From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back

Jean-Baptiste Andre is a researcher at the CNRS, working at the Departement d'Etudes Cognitives of the Ecole Normale Superieure - PSL Research University. He is a theoretician in evolutionary biology, working on human social behavior with an evolutionary perspective, and interested primarily in the evolution of cooperation and morality. Mikael Cozic is Professor of contemporary philosophy at the University of Lyon 3. He works on the methodology of economics and decision theory. His research concerns also formal theories of epistemic and practical rationality, mainly in the Bayesian tradition. Silvia De Monte. Researcher at the Institute of Biology of Ecole Normale Superieure (CNRS/ PSL Research University), Paris, and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Ploen, Germany. Her research focuses on the ecology and evolution of collective behaviours, notably in microbial populations, combining mathematical models and analysis of observational data. Jean Gayon. Historian and philosopher of science. He was a former Professeur at the Universite Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne, and former director of the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS / Universite Paris I Pantheon / Sorbonne). Philippe Huneman. Research Director at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS / Paris I Sorbonne). Philosopher of biology, he works on the philosophy of evolutionary biology and ecology, and especially issues regarding natural selection, individuality, organisms and explanatory types. Johannes Martens is a philosopher of biology and a permanent researcher at the CNRS in Paris (Sorbonne University). His works concern primarily the theoretical structure and the philosophical implications of social evolution theory. Bernard Walliser is a researcher at Paris School of Economics (Ecole Normale Superieure) and at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research concerns mainly the social impact of economic agents' beliefs, conceptualized in a game theory framework, as well as different topics in economic methodology.

Chapter 1 Introduction.- Chapter 2 Preliminary reflections Analogical reasoning between economics and biology.- Chapter 3 Set of 25 keywords, Adaptation/Learning, Altruism, Chance/Uncertainty, Classification, Communication/Signalling, Competition, Constraint/Trade-off, Cooperation, Crisis, Cycles, Development/Growth, Diversity, Equilibrium, Fitness/Utility, Heredity/Transmission, Information, Market, Mutation/Innovation, Optimality, Organizational levels, Population, Resource /Investment, Selection, Strategic interactions, Time scales, Chapter 4 Concluding remarks 1. The relevance of the studied analogies according to their field origin and system characteristics.- Chapter 5 Concluding Remarks 2 Economics and evolutionary biology: An overview of their (recent) interactions.