Humans are economic animals. Although textbooks often deal with a fictitious Homo economicus guided entirely by rational self-interest, all of us—even economists—know that passions, habits and emotions vie with reason in the daily decision making that keeps up the flow of services and goods. Yet every generation of economists has come to grips in different ways with what Adam Smith referred to as our "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange."
Attempts to integrate economic life into natural history are not new: Early in the 18th century, Bernard Mandeville published several editions of his Fable of the Bees, and in 1759, Adam Smith published his Theory of Moral Sentiments, well before inquiring into the "Wealth of Nations" in 1776. In the 19th century, both Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer tried to incorporate natural selection into their doctrines of social warfare. The transfer of ideas has not been one-sided: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were greatly influenced by Adam Smith and T. R. Malthus. In the 1960s and 1970s, sociobiologists such as E. O. Wilson and William D. Hamilton analyzed costs and benefits of behavioral traits in terms of reproductive success, and John Maynard Smith hijacked game theory, a tool from mathematical economy, to investigate the trial and error of mutation and selection in terms of evolutionarily stable strategies. In return, Maynard Smith's "game theory without rationality" greatly boosted experimental economics and in its newest form led to neuroeconomics, a field in which researchers use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify zones in the human brain specializing in emotional or rational decision making...more here
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