Armin Schulz
University of Kansas, USA
Spring 2018
Evolving Economics—Promises and Challenges in Linking Evolutionary Biology and Economics

Armin Schulz is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas. In his research, he is primarily interested in finding out more about (a) how and when evolutionary theory can be used to illuminate issues that are not obviously evolutionary biological (especially ones in psychology, social science, and philosophy), and (b) how and when theories from psychology, social science, and philosophy can be used to illuminate evolutionary biological issues. He is the author of Efficient Cognition: The Evolution of Representational Decision Making (2018, MIT Press), over 20 published papers, over 50 research presentations, and a co-edited special section of the journal Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences C on the evolution of psychological altruism.

In Pittsburgh, Armin will be researching the methodology and substantive implications of “evolutionary economics”—the application of evolutionary biological insights to economic questions. To do this, he will develop an extended assessment of the plausibility of three representative examples of work in evolutionary economics: (1) the appeal to what we know about (a) non-human economic decision-making and (b) human evolutionary history to understand human economic decision-making, (2) the assessment of whether and when equilibrium modeling in economics is useful by appeal to whether and when equilibrium modeling is useful in evolutionary ecology, and (3) the possibility to advance the regulation and understanding of economic systemic risk by assessing the evolution and maintenance of transposons in an organism’s DNA. He is very much looking forward to talking with other members of the Center about these—and many other!—questions, and to exploring the many sides of Pittsburgh.