This document is available in paper or PDF file. Click here to find out about Adobe Acrobat PDF files. Ever since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, genetic evolutionary theory has increasingly served as the foundation for fields that deal with organisms that arose by natural selection. The promise of genetic evolutionary economics is a better understanding of human nature and, consequently, a more accurate and comprehensive economic science.
Economic theory rests on a set of assumptions about human nature.
These economic axioms concern human genes, but there is no explicit connection between genetic evolution and economic theory. As a result, human behavior and economic predictions of that behavior diverge in a variety of important settings. Chapter 2 discusses the difficulties inherent in the standard economic approach. Natural selection theory, the chapter argues, is the best tool for refining the axioms of economics. Genetic evolutionary economics allows the derivation of parameters that are intractable with standard economic techniques.