Charles Elworthy (scientist) - Academic Work

Academic Work

Elworthy teaches as a professor at Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), the University of Szczecin (Poland), and as 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.

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. 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 criticized for their alleged biologism.`

In his later work Elworthy examines on 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 of 1984-1993. His most recent research focuses on the global governance of energy and climate change.