American Economic Association

Modes of Thought in Economics and Biology

Author(s): Paul A. Samuelson
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 75, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-
Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May, 1985), pp. 166-172
Published by: American Economic Association
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FRONTIERS IN DEMOGRAPHIC ECONOMICSt
Modes of Thought in Economics and Biology
By PAUL A. SAMUELSON*
Sociobiology, particularly in connection
with its obsessive interest in Hamiltonian
altruism, has veered closer towards econom-
ics. Reactions within economics against
highfalutin borrowings of the methodology
of mathematical physics led Alfred Marshall
and a host of later writers to hanker for a
"biological" approach to political economy.
A dispassionate audit of what resulted from
this urge would have to report a disappoint-
ing paucity up to now of fruitful finds or
insights.
But independently of this anti-physicism
strain in economics there developed within
economics an "evolutionary approach." It is
not social Darwinism that I am referring to
(although an insidious temptation in that
direction is sometimes involved). Rather,
several writers explored the notion that-
what survives under competition, whether in
the jungle or the marketplace, may resemble
what is achieved in a maximum problem's
solution-even though no participants in the
struggle may have any perception and aware-
ness that they as individuals are maximizing
anything or awareness that the group ends
up doing so. Some names associated with
this notion are Armen Alchian (1950), Mil-
ton Friedman (1953), and Sidney Winter and
Richard Nelson (1982). My Foundations
(1947) discussions of the stability of surviv-
ing forms, borrowed explicitly from the
physiologist philosopher L. J. Henderson
(1917), is somewhat in this same vein.
There is really no trace of anti-physicism
in such an approach. Indeed, the case where
soap bubbles unconsciously form the shapes
that maximize elaborate integrals in the
calculus of variations is very much like the
case where leaves and branches of a tree,
competing for access to the sunlight, achieve
maximal shapes.
When Edward Wilson's manifesto for soci-
ology first came out (1975), I predicted that
it would meet a resonant response in
Chicago-school economics. Everything has
proceeded on schedule to validate my fore-
cast. A hard-boiled economist who shares his
income with his child can now cease to feel
guilty about this superficial violation of the
doctrine of "no free lunch." Hamiltonian
inclusive fitness shows that this is just a sel-
fish gene's way of making more of itself-
no less respectable a process than that in
which I cannily outsell or outproduce my
neighbor.
I. Population as Part of Economics
Population analysis is at the intersection
of social science and biology. Once upon a
time, throughout the heyday of classical eco-
nomics, demography belonged to political
economy. The supply of labor was one of the
important endogenous variables in the sys-
tems of Smith, Malthus, Mill, and Marx. I
have expressed in many places how super-
ficial and empty the concept of a subsistence
wage has always been. Although economies
in the pre-industrial revolution era differed
widely in their per capita levels of real in-
come, writers blithely embraced the para-
digm of a horizontal SS supply curve for
labor, as if the cost of production and repro-
duction of labor was an identifiable exoge-
nous parameter. There must be something
very tempting about this vacuous notion,
since so many different scholars did succumb
tDiscussant: Gordon Tullock, Public Choice Center,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
*Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139. I owe thanks to
the Sloan Foundation for nartial sunnort-
166
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VOL. 75 NO. 2 FRONTIERS IN DEMOGRAPHIC ECONOMICS 167
to it. And, by the age of Mill and Marx-in-
deed, even in Ricardo's time and Malthus's
later editions-the level of the subsistence
wage rate was freed from physiological di-
mensions and became a dummy variable shot
through with conventional standards of life
hankered after by (some) workers. At this
stage a meaningful false theory had been
replaced by a meaningless nontheory that
could never be vindicated or rejected by any
pattern of historical facts.
II. Paradigm Lost and Regained
One feature of neoclassical economics that
distinguishes it from the classical version
is the removal of population as a variable
subject to economists' equilibrium analysis.
Knut Wicksell, an autodidact in a backwater
of northern Europe, was the last neoclassicist
to preoccupy himself with demography.
Marshall, Edwin Cannan, Frank Knight, and
A. C. Pigou all were content to have the
trend of population growth imported from
the fields of sociology and technical demog-
raphy. The pioneers of modern demography
-Alfred J. Lotka, Robert R. Kuczynski,
David Glass, Kingsley Davis, Ansley J.
Coale, Nathan Keyfitz, and others-were not
primarily economists and made little pre-
tence to be. The classical subsistence wage
theory is dead forever- dead as a theory of
constancy of wage even as applied to the
poor regions of Africa and Asia where gross
reproduction rates are still enormously high
and where population density perceptibly
reduces per capita productivity. So the real
wage rate is definitely not an exogenous vari-
able for today's economics. Nevertheless, in
recent years economists have begun to in-
filtrate the field of demography. This is part
of the imperialist movement in which we
economists try to apply our methodologies to
everything- to the law, to the sociology of
the family (courtship, marriage, divorce,
cohabitation). I have in mind writings by
such economists as Richard Easterlin, Paul
Schultz, Gary Becker and a whole Chicago
school, Ronald Lee, Harvey Leibenstein, and
many others.
As might be expected, noneconomists have
sometimes resented invasion of their turf.
Demographers are not as titillated as we are
by letting the decision to have or not have a
child be likened to the decision to buy or not
buy a new car. Easterlin aside, the econo-
mists' models did not predict in advance the
magnitude of the post-1939 baby boom; nor
the post-1957 resumption of the trend to-
ward small family sizes. Slutsky-like analysis
of the income-and-family size relationship
labors like a lion with concepts of quality
and alternative earning power of spouses,
only to produce the mouse that sometimes
these days it is fashionable to have 1 or 2
children and sometimes to have 2 or 3. Weak
and hard-to-reproduce evidences for ex-
trasensory perception, people find boring.
Similarly, a weak tendency for people to
have more or to have less of their children
during cyclical recessions does not excite
noneconomists.
Economists are smart and hard-working
people, now being produced in copious
supply relative to the traditional problems
feasible to make progress on. Like lemmings
oppressed by the workings out of the law of
diminishing returns, economists will con-
tinue to swarm into the area of demography.
Hard work and intelligence will get them-
selves heard, even when somewhat hamstrung
by unpromising initial hypotheses and meth-
ods. So, in the end, economists' demography
will carve out an ecological niche for itself.
III. Anecdotes and Anecdotes
A Kuhnian expert in the dynamics of sci-
entific schools will observe how sociobiology
extrudes into the traditional grounds of the
social sciences. Francis Galton, Karl Pear-
son, and Ronald Fisher sought genetic ex-
planations for differences in performance and
class position. Although R. A. Fisher was a
genius in genetics and mathematical statis-
tics, his 1930 classic, The Genetic Theory of
Natural Selection, seems naive in the degree
to which he hypothecates a genetic basis for
observed differences in behavior. No cogent
evidence is given for his views and indeed it
is not clear what evidence would be cogent.
We are beginning to identify today, by
means of biochemistry and molecular bi-
ology, particular diseases with particular sin-
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168 A EA PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS MA Y 1985
gularities in DNA data. But just how the
courage observed in offspring is related to
the genes for courage inherited from their
ancestors is as yet a completely nonoper-
ational question. The same has to be said of
" altruism," "intelligence," "sexuality," and
most of the attributes discussed in the final
chapters of Wilson. These final chapters, I
noticed at first reading, depend largely upon
hypothetical anecdotes and case studies. Ini-
tially, I thought this a weakness of the
material dealing with man and with higher
primates, an understandable let down from
the higher level of scientific rigor characteriz-
ing the earlier chapters dealing with the solid
facts of animal and plant biology. But on
further examination and reflection, I dis-
covered that much of what goes under the
name of natural history involves a similar
marshaling of selective anecdotes. Chemistry
and meteorology are not like that. And
neither is economics. In economics we have
data aplenty. Our subject is inexact but we
do apply quantitative analysis (statistical and
otherwise) to formulate and test our hy-
potheses. When you read about Volterra's
struggle for existence between predators and
prey, or Wilson's programs for a genetic-
based ethics, you are not in the constrained
world of fact and interpretative hypothesis
but rather in the imaginative realm of specu-
lative possibility.
To be sure, more and better observations
will be made available by future scholars
working in this vineyard. But the point to be
made is how far away we now are from a
satisfactory state of knowledge in these be-
tween-disciplines domains.
Rather than belabor these points about
realism and relevance, I wish for the rest of
the present endeavor to deal with purely
deductive matters, to illustrate by some ex-
amples involving sex ratios how unalike (and
alike) are the deductive paradigms common
to economics (and perhaps sociology) and
those of sociobiology and genetic demog-
raphy.
IV. Different Moods
There are important differences between a
typical genetic process and an economic or
sociological process. Genetic evolutionary
selection, as when there is survivability ad-
vantage in a malarial environment for the
genotype that is heterozygous for the sickle
cell trait, involves no consciousness or overt
purpose: any teleological aspect is an "as if"
phenomenon. Ofttimes genetic change is gla-
cially slow, involving hundreds of genera-
tions. So to speak, there is no "action at a
distance" in demographic genetics: funeral
by funeral, mating by mating, each allele
must make its way. By contrast, in econom-
ics what one firm innovates to do now can in
principle sweep the whole industry by quick
imitation.
As a typical process in biology, consider a
society that relies solely on the rhythm
method for its birth control (a specification
already shot through with sociology and con-
vention). Given enough time the strategy will
partially or wholly self-destruct-as those
genetically disposed to have irregular men-
strual cycles leave more of their offspring to
be represented in subsequent populations.
But the biological time scales involved run
into hundreds of years, by which time there
will have occurred scores of alternations of
sociological ideologies.
The sex ratio is a useful topic for our
comparison.
V. Balanced Sex Ratio
Human babies are almost as likely to be
girls as boys: typically males are in small
excess, 106 to 100; but females have lower
mortality so that by adulthood the sex ratio
is in virtual balance. Animal populations,
whether monogamous or not, are observed
often to have nearly balanced sex ratios at
birth, with whatever unbalance that implies
in maturity.
R. A. Fisher gives an ingenious argument
why individual natural selection might be
expected to evolve toward a balanced sex
ratio at birth or conception. Here is my
attempt to paraphrase his logic:
Suppose all genetic strains but yours
tend to produce an excess of male over
female births. If your strain tends to
produce a more balanced sex ratio of
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VOL. 75 NO. 2 FRONTIERS IN DEMOGRAPHIC ECONOMICS 169
births, other things equal, each of you
will be better represented with grand-
children than each of the other crowd
-this for the reason that, for pro-
ducing the grandchildren generation,
the totality of all sons have exactly
equal representation with the totality
of all daughters (even when the respec-
tive totals are unequal!), with the impli-
cation that each daughter brings you
more in relative grandchildren repre-
sentation than each son does. So, in
each generation, the unbalance of the
sex ratio at birth tends to be reduced.
Only a sex ratio at birth in balance is
immune to evolutionary drift.
To see how mathematical geneticists put
this heuristic argument on a rigorous analyti-
cal basis, refer to I. Eshel (1975), Joel Yellin
and myself (1977), and the Gibbs Lecture of
Samuel Karlin (1984). To illustrate the logic
it suffices for me here to sketch the rock-bot-
tom simplest case.
VI. Darwin's Mindless Invisible Hand
Adult male and females, [M, F] mate to
produce this period's births, B. The fractions
[g, 1- g] determine the breakdown of new-
borns between males and females. The
mortality fractions [
Pm,
Pf
I
specify how many
of the newborn males and females survive to
be adults in the next period. With mortality
specified, our model is complete once we
specify the mating-fertility function deter-
mining the output of births out of the inputs
of adult males and females. I write this as
(1) B(t)=M(t)F(t)b[M(t),F(t)J,
where MFb[M, F] is much like the econo-
mists' production function, being monotone
increasing (and perhaps concave). Examples
would be cMF/(M + F), cMF/(-M + 2F),
cMF/M1/3F1/2.
Combine (1) with our mortality and sex-
ratio assumptions
(2) M(t) =
pr
[ gB(t -1)],
F(t)-=pf [(I1-g)B(t -1)]
to derive an autonomous first-order dif-
ference equation determining births and all
demographic variables:
(3)
B(t)=g(1-g)pmpfB(t
- 1)2
x b [
pmgB(t-1),
pf (l-g)B(t-1)]
-=4[B(t-1)]J, t 21.
Thus, if MFb[M, F] is first-degree homo-
geneous, we find Malthus-Lotka exponential
growth:
(4) B(t)=B(O)Rt,
B (O)
=
M(O) F(O)b [ M(O), F(O)J
1 R
=
g(1 -
g)pmpfb[gpm(1
-
g)pf]
If both sexes played a symmetric role in the
MFb function, maximal group fitness would
require that any superiority of females in
mortality ought to be compensated by hav-
ing an excess of males at birth g >
2. The
above Fisherine argument denies that the
Invisible Hand of individual selection will
lead to this group fitness state, leading in-
stead to balanced sex ratio at birth (g= =2
whatever that implies for unbalance in the
adult sex ratio!
Now introduce genetic selection. The old
genetic strain that (M, F, B, g) above be-
longed to, I now write as (MA, FA, BA, gA).
A mutation creates also a new genetic strain,
with
(Ma, F, Ba, ga). (To keep the discus-
sion simplest, I don't deal with diploid in-
heritance, which would require us to intro-
duce [MAA, Maa, MAa, FAA,
...I
, etc.) The
axioms of the Fisherine syllogism are very
strict:
1. The genotypes differ only in sex ratio:
gA
*
ga-
2. The same survival fractions [Pm'
PfI
apply to both
genotypes.
3. Where fertility-mating is
concerned,
an individual of genotype A has exactly the
same properties as any like-sexed, like-aged
individual of genotype a. This implies ran-
dom or nonassortative mating and that total
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170 AEA PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS MA Y 1985
births, B
=
BA +
Ba,
are determined as be-
fore by total (M, F) numbers:
(5) BA+ Ba= (MA+ Ma)(FA+ Fa)
X b[MA+
Ma, FA+ Fa].
For short, the last factor on the right will be
written as b.
4. The last axiom specifies that offspring
of parents both of the same genotype are of
that genotype; half the offspring of parents
of different genotype average out to be of the
father's genotype, half of the mother's, and
sampling irregularities are assumed ignorable
in a large enough population.
The axioms translate in a straightforward
way to give the following first-order dif-
ference equation system determining how the
vector [BA(t),
Ba(t)]
=
[BA,
Ba] transforms
itself into [BA(t + 1), Ba(t + 1)]
=
[BA, Ba]:
(6A) B= {
ga(1-gaI)Ba [gA(1-ga)
+
ga(l-gA )]BABa
{
pmpfb}-
(6a) B = { gA(lgA)BA 2 [gA(l ga)
?
ga(-gA)] BABa
}{pm
pfb;
Suppose we are interested only in ratios of
genotypes,
B,/BA
=
x(t), and in the ratio of
the sexes at birth, as measured by g(t) the
properly weighted average of [gA,
ga].
We
can divide (6a) by (6A) and cancel out com-
pletely both any differences in the sexes'
mortality fractions and any special features
of the b[M, F] function that happen to ob-
tain!
We then get the autonomous first-order
difference equation in [x(t), x(t +
1)]:
(7) x(t+1)=x(t)X
9al(1-g.)X(t)+ 12 [9A(1 9a)+9,(1 gA)]
gA(1-gA)+X(t)2
[gA(1-ga)+ga(19gA)]
It can then be shown
graphically or
analyti-
cally that, for 0
<x(O)
<
o, as t -x oo the
overall sex ratio
g(t)
-2
'
if
(gA, ga)
straddle
4; if they are both on one side of 4, g(t)
the
(ggA,
g) nearest to 4.
Warning: Balance of the sexes at birth would
obtain in this model even if males lived
longer than females, Pm >
Pf,
and even if
females were more important for nurturing
and if a small fraction of the available males
would suffice for purposes of procreation.
Fitness of the group, when it calls for bal-
anced sex ratio of adults or such adult unbal-
ance as implies a strong unbalance at birth,
will be sacrificed to that maximizing individ-
ual fitness. Economists understand well that
what's good for each may be bad for all
sellers-as in Prisoner's Dilemma, or in per-
fect competition.1
VII. Economic and Sociological Processes
New techniques are making it possible to
know in advance what will be the sex of a
baby. With knowledge may come power to
control. Thus, if one learns by amniocentesis
that an embryo is female, and if one prefers
a male, an abortion might be decided on. If
such customs become common, some far-
reaching sociological changes could occur.
And these would have economic ramifica-
tions.
Nor is all this new. Animal breeders and
folklore have held that the probabilities of
the different sexes can be affected by timing
patterns within the menstrual cycle. Indeed,
it is reported in Too Many Women? by M.
Guttenberg and P. F. Secord (1983) that the
1See Fisher (pp. 142-43), W. D. Hamilton (1967),
Wilson (pp. 316-17), R. L. Trivers and D. E. Willard
(1973), for alternative models that alter conclusions
about balanced sex ratios by bringing in considerations
of " parental investment" and other interactions between
genotype and fertility or mortality functions and param-
eters. Where an economist would say: " Parents will
invest in one sex or the other up to the point of equality
of marginal advantage," biologists more often speak of
equality of investments in the two sexes. Equality of
derivatives and equality of ordinates are not always the
same thing! Actually, selection would lead to two-thirds
of newborns being male if the (M, F) symbols in (1)-(7),
instead of meaning (males, females), had to be inter-
preted to be (pairs of males, single females)-as when
each female uses up twice the "energy" or "mass" of
one male.
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VOL. 75 NO. 2 FRONTIERS IN DEMOGRAPHIC ECONOMICS 171
Talmudic practices followed by nineteenth-
century orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe
resulted in a sex ratio as distorted as 146/100.
Also, the mystery of the alleged excess of
male births occurring in the World War I
epoch may even be resolvable by prosaic
factors having to do with scheduling of army
leaves and discharges during that period.
Whatever the mixture of science fiction
and fact characterizing present knowledge, it
is not unlikely that better control over gender
is just around the corner for reasons that
have nothing to do with genetic change. How
do economists model such a process? I shall
deal only with an archetypal example.
Scarcity tends toward value. The more
women there are, other things equal, the
lower might be expected to be their relative
wages and lifetime earnings. Feminists might
therefore look with some approval upon a
future trend toward more sons rather than
daughters.
Working against this in the political sphere
is that scarcity leads to weakness of voting
position and respect. "Expand thy numbers,"
is the injunction each identity group re-
sponds to. Here I shall stay with the
economist's case where per capita real in-
comes are hurt by abundance of numbers.
The simplest case is where the real na-
tional product, Q,
is produced by the male
and female adult labor forces, (M, F),
with
the imputed real wage to each being de-
termined by respective marginal products:
(8) Q= Q[M, F] = Mq[F/M],
q'
> O >
q"
Wm
= dQ[M, F]/dM= q'[M/F];
Wf
=
dQ[M, F]/dF= 4P(Wm),
'<O.
Warning: a polar feminist model that sup-
posed male and female inputs to be identical
factors of production would make Q be c(M
+ F) and necessitate qualifying much of the
following analysis.
If some people indulge a strong enough
preference for sons, that will skew the adult
sex ratio upward, tending to raise female
wage rates and lower male rates. If women
are no less productive than men, in the sense
that Q[M, F] is a symmetric function
equalling Q[F,
M],
then the female wage will
exceed the male. Such an elevation in relative
remuneration may serve partially to reverse
the sex ratio imbalance.
One past reason for preferring sons may
have been their superior earning power. Al-
though daughters may perhaps be counted
on to be more nurturing to you in your old
age, sons may have the greater wherewithal
to support you. Or the vanity of having the
family name carried on may, under our
patriarchal culture, be better served by sons.
But now that the contrived scarcity of females
raises their earnings, you have a new eco-
nomic motive to indulge your preference for
males less.
The new equilibrium, under the postulated
symmetry of Q(M, F) and specified prefer-
ence bias toward males, will be toward an
excess of males but an excess limited by their
induced impoverishment. The approach to
the new equilibrium could involve successive
over- and undershoots (as in the economist's
"cobweb" model, where each person doesn't
realize how many others are also doing the
same thing). Or the approach may be grad-
ual in the fashion of adaptive expectations.
To keep up with the latest fad, we could even
fabricate a rational expectations model: in it,
people make a best guess about what the
future development of the sex ratio will be;
they take account of what is implied by this
for relative earnings of their sons, daughters,
grandsons and granddaughters, and in terms
of this make their decisions; and, miracle of
miracles, when all do this they together con-
trive what it is that they each expect.
Again we discover the possibility of a con-
flict between group (economic) selection and
individual (economic) selection. If two un-
friendly societies compete, the more pros-
perous one (Sparta) may eliminate the other.
However, the M/(F + M) ratio that maxi-
mizes total Q (of Athens) may not be the sex
ratio that best pleases its representative citi-
zen. So each following self-interest may
achieve the destruction of all.
Observation: genetic evolution can work
to offset economic unbalancing of the sex
ratio. To see this best, suppose
pf
= Pm and
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172 A EA PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS MA Y 1985
that only a subset of the population exercise
gender control by abortion or otherwise. The
groups who do and do not control gender
need not be genetically defined. None the
less, the dynamic Equation (7) could still
apply, provided only we can suppose that
when both parents belong to one group, so
will the offspring. And that when the parents
belong to different groups, half the offspring
will be like one parent and half like the
other.
What will follow? The Fisher logic will
then apply to this non-particulate-inheri-
tance setup. With what result? Our defined
process of sociological selection will lead to a
rebalancing of the sexes! Indeed, the process
can lead to a serendipitous balancing if there
are two groups, one favoring sons and one
daughters: each can then get their heart's
desire, with their numerical weightings evolv-
ing to keep the overall birth ratio in balance
though no one is aware of the equilibrating
process.
Mere deduction cannot prove anything
definite about real world sex ratios. If we
alter the razor's-edge symmetries of the Fish-
erine premises- admit nonrandom matings,
etc., etc.-we of course can no longer deduce
balanced sex ratios. Realistic economic mod-
els are not too likely to honor the precise
"other things equal" premises implicit in the
Fisherine deduction.
VIII. Finale
There is much territory between econom-
ics and biology that is still virgin ground. It
will be tilled increasingly in the future. We
should not be surprised if the first explora-
tions are both crude and pretentious. Wis-
dom and maturity are the last settlers to
arrive in pioneering communities.
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Uncertainty, Evolution
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Fisher, R. A., The Genetical Theory of Natural
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Friedman, Milton, Essays in Positive Econom-
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Guttenberg, M. and Secord, P. F., Too Many
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