Charles Elworthy | |
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 Elworthy in 2010 | |
| Born | Charles Herbert Elworthy 5 November 1961 Timaru, New Zealand |
| Died | 8 June 2023 (aged 61) Oxford, Oxfordshire, England |
| Spouse | Sununtha Vaidyanuvatti |
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| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Free University of Berlin |
| Thesis | Homo biologicus: an evolutionary model for the human sciences (1991) |
Charles Herbert Elworthy (5 November 1961 – 8 June 2023) was a New Zealand economist and social scientist.
Elworthy was born in Timaru on 5 November 1961, one of four children of Fiona Elizabeth Elworthy (née McHardy) and Peter Herbert Elworthy. [1] [2]
Elworthy was a visiting business fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and the head of research at the Map of Agriculture. He taught as a professor at Chulalongkorn University (Thailand) and the University of Szczecin (Poland), and was a privatdozent at the Free University of Berlin (Germany).
Elworthy's research approach was fundamentally shaped while at Cambridge through Douglass North’s supervisions on the New Institutional Economics. This was complemented by an introduction to alternative psychological models and their implications for political behaviour and international relations at Yale. These foundations were combined in his doctoral research on the evolutionary foundations of human behaviour and his later work on the interaction between governance structures and behaviour. [3]
In his dissertation, published in 1993 in Berlin, Elworthy created the model of Homo biologicus which explains human behaviour in terms of evolutionary theory and phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. [4] Homo biologicus is linked to, but extends, the economic Homo economicus model, which describes man as a rational and self-interested being. The core hypothesis is derived from evolutionary psychology, and proposes that human psychological processes were shaped by natural and sexual selection to solve evolutionarily relevant problems. Some of these relate to somatic effort, and are economic in nature, while others relate to reproductive and social behaviour which are inexplicable within a conventional Homo economicus paradigm. Elworthy's theory stands in the tradition of authors like E. O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins, who are controversial among social scientists and frequently criticised for their alleged biologism. In later academic work, Elworthy examines the interactions between social institutions and human psychology and the behaviour that results. His habilitation analyses constitutional developments in New Zealand, and their enabling role in the dramatic liberalisation from 1984 to 1993.
Elworthy's later research concentrated on the governance and usage of natural resources. Elworthy was involved in the creation a "Map of Agriculture", a GIS application which provides financial returns, production yields and environmental information about agriculture around the world. [5]
Following his experience at the COP15 Copenhagen climate conference, [6] Elworthy established the Bhuu organisation as an example of ecological entrepreneurship. The objective was to develop simple devices that transmitted environmental measurements to a central database via the internet. The intention was that the data could then be visualised and analysed and made available to both the original collectors and the general public. The Bhuu initiative itself was overtaken by other technologies, but the intention of providing better economic and environmental information to enable better decision-making remained part of Elworthy's objectives.[ citation needed ]
Elworthy was the director of the European Academy charitable organisation in Schloss Wartin. Along with his colleague Hans-Joachim Mengel, he restored the manor house in the Uckermark village of Wartin . The Collegium Wartinum Foundation supports the preservation of this manor house and its use as a cultural, artistic, and scientific centre in the Uckermark. [7]
Elworthy died at a hospice in Oxford, England, on 8 June 2023, at the age of 61. [8]
Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behaviour of non-human animals. It has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and the Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the three winners of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology combines laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology.
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.
The term Homo economicus, or economic man, is the portrayal of humans as agents who are consistently rational and narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively defined ends optimally. It is a wordplay on Homo sapiens, used in some economic theories and in pedagogy.
Evolutionary economics is a school of economic thought that is inspired by evolutionary biology. Although not defined by a strict set of principles and uniting various approaches, it treats economic development as a process rather than an equilibrium and emphasizes change, innovation, complex interdependencies, self-evolving systems, and limited rationality as the drivers of economic evolution. The support for the evolutionary approach to economics in recent decades seems to have initially emerged as a criticism of the mainstream neoclassical economics, but by the beginning of the 21st century it had become part of the economic mainstream itself.
Edward John Mostyn Bowlby, CBE, FBA, FRCP, FRCPsych was a British psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development and for his pioneering work in attachment theory. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bowlby as the 49th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
A psychological adaptation is a functional, cognitive or behavioral trait that benefits an organism in its environment. Psychological adaptations fall under the scope of evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs), however, EPMs refer to a less restricted set. Psychological adaptations include only the functional traits that increase the fitness of an organism, while EPMs refer to any psychological mechanism that developed through the processes of evolution. These additional EPMs are the by-product traits of a species’ evolutionary development, as well as the vestigial traits that no longer benefit the species’ fitness. It can be difficult to tell whether a trait is vestigial or not, so some literature is more lenient and refers to vestigial traits as adaptations, even though they may no longer have adaptive functionality. For example, xenophobic attitudes and behaviors, some have claimed, appear to have certain EPM influences relating to disease aversion, however, in many environments these behaviors will have a detrimental effect on a person's fitness. The principles of psychological adaptation rely on Darwin's theory of evolution and are important to the fields of evolutionary psychology, biology, and cognitive science.
Cultural learning is the way a group of people or animals within a society or culture tend to learn and pass on information. Learning styles can be greatly influenced by how a culture socializes with its children and young people. Cross-cultural research in the past fifty years has primarily focused on differences between Eastern and Western cultures. Some scholars believe that cultural learning differences may be responses to the physical environment in the areas in which a culture was initially founded. These environmental differences include climate, migration patterns, war, agricultural suitability, and endemic pathogens. Cultural evolution, upon which cultural learning is built, is believed to be a product of only the past 10,000 years and to hold little connection to genetics.
Cultural selection theory is the study of cultural change modelled on theories of evolutionary biology. Cultural selection theory has so far never been a separate discipline. However it has been proposed that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and "the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution". In addition to Darwin's work the term historically covers a diverse range of theories from both the sciences and the humanities including those of Lamark, politics and economics e.g. Bagehot, anthropology e.g. Edward B. Tylor, literature e.g. Ferdinand Brunetière, evolutionary ethics e.g. Leslie Stephen, sociology e.g. Albert Keller, anthropology e.g. Bronislaw Malinowski, Biosciences e.g. Alex Mesoudi, geography e.g. Richard Ormrod, sociobiology and biodiversity e.g. E.O. Wilson, computer programming e.g. Richard Brodie, and other fields e.g. Neoevolutionism, and Evolutionary archaeology.
Julius Duboc was a German author and philosopher.
Tinbergen's four questions, named after 20th century biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, are complementary categories of explanations for animal behaviour. These are also commonly referred to as levels of analysis. It suggests that an integrative understanding of behaviour must include ultimate (evolutionary) explanations, in particular:
Evolutionary psychology seeks to identify and understand human psychological traits that have evolved in much the same way as biological traits, through adaptation to environmental cues. Furthermore, it tends toward viewing the vast majority of psychological traits, certainly the most important ones, as the result of past adaptions, which has generated significant controversy and criticism from competing fields. These criticisms include disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, cognitive assumptions such as massive modularity, vagueness stemming from assumptions about the environment that leads to evolutionary adaptation, the importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues in the field itself.
Geisteswissenschaften is a set of human sciences such as philosophy, history, philology, musicology, linguistics, theater studies, literary studies, media studies, religious studies and sometimes even jurisprudence, that are traditional in German universities. Most of its subject matter would come under Humanities in the typical English-speaking university.
Michael Terrence McGuire was an American psychiatrist who made contributions to the theory of psychoanalysis, biological psychiatry, evolutionary biology, sociobiology and the theory and practice of psychiatry.
Homo reciprocans, or reciprocating human, is the concept in some economic theories of humans as cooperative actors who are motivated by improving their environment through positive reciprocity or negative reciprocity, even in situations without foreseeable benefit for themselves.
The history of evolutionary psychology began with Charles Darwin, who said that humans have social instincts that evolved by natural selection. Darwin's work inspired later psychologists such as William James and Sigmund Freud but for most of the 20th century psychologists focused more on behaviorism and proximate explanations for human behavior. E. O. Wilson's landmark 1975 book, Sociobiology, synthesized recent theoretical advances in evolutionary theory to explain social behavior in animals, including humans. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby popularized the term "evolutionary psychology" in their 1992 book The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and The Generation of Culture. Like sociobiology before it, evolutionary psychology has been embroiled in controversy, but evolutionary psychologists see their field as gaining increased acceptance overall.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to social science:
The reasonable person model (RPM) is a psychological framework which argues that people are at their best when their informational needs are met. Positing that unreasonableness is not a human trait, but rather the result of environment, the RPM attempts to define the environments/actions that foster reasonableness, defining three key areas that assist with this: model building, being effective, and meaningful action.
Cultural group selection is an explanatory model within cultural evolution of how cultural traits evolve according to the competitive advantage they bestow upon a group. This multidisciplinary approach to the question of human culture engages research from the fields of anthropology, behavioural economics, evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, sociology, and psychology.
Gustav Ratzenhofer was an Austrian military officer, philosopher and sociologist. He also wrote under the pseudonym Gustav Renehr.
Economic ethics is the combination of economics and ethics that uses judgements from both disciplines to predict, analyze, and model economic phenomena.
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