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To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5982.2009.01572.x Byline: Arthur J. Robson (1) Abstract: Abstract. Adoption of agriculture at the expense of hunting and gathering was the dramatic precondition for all modern civilization. Recent data suggest that, because of this transition, humans initially were more disease prone, smaller, less nourished, and shorter-lived. To explain why individuals chose agriculture over hunting and gathering, this paper develops a simple model of the evolution of preferences over the quality and quantity of children, as would have been generated by our long history as a species. These preferences would have induced the choice of agriculture, but also would have led to these otherwise puzzling health effects. Abstract (Spanish): La transition neolithique vers l'agriculture : une perspective bioeconomique. L'adoption de l'agriculture en remplacement de la chasse et de la cueillette a ete une condition prealable dramatique pour toutes les civilisations modernes. Des donnees recentes suggerent cependant que, en consequence de cette transition, les humains sont devenus, dans les premiers temps apres la transition, davantage vulnerables a la maladie, ont vu leur esperance de vie diminuer, ont ete moins bien nourris, et sont devenus plus petits. Pourquoi alors est-ce que des individus qui avaient le choix entre deux systemes economiques ont choisi l'agriculture? Pour expliquer ce choix, ce memoire developpe un modele simple de l'evolution des preferences quant a la qualite et la quantite des enfants. Celles-ci auraient ete engendrees par notre longue histoire en tant qu'espece. Ces preferences auraient engendre le choix de l'agriculture, mais auraient aussi entraine d'autre part ces effets deconcertants sur la sante. Author Affiliation: (1)Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University

We argue for attention to the evolutionary origins of economic behaviour. Going beyond this, we argue that the economy of hunting and gathering was the context in which evolution shaped human characteristics that underlie modern economic behaviour. We first reconsider the basic biological question of why aging occurs at all. We then illustrate the usefulness of considering foraging economics by asking why it is biologically advantageous for humans to live long after their reproductive career is over. Further, we argue that foraging economics would have led to the simultaneous exaggeration of intelligence and of longevity that is characteristic of humans.

This paper presents an unconventional argument based on population growth to bolster marginal productivity theory. There is an economy with a single output produced from a number of different types of labor. Each type of labor is reproduced from that type itself and from the amount of the output devoted to it under some income distributional norm. Any norm which fails to induce convergence to maximal balanced growth is growth dominated, in that the population and income it induces can be overwhelmed eventually. On the maximal balanced growth path, the norm divides output according to marginal productivity.

This paper is a selective survey of recent work on evolutionary models of games. It is shown how evolution, in a literal biological sense, may have generated the attitudes to risk that are the basis of strategic behaviour. Such attitudes to risk may or may not conform to the expected utility theorem. Although strategic behaviour itself is bound to be importantly influenced by non-genetic mechanisms, these mechanisms may remain analogous to biological inheritance, at least in special cases. The theory of evolutionary games derived in this way is sketched, and applications to various coordination games are discussed.