Abstract
Biology recapitulates economics: at least evolutionary biology seems to be rediscovering and analysing the same kinds of ideas that the great eighteenth-century economic psychologists (from Mandeville to Hume to Smith) had explored. Over the last few years there has been a heated debate among evolutionary theorists – scientists, mathematicians, the odd humanist – about whether altruism is possible, given the core idea that evolution is driven by the selection of winners in the cut-throat competition for reproductive success. This is often called evolution by natural selection, but not even Darwin saw natural selection as the whole story.0 In the history of life