Again, closer to a month of links: A great set of essays triggered by David Dobbs’s assault on the selfish gene. Tim Harford on big data. His piece on behavioural economics is also worth reading. Take the hype with a grain of salt. The Greg Clark show continues - an interview on Social Science bites and a presentation at the RSA. A good long-read on de-extinction.

More like a month of links, but here goes: We’re going to be hearing a lot about Greg Clark’s new book on social mobility - The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Clark gives a synopsis in the NYT. In short, Clark and his colleagues estimate “that 50 to 60 percent of variation in overall status is determined by your lineage.” Kolk and colleagues present a paper in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B presents a model in which intergenerational fertility correlations drive a long-term fertility increase.

Links this week: Matt Ridley on inequality. Inequality and assortative mating. The sloth’s algae farm. The work of Suzanne Scotchmer (also here). And last, the Volcom Pipe Pro is consistently the best contest each year outside the World Tour. This year’s final day highlights:

Over the past year I have posted several times about the Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference, which was held in Sydney this week. It turned out to be a great conference, and I am very pleased with how it panned out. The conference has increased my optimism about the potential for more work to be carried out at the inter-disciplinary boundaries between economics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology and so on.

Links this week: Greg Clark on long-term social mobility. Cameron Murray on his reading list - Tribes, Gods, Indeterminancy, Property, Capitalism Assortative mating drives income inequality. The behavioural science of sleep. The Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference kicks off today. Rob Brooks posts.

Links this week: Robert Shiller on the rationality debate. More macro wars. “Adam” wasn’t necessarily human. Eric Crampton on free-range kids. And finally, one of my favourite surf clips from last year - I’d love to see someone paddling this wave: [vimeo http://vimeo.com/73838157]

Links this week: A cool idea - people who are genealogical ancestors of everyone alive but genetic ancestors of none (HT: Joe Pickrell). Philip Ball on how the apparently irrational can be rational. John Kay on the economic approach - there is no such thing. Genetically modified chickens. The annual Edge question is out, this time “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?

In my last post, I discussed the framework for cultural evolution laid out by Claire El Mouden and colleagues in a new article in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (ungated pdf and supporting information). By setting out clear definitions for the analysis of cultural evolution, such as cultural relatedness and fitness, a workable framework using evolutionary biology’s Price equation can be developed. As I noted in that post, it is when the biological and genetic frameworks are laid on top of each other, as is the focus of the dual-inheritance literature, that things get interesting.

A sojourn into the literature on cultural evolution can be confusing. Authors use the same terms in different ways. Unique models are used to reach opposite conclusions. And each author seems to find their own way to intertwine genetic evolution into the analysis. In that light, a new article in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (ungated pdf and supporting information) by Claire El Mouden and friends seeks to nail down some of the concepts of cultural evolution and to set up a general framework (thank you!

Links this week: Robert Kurzban wonders why priming works. A disturbing way of maximising fitness. A fertility clinic worker may be the father of a lot of children. Some chaff in with the wheat, but this article on Social Darwinism reports some interesting research. The Santa Fe Institute’s MOOC Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos has kicked off. A new paper in JEBO.