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Was exchange an early agent of human evolution or is it merely a de novo artifact of modern civilisation? Here, Haim Ofek explores the impact of market forces on human evolution, from the feed-as-you-go strategy typical of primates to the development of agriculture and the domestication of fire

Was exchange an early agent of human evolution or is it merely an artefact of modern civilisation? Spanning two million years of human evolution, this book explores the impact of economics on human evolution and natural history. The theory of evolution by natural selection has always relied in part on progress in areas of science outside biology. By applying economic principles at the borderlines of biology, Haim Ofek shows how some of the outstanding issues in human evolution, such as the increase in human brain size and the expansion of the environmental niche humans occupied, can be answered. He identifies distinct economic forces at work, beginning with the transition from the feed-as-you-go strategy of primates, through hunter-gathering and the domestication of fire to the development of agriculture. This highly readable book will inform and intrigue general readers and those in fields such as evolutionary biology and psychology, economics, and anthropology.

Was exchange an early agent of human evolution or is it merely an artefact of modern civilisation? Spanning two million years of human evolution, this book explores the impact of economics on human evolution and natural history. The theory of evolution by natural selection has always relied in part on progress in areas of science outside biology. By applying economic principles at the borderlines of biology, Haim Ofek shows how some of the outstanding issues in human evolution, such as the increase in human brain size and the expansion of the environmental niche humans occupied, can be answered. He identifies distinct economic forces at work, beginning with the transition from the feed-as-you-go strategy of primates, through hunter-gathering and the domestication of fire to the development of agriculture. This highly readable book will inform and intrigue general readers and those in fields such as evolutionary biology and psychology, economics, and anthropology.

The discussion in this chapter is an attempt to reconcile two observations: (1) that vertebrates are generally the least cooperative form of life in the animal kingdom and, conversely, (2) that humans are the most cooperative form of life in the same kingdom (at least in terms of cooperation with nonkin). The main challenge is to reconcile such a diametric departure on the part of humans with the fact that humans are perfect vertebrates in all other respects. The second section of this chapter explains why, excepting our own species, the vertebrates are all but universally defective or nearly defective

Family ties have an important effect on the wage gap between male and female workers because wives are often more geographically tied to their husband's location, which may not be the best market for the wife's skills. Theory implies a testable inverse relationship between urban size—reflecting labor market size—and male‐female wage differentials. Our results indicate that the wage gap between married men and women narrows with urban size. About 17 percent of the wage gap between married men and women can be accounted for by urban size—or, more fundamentally, by geographic immobility due to the family tie constraint.

This collection reports on the latest research on an increasingly pivotal issue for evolutionary biology: cooperation. The chapters are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and utilize research tools that range from empirical survey to conceptual modeling, reflecting the rich diversity of work in the field. They explore a wide taxonomic range, concentrating on bacteria, social insects, and, especially, humans. Part I (\"Agents and Environments\") investigates the connections of social cooperation in social organizations to the conditions that make cooperation profitable and stable, focusing on the interactions of agent, population, and environment. Part II (\"Agents and Mechanisms\") focuses on how proximate mechanisms emerge and operate in the evolutionary process and how they shape evolutionary trajectories. Throughout the book, certain themes emerge that demonstrate the ubiquity of questions regarding cooperation in evolutionary biology: the generation and division of the profits of cooperation; transitions in individuality; levels of selection, from gene to organism; and the \"human cooperation explosion\" that makes our own social behavior particularly puzzling from an evolutionary perspective.

The authors attempt to determine the net effect of city size on quality of life by developing a welfare measure of urbanization. \"The estimation procedure suggested in the theoretical part of the paper (section II) is implemented in the empirical part (section III) using 1980 census data from the [U.S.] PUMS (Public Use Micro Data Sample). The results indicate there is no single optimal city size, but rather a worst city size, and about 90 percent of the U.S. population reside in cities smaller than worst city size. If quality of life is related to the degree of urbanization, then long-term trends in the locational distribution of the population should be accounted for in any welfare-oriented measure of national income. One application of our results is, as indicated, the derivation of a GNP welfare deflator reflecting changes in the degree of urbanization (section IV). The findings suggest an urban deflator on the order of six to seven percentage points, which is steadily increasing at a rate of about half a percentage point per decade.\"

The quantitative effects and even the existence of a \"human capital depreciation\" phenomenon have been a subject of controversy in the recent literature. Prior work, however, was largely cross-sectional and the longitudinal dimension, if any, was retrospective. Using longitudinal panel data (on married women in NLS) we have now established that real wages at reentry are, indeed, lower than at the point of labor force withdrawal, and the decline in wages is greater, the longer the interruption. Another striking finding is a relatively rapid growth in wages after the return to work. This rapid growth appears to reflect the restoration (or \"repair\") of previously eroded human capital. The phenomenon of \"depreciation\" and \"restoration\" is also visible in data for immigrants to the United States. However, while immigrants eventually catch up with and often surpass natives, returnees from the non-market do not fully restore their earnings potential.

The first appearance of manufactured stone tools in widespread systematic human use, about 2 million years ago, in combination with other evidence (e.g., food sharing), suggests the possibility that some form of exchange, however primitive, was already practiced by traders with brains half the size of a modern human being. If true, the implication is that exchange could have played an important facilitating role already in the first major economic transition in human (or protohuman) history – the transition from the feed-as-you-go strategy of primate feeding to hunting-gathering. The discussion in this chapter will consider these possibilities in light of the available paleoarcheological data, starting with a preliminary review of the physical environment.The physical environmentThe single most important factor that describes the theater of events in evolution, certainly in human evolution, is climate. The global climate in which civilization flourished is the wrong environmental model for understanding human evolution not only throughout the long ice ages (nearly 90% of the time humans walk the earth) but, in all likelihood, also in the course of the short spikes of interglacial periods (the remaining 10%). The climate observed today and enjoyed by (anatomically) modern people over the past 10,000 years is a placidly warmand, arguably, all too brief interval in a long process of falling temperatures starting about 3.2 million years ago (and greatly intensifying roughly 2.4 million years ago and then again about 900,000 years ago).