Abstract
What is a chapter on biology doing at this point in the book? Well there are two things that make it relevant. We have rejected physics as a model of how to do economics, on the one hand, and we’ve been claiming that economics can become a scientific discipline, on the other hand. So the point of this chapter is to suggest that there is in fact another way to do science, and that biology offers insight as to how that may be done in economics. There is some debris to clear up before we get to the main argument, and so we ask for some patience from the reader. However, one major similarity can be noticed before we start: The extraordinary diversity of the set of living creatures and the extraordinary complexity of the simplest among them, the single-cell bacterium, looks a lot more like the extraordinary diversity and complexity of the permeable human than do either to a physicists particle.
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Notes
The physics text is David Halliday, Robert Resnick, and Jearl Walker, Fundamentals of Physics (New York: Wiley, 2005); the biology text is
Scott Freeman, Biological Science (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2005); and the economics texts are
Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Economics, 6th ed. (Mason, OH: Southwestern, 2012) and
Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, Economics, 3rd ed. (New York: Worth, 2013). The latter two are both very popular and roughly cover the mainline political spectrum in the field.
The group established the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, which only managed to publish a single work, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
See Benjamin Ward, What’s Wrong with Economics? (New York: Basic Books, 1972) for an application of ideas from this seminal work to economics.
Terrell L. Hill, An Introduction to Statistical Thermodynamics, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1986), discusses the heat-exchange equation and the additional term to characterize diffusion.
See Ken Dill and Sarina Bromberg, Molecular Driving Forces, Statistical Thermodynamics in Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Nanoscience, 2nd ed. (London: Garland Science, 2011), 317–20.
The following account is put together from Freeman (2005), ch. 10; and Thomas Pollard and William Earnshaw, Cell Biology, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Saunders/Elsevier, 2008), 337–45.
Fraud and failure have reached the level of serious scandal in the sciences. A recent article in Science, “Shaking Up Science” (vol. 339, January 25, 2013) has two scientific journal editors, Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall, questioning researcher honesty; a year later Science published a study by Annie Franco, Neil Malhotra, and Gabor Simonovits, “Publication Bias in the Social Sciences,” Science 345 (2014): 1502–4, showing a strong bias toward publishing strong results over neutral or merely confirming ones. Clinical trials have come under challenge (New York Times, July 14, 2013, by Clifton Leaf), as have the very popular study of studies (“Analytical Trend Troubles Scientists,” Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2012, by Gautam Naik). Ioannides’ work is referenced in the above reports. The list could be extended, but generally shows that pressures to compromise results come with respect to motives at several levels, including researchers, peer reviews, and grants agencies.
Martin Nowak, C. Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Eusociality” Nature 466 (August 2010): 1057–62. In its online report, Nature claims one hundred fifty challengers to their thesis.
See also Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2011) for an attempt to have it both ways, which might just work.
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© 2016 Benjamin Ward
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Ward, B. (2016). Biology—A Colleague or a Model?. In: Dionysian Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137597366_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137597366_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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