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The handicap principle is associated with the biologist Amotz Zahavi ( *The 
Handicap Principle: A Missing piece of Darwin's Puzzle*, Oxford University 
Press, 1997.) Geoffrey Miller's *The Mating Mind* (Doubleday, 2000) is a 
wonderful account of sexual selection in general, including Zahavi's work. 
He specifically cites Veblen  as an important influence for the obvious 
outlines of a theory of wasteful costly signalling in The Theory of The 
Leisure Class.  The ability to waste resources, in TLC, is a costly, 
difficult to fake, signal of status or prowess. Of course Veblen wasn't 
doing biology, but Miller thought Veblen was also important in 
understanding -- long before modern developments in the theory of sexual 
selection (Darwin's long-ignored theory) made it obvious-- that 
evolutionary fitness was quite compatible with huge amounts of waste, that 
fitness-promoting adaptations often reduce survival value, that 
non-instrumental (for survival purposes) adaptations (such as, for Miller, 
Art, Science,  Ethics and a Big Brain!) were not at all incompatible with 
the evolutionary process. I don't have the quote at my fingertips, but 
Veblen once said that the lesson of evolution is  that "everything that 
exists, is wrong." I wish  some of our sillier pop-evolutionists, such as 
Wilson and Pinker, would go read him! It wouldn't be the first time (see 
Malthus to Darwin) that economic thinking influenced biology. 
 
Kevin Quinn 
 
 
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