Bioeconomics

Bioeconomics, the integration of economics with biology, aims at enriching the two disciplines with the transfer of concepts and tools in both directions. The new field emerged in the 1970s, with contributions from the founders of bioeconomics, economists Gordon Tullock, Gary Becker, and Jack Hirshleifer, and biologist Michael Ghiselin.

Tullock applied standard economic theory of constrained maximization by humans to the analysis of a bird, the coal tit, and its consumption behavior. Ghiselin, combining Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) theory of sexual selection with Adam Smith's (1723–1790) notion of specialization and division of labor with his own notions of competition and cooperation, developed his theory of the “economy of nature” and the evolution of sex as a bioeconomics paradigm alternative to E. O. Wilson's (1975) gene-based sociobiological approach. Sociobiology evolved into “evolutionary psychology,” with Jerome Barkow and colleagues' The Adapted Mind (1992) as an important source. Becker used standard economic theory to explain how altruism could evolve by natural selection, beyond genetically related kin to include nonkin members. In addition, Hirshleifer discussed the importation of biological ideas into economics in connection with Armen Alchian's evolutionary theory of the firm.

Since the 1970s, secondand third-generation bioeconomists have used other economic paradigms to enrich the field. Janet Landa used new institutional economics (NIE), with its emphasis on positive transaction costs, to explain institutions and organizations of capitalism, why it is efficient for honeybees to use the unanimous-voting rule for collective choice of a new nest, and why Chinese merchants are successful in outcompeting other ethnic groups. David Wilson pointed to the existence of homogeneous merchant groups as providing very important empirical evidence in support of group selection theory.

Other notable economists, using NIE, game theory, evolutionary economics, complexity theory, cognitive economics, and ecological economics, also enrich bioeconomics. Biologists, working with the theories of sex allocation and gene culture coevolution, as well as results from research on living animals and fossils, have contributed importantly to the development of bioeconomics.

The first journal in the field, Journal of Bioeconomics, began publishing in 1999, with Landa as editor in chief and Ghiselin as coeditor. It has served as a launching pad for the work of third-generation bioeconomists and the emergence of the first bioeconomics course, designed and taught in 2003 by Robert Yarbrough. Bioeconomics continues to expand into new frontiers, resulting in the emergence of neuroeconomics and the development of the bioeconomics of classification, the integration of systematics with the economics of classification.