Links this week: Robert Kurzban reports on a very cool dictator game experiment. Do people only give money in experimental conditions? Nicholas Gruen digs up a nice Alfred Marshall quote. Peter Turchin calls on cultural group selection to explain the transition to farming. Or maybe it’s because “people like to own stuff”. A take-down of the paper suggesting the Victorians were smarter than us.

If nothing else, David Sloan Wilson is ambitious. He’s been pushing the multilevel selection wheelbarrow with not much support for close to forty years (although support seems to be growing in some circles). And over the last couple of years, he’s been increasingly promoting the idea of a evolution-centred “science of intentional change” that will allow us to change our behavioural and cultural practices. And as a simple step on the way there, all we have to do is conceptually unify the behavioural sciences.

From Neil Niman’s article Sexual Selection and Economic Positioning: If economic agents earn the market clearing wage or the normal rate of return, it becomes difficult for an individual to stand out relative to one’s peers. Yet it is the ability to distinguish one’s prosperity and prospects that lead to reproductive success—a level of success that ultimately determines which genes are passed along from generation to generation. Thus, if the economic agent is to maximize the probability for survival of the gene through time, it cannot be a passive ‘price taker,’ but rather must be an active seeker of relative success.

Were the Victorian’s cleverer than us? Patrick Rabbit pulls it apart. Kevin Mitchell has a shot at the new eugenics. Razib responds. Read the comments on both. Peter Singer critiques conspicuous consumption. The example is similar to one Robert Frank uses in Luxury Fever, but I still like it. Gender identity and relative income within households (pdf). I haven’t read it yet, but some interesting results.

Links this week: Marshall Sahlins says goodbye to the NAS. A review of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday that is well worth reading (HT for these first two links: Andrew Badenoch) Dan Dennet and memes.

Some of the reviews of Michael Chwe’s Jane Austen, Game Theorist suggest that it is worth a read (such as Diane Coyle ). One idea in the book that I like the sound of is “cluelessness”. From Jennifer Schuessler in the NYT: Most game theory, he noted, treats players as equally “rational” parties sitting across a chessboard. But many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with unequal levels of strategic thinking.

Imagine two populations of asexually reproducing people (asexual reproduction is where each child comes from a single parent, not a couple). In the first population, each person has a 50 per cent chance of having no children, and a 50 per cent chance of having two children. If there is no relationship between the outcomes for each person (i.e. they face idiosyncratic risk) and the population is large, we would expect the population to remain relatively constant over time.

Links this week: 1. [Gender language and economic power - another economic paper with a spurious correlation](http://www.replicatedtypo.com/gender-language-and-economic-power-another-spurious-correlation/6227.html)? 2. [Culture and economic development](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/can-culture-predict-economic-development.html). 3. [We haven't yet reached our satiation point](http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/04/subjective%20well%20being%20income/subjective%20well%20being%20income.pdf). [A summary](http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/04/subjective-well-being-income). 4. It's been a few weeks since the last, but here's [another Chagnon versus the anthropologists article](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/05/napoleon_chagnon_controversy_anthropologists_battle_over_the_nature_of_fierceness.single.html). 5. [How many priming studies are safe to cite](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=disputed-results-a-fresh-blow-for-social-psychology)?

Carl Zimmer writes about a new paper in Trends in Genetics where the authors argue that natural selection during pregnancy is an important driver of recent evolutionary changes: Women nourish their fetuses by raising the level of sugar in their blood. That’s a dangerous game, because it threatens to throw off their own delicate balance between sugar and insulin. If that balance gets out of whack, women may suffer gestational diabetes.

A couple of months ago I linked to a piece by Ronald Coase about the state of economics. Coase wrote: Economics as currently presented in textbooks and taught in the classroom does not have much to do with business management, and still less with entrepreneurship. The degree to which economics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate. As readers of this blog would know, most of what I read and write is relatively isolated from ordinary business life.