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Bioeconomics as a Subversive Science
From 'Tastes' and 'Preferences' to 'Adaptation' and 'Basic Needs'

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.
Institute for the Study of Complex Systems
119 Bryant Street, Suite 212
Palo Alto, CA 94301 USA

Phone: (650) 325-5717
Fax: (650) 325-3775
Email: pacorning@complexsystems.org

Prepared for the Annual Meeting,
Western Economics Association International
San Francisco, CA, July 1996

"A good economist...is someone who has a difficulty for every solution."

Brian Loasby, Equilibrium and Evolution

"Anyone whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory."

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

In its original coinage, "bioeconomics" referred to the study of how organisms of all kinds earn their living in "nature's economy," with particular emphasis on co-operative interactions and the progressive elaboration of the division of labor (see Hermann Reinheimer, Evolution by Co-operation: A Study in Bioeconomics, 1913). Today the term is used in various ways, from Georgescu-Roegen's thermodynamic analyses to the work in ecological economics on the problems of fisheries management. Another alternative is a paradigm that would resonate with Reinheimer's original conceptualization of bioeconomics as a science that is focussed on the fundamental problem shared by all living species, namely survival and reproduction. The key concept in a modernized bioeconomic paradigm sensu Reinheimer is "adaptation" -- the strategies and tactics that an organism (or various functionally-organized groupings of organisms) utilize to meet its/their basic biological "needs." The phenomenon of adaptation is already widely studied (albeit imperfectly) in the life sciences, most notably in ecology (especially behavioral ecology and socioecology), as well as in ethology, sociobiology and selected social science disciplines, ranging from physical, ecological and economic anthropology to human ecology. Thus, the exclusion of the concept of adaptation from mainstream economics may seem to be anachronistic, except for the fact that it challenges some of the most fundamental (and sacred) assumptions and axioms of the dismal science.

In this paper, it will be argued that "the usual suspects" (the traditional objections to a biological adaptation paradigm in economics) are no longer (indeed, never were) tenable and that an analytical framework based on the concept of "basic needs" can provide a complementary approach to conventional economic analyses (and to sociobiological, fitness-maximizing analyses, for that matter) -- one that may offer considerable heuristic and predictive power. The paper begins by elucidating the concept of adaptation and by asserting its continuing (indeed, inescapable) relevance to the behavior of homo oeconomicus in all known societies, not just "marginal" hunter-gatherers. It is argued that an economy is at heart a "survival enterprise," the basic purpose of which is "earning a living" (whatever may be our perceptions -- and the exceptions) and that both "competition" and "co-operation" represent subsidiary, contingent "survival strategies." From this perspective, bioeconomic evolution may be characterized as a consequential change in a society's (or a species') mode of adaptation -- ie., in the means of production of the requisites for biological survival and reproduction. It entails the differential selection of alternative adaptive modalities (instrumentalities of needs satisfaction).

One approach to operationalizing this paradigm, described in some detail in the author's 1983 book The Synergism Hypothesis and briefly summarized here, entails empirically-grounded measures of basic needs satisfaction in 14 different "primary needs" domains, along with an array of related, culturally-contingent "instrumental needs." Also briefly discussed is an effort to develop a summary "Personal Health Indicator" and a global "Population Health Indicator" as measuring rods that could be utilized to evaluate the outcomes of economic activities from a bioeconomic perspective -- both at the personal and societal (micro and macro) levels. It is concluded that, although there is much room for improvement, this preliminary formulation does represent a beginning toward measuring human adaptation in a concrete way. Finally, the potential predictive power of a bioeconomics framework in relation to economic behavior and choice-making (ie., the causal dynamics of the "black box") is also briefly discussed.

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