken as given, the result of an indecipherable mix of cultural and biological influences. On the other hand, the means or production functions used to satisfy these preferences are usually assumed to be objectively determined by rational technical considerations. The speed at which the utility function evolves is, of course, very sensitive to how the simulation is structured. Optimization occurs at multiple levels in evolutionary theory. For example, individual organisms and their genes are selected for or against depending on how well adapted they are to their environment.
