----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]