Links this week: Hodgson and Knudsen have set up a reading group for their book Darwin’s Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution. Chapter one has already kicked off. Another from The Umlaut - Conspicuous Frugality. Flip-flopping selection pressure in a modern population. Following from my post on Douglas Kenrick and colleagues’ theory of Deep Rationality, below are a couple of short videos - one on How Mating and Self-Protection Motives Alter Loss Aversion, and the other on the upcoming book The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think by Kenrick and Vlad Griskevicius, which also looks like it covers similar territory.

I have posted before about Gary Becker’s argument that the evolution of altruism can be explained by a version of his rotten kid theorem. In short, if an altruist cares about other people’s welfare in addition to their own and is willing to transfer their resources to others, an egoist’s action to harm the altruist may also harm the egoist as the amount that the altruist would be willing to transfer to the egoist will be reduced.

Even though I consider that I am across the literature at the boundary of economics and evolutionary biology, now and then an article pops up that I somehow missed. The latest article of this type is a 2009 article by Douglas Kenrick and colleagues, titled (as is this post) Deep Rationality: The Evolutionary Economics of Decision Making. I found it through Dan Ariely’s reading list for his Coursera course A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behaviour.

Links this week: From The Umlaut (worth adding to your feed) - Why Choosing to Make Less Money Is Easier Than Ever. The return of conspicuous leisure? A new book Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology, and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics may be worth a look (HT: Diane Coyle). Should human genes be patented? I wonder how much of this debate will be surpassed by technological progress.

One of the few areas where there is active research on the link between evolutionary biology and economics is the evolution of economic preferences (some papers in this area are in my economics and evolutionary biology reading list). Economic preferences are the way an actor will rank a set of choices based on characteristics such as the amount received, the probability of certain outcomes, and the timing with which the outcomes are received.

John Brockman has wheeled out another good bunch of experts for the newest Edge question “What’s the question about your field that you dread being asked?” One response by Richard Thaler is particularly interesting, who fears being asked “When will there be a single unified ‘behavioral’ theory of economic activity?” For those who know Thaler’s work in behavioural economics, his reason might be surprising: If you want a single, unified theory of economic behavior we already have the best one available, the selfish, rational agent model.

Links this week: E.O. Wilson’s argument that great scientists don’t need math has already received plenty of responses. Wilson’s argument reminded me of one of Paul Krugman’s critiques of Stephen Jay Gould’s popular work, which were “literary confection” as they lacked math. A free webinar with Geoffrey Miller and others on What Every Marketer Should Know About the Nonconscious. Diane Coyle posts on a paper by Sergio Da Silva in which he argues that “economics fails to ground itself in the underlying knowledge provided by biology”.

Since the time of Darwin, the same evolutionary psychology debates have played out over and over. Here is Ronald A. Fisher in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), addressing the type of argument that you can still hear today about the evolution of the human mind: [I]t is often felt to be derogatory to human nature, and especially to such attributes as man most highly values — as if I had said that the human brain was not more important than the trunk of an elephant, or as if I had said that it ought not to be more important to us, if only we were as rational as we should be.

When we experience positive events, we feel happy. But happiness adjusts, with the effects of a positive event normally short-lived. Over the long-term, happiness tends to float around a stable mean. Happiness is also strongly related to our position relative to our peers. How happy we are with our income depends on everyone else’s income. In line with the first law of behavioural genetics, it is worth looking for an evolutionary foundation to this pattern.

Links this week: There are plenty of good looking MOOCs popping up. John Hawks has announced his MOOC Human Evolution: Past and Future, starting early 2014. Dan Ariely’s behavioural economics course kicked off a couple of weeks ago, and this course on social and economic networks by Matthew Jackson looks worth a look. I seem to be adopting a speed learning strategy for MOOCs - wait until all the material is up and then binge.