Review of André et al.’s From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back: Parallels and Crossings between Economics and Evolution. Cham: Springer, 2022, xi + 186.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plenty of introductory books have explored the concepts and methods of evolutionary biology and economics (e.g., Sterelny & Griffiths 2012; Reiss 2013), but few have explored how those concepts and methods are shared and traded between the two disciplines.From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back helps fill this gap.The book's project, as one of its authors puts it, is to present a systematic study of the "economics/evolutionary biology interplay" that's marked much of the two disciplines' histories (2).All those oft-cited moments-from Darwin's inspired borrowings of Malthusian ideas to the interdisciplinary construction of evolutionary game theory-seemed to suggest deep similarities between the biological and economic domains and the ways in which researchers conceptualized each.Thanks to André et al.'s contribution, scholars now have an accessible introduction through which they can start to make sense of those similarities.The authors anchor their study to a set of key concepts that both evolutionary biology and economics seem to share.The concepts are shared either in the sense of being picked out by the same linguistic term or in the sense of being made to serve similar functions in each discipline (2).'Competition' is an example of concepts shared in the former sense.While in evolutionary biology it might refer to organisms' relative degree of success in securing finite opportunities for survival and reproduction (48), in economics it can refer to rivalrous situations in which different agents try to trade with the same market participants (50).'Fitness' and 'utility' are examples of concepts shared in the latter sense.Though distinct, the two concepts play similar roles in predicting things like phenotypes and choices when subjected to some "maximization principle" (2).A lexicon-like list of twenty-five of these concepts makes up the bulk of the book (chapter 3).Each entry presents the same concept twice.First, one of the book's authors describes the concept as it appears in its biological context, and then another describes it as it appears in its economic
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".