Paul Frijters has written an interesting review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow over at Club Troppo. In the review, Frijters suggests that Kahneman’s main contribution to economics is keeping economists honest: In terms of the whole rationality debate, the main contribution that Kahneman makes with this book, and that he in my opinion has made throughout his career, is to keep economists honest. ... Kahneman’s value derives from the great temptation amongst economists, particularly those of a strong theoretical bent, to fall in love with their abstractions and to pretend they are accurate descriptions of how things really work.

Peter Turchin, advocate of Cliodynamics, has posted on his recent success in adopting the “paleo diet”. The diet is based on the food presumably eaten by our evolutionary ancestors in the Paleolithic era, which is before the dawn of agriculture. Lots of meat, fruit, vegetables and nuts, but no grains. Although I have much sympathy for the paleo diet for its health benefits (its largely how I eat), I’ve always thought the paleo label was not quite right.

From a working paper by Garett Jones released earlier this year: Social science research has shown that intelligence is positively correlated with patience and frugality, while growth theory predicts that more patient countries will save more. This implies that if nations differ in national average IQ, countries with higher average cognitive skills will tend to hold a greater share of the world’s tradable assets. I provide empirical evidence that in today’s world, countries whose residents currently have the highest average IQs have higher savings rates, higher ratios of net foreign assets to GDP, and higher ratios of U.

As noted by Steve Hsu and Razib Khan, a new paper in Nature Genetics reports evidence of recent selection on existing variation in height in European populations. The paper’s authors summarise as follows: In summary, we have provided an empirical example of widespread weak selection on standing variation. We observed genetic differences using multiple populations from across Europe, thereby showing that the adult height differences across populations of European descent are not due entirely to environmental differences but rather are, at least partly, genetic differences arising from selection.

From Mark Pagel, author of Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind, in a RSA podcast: Cultural evolution and genetic evolution are still going on. We’re still evolving. Our societies are strongly selecting against violence and antisocial behaviour at a genetic level. People who knock you over the head and steal your wallet get thrown in jail, and it’s hard to have reproductive success in jail. And some societies even kill people who do those things, and so we are still selecting against antisocial behaviour very strongly in our societies.

A new paper in PNAS suggests that the similarity between European and Neanderthal genomes is due to population structure in Africa (500,000 odd years ago), not recent interbreeding (50,000 odd years ago). It has been getting a decent bashing, much of it before it was even released. The problem is that the model underlying the theory does not match recent data, which has overtaken the model since the idea behind it was first conceived.

In a 1945 paper, George Stigler, the 1982 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, examined what would be the cheapest way in which a 154 pound man could meet his National Research Council recommended dietary requirements of 3000 calories a day, including 70 grams of protein and a range of other vitamins and minerals. Using 1939 prices, Stigler found that an annual diet consisting of 370 pounds of wheat flour, 57 cans of evaporated milk, 111 pounds of cabbage, 23 pounds of spinach and 285 pounds of navy beans would meet the requirements.

Around ten years ago, I was rummaging through books in a bargain bookshop under Sydney’s Central Station when I came across a $2 copy of Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind. It turned out to be a good use of my $2, as The Mating Mind is one of the most important books in shaping my thinking, and it was one of the first books I put on my economics and evolutionary biology reading list.

At the Consilience Conference earlier this year, I saw Peter Turchin’s presentation on cliodynamics - the mathematical modelling of historical dynamics. I was relatively sceptical of what I saw, and a new Nature news piece by Laura Spinney on Turchin’s work captures some of this scepticism. Spinney describes cliodynamics as follows: In their analysis of long-term social trends, advocates of cliodynamics focus on four main variables: population numbers, social structure, state strength and political instability.

In my recent review of Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail, I asked if Ormerod’s comparison between the extinction of species and the death of firms was the right analogy. One reason for my question was that species are typically defined due to their reproductive isolation, preventing gene transfer between species. In contrast, the unit of selection for firms, business plan modules (the name used by Eric Beinhocker), can spread freely spread between firms.