Videos of the presentations at the Biological Basis of Preferences and Behaviour conference have been put online. Many are worth watching. I hope to write more detailed posts about a few of the presentations soon, but the three presentations I got the most out of were: “Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers” by Coren Apicella. Presentations such as this always remind me that I should be reading far more work by anthropologists.

Technology wants increasing efficiency, opportunity, emergence, complexity, diversity, specialisation, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure and evolvability. As Kevin Kelly argues in What Technology Wants, these are the same things that life wants. Technology extends evolution’s four billion year path. Whether you buy Kelly’s central thesis or not (in general, I don’t) and if you ignore some of Kelly’s near-religious fervour (particularly in the opening and closing chapters), Kelly provides a strong argument that the growth in technology is primarily beneficial, with the major benefit being increased choice.

Over the last few months, I have heard the phrase “agriculture creates excess population” or other words to that effect from several sources. The latest is at Evolvify, where Andrew references Richard Manning and writes: Agriculture creates excess population. The argument that we need more agriculture to support higher population fails to recognize its inherently circular nature. While I have some sympathy to the argument about the destructiveness of agriculture for the ecosystems it supplants, I would prefer to frame the argument differently.

The Edge has put up video and transcript of a great interview with Joe Henrich (the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Evolution at UBC). The whole interview is worth watching or reading. A couple of the more interesting snippets are below. First, on the division of labour: One of the interesting things about the division of labor is that you're not going to specialize in a particular trade—maybe you make steel plows—unless you know that there are other people who are specializing in other kinds of trades which you need—say food or say materials for making housing, and you have to be confident that you can trade with them or exchange with them and get the other things you need.

Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor’s paper linking genetic diversity and economic development has been available as a working paper for a few years, but it has now found a home in the American Economic Review (the latest available version of the working paper that I am aware of is available here). Science has picked up on the forthcoming publication is its editor’s choice section (unfortunately gated without subscription). Science summarises the results as follows:

At the Consilience Conference earlier this year I bumped into evolutionary biologist Michael Rose, whose research interests include examining ageing through the lens of evolutionary theory. In our brief conversation, Rose mentioned that he had laid out much of his thinking on the topic in 55 Theses, where Rose describes how to use the insights of evolutionary biology to improve your health. Reading through the archives of the Social Evolution Forum over the weekend (worth adding to your feed), I came across a post by Peter Turchin recounting a conversation he had with Rose at the same conference.

The ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project is an international collaboration that intends “to build a comprehensive parts list of functional elements in the human genome, including elements that act at the protein and RNA levels, and regulatory elements that control cells and circumstances in which a gene is active.” The project has made a splash in the last couple of days with thepublication of thirty open access papers across Nature, Genome Research and Genome Biology describing some of the results.

Scientific American has an excellent podcast of an interview with James Flynn on his new book, Are We Getting Smarter? The podcast accompanies an article from the latest issue. Flynn makes some interesting points throughout the discussion, including the following thoughts on the interaction between the economy and IQ: One of the big surprises is that Scandinavia, the IQ gains tailed off towards the end of the last century and many of us thought and I had an open mind that that would mean that they would tail off in the rest of the developed world.

In an interesting paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, Nailya Ordabayeva and Pierre Chandon propose that conspicuous consumption may be higher in a more equal society as it provides an opportunity for a larger increase in relative rank. The benefits of conspicuous consumption are highest when everyone is similar as a small signal can allow someone to jump ahead of the greater number of people clustered in similar income groups.

The idea that modern sedentary lifestyles are leading to obesity has come under attack in a New York Times article in which Herman Pontzer writes about a recent PLoS ONE paper that he co-authored. Pontzer and his colleagues’ research showed that the number of calories burned in a typical day by a member of the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania, was indistinguishable from that burned by a typical adult from Europe or the United States.