Steve Hsu has pointed out an interesting old interview with Noam Chomsky. Hsu highlights Chomsky’s views on the limits of human intelligence. It was possible in the late nineteenth century for an intelligent person of much leisure and wealth to be about as much at home as he wanted to be in the arts and sciences. But forty years later that goal had become hopeless. ... I think it has happened in physics and mathematics, for example.

Sarah Hill has posted at Scientific American on a new paper (pdf) that she (and colleagues) has written on the lipstick effect. The lipstick effect is a phenomena where sales of beauty products increase in times of recession, in contrast to the reduction in purchases for most other goods. The authors suggest that this reflects the desire of women to reproduce more quickly, and competition between women for access to the relatively scarcer resource-rich men.

An article by Bentley and colleagues published in PNAS last month points to some very early evidence of persistent inequality. The study headline is the uncovering of the earliest (statistically significant) evidence of status and wealth differences among the first farmers of Neolithic Europe and the existence of a patrilocal kinship system. However, the analysis also suggests that the healthiest farmers when young were also the richest when buried. Early advantage persisted until death.

Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg have put out a nice review article on long-term economic growth and the intergenerational transmission of development. Below are some of the more interesting parts. They note two important papers (which I intend to write more detailed posts about at some stage) by Louis Putterman and David Weil, and by Comin, Easterly and Gong. They write: [Putterman and Weil] examine explicitly whether it is the historical legacy of geographic locations or the historical legacy of the populations currently inhabiting these locations that matters more for contemporary outcomes.

I was surprised at the easy run that group selection has recently had in social science circles, so I am pleased to see that Steven Pinker has waded into the fray with an essay in Edge. Pinker’s whole essay is worth a read, but there were a couple of parts of it that I particularly liked. The first was Pinker’s highlighting that when many social scientists talk of group selection, they are talking of cultural group selection.

Near the close of his acceptance speech for the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Julian Simon Memorial Award, Matt Ridley suggests that the total number of people is not the major driver of technological progress: [W]hat counts is not how many people there are but how well they are communicating. ... [I]t’s trade and exchange that breeds innovation, through the meeting and mating of ideas. That the lonely inspired genius is a myth, promulgated by Nobel prizes and the patent system.

A new NBER paper by Bill Easterly and Ross Levine proposes that a large proportion of global development is attributable to European settlement, even where Europeans formed a small minority of the population. The abstract: A large literature suggests that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes. This literature has had a serious gap: no direct measure of colonial European settlement. In this paper, we (1) construct a new database on the European share of the population during the early stages of colonization and (2) examine its impact on the level of economic development today.

Carole Jahme at the Guardian reports on Richard Dawkins’s proposition that evolutionary science will be the new “classics”: He explained that whereas classicists have traditionally been assumed to be the scholars most able to branch into any area of research, today – with advances in evolutionary study – it will be those with scholarship in evolutionary science who will supersede classicists in depth, breadth and usefulness. Dawkins sees his new polymathic course at the New College of the Humanities as part of this trend:

Project Syndicate has published one of the last pieces by Elinor Ostrom, in which she gives her views on the upcoming Rio+20 summit. The article reflects Ostrom’s wariness of blanket, top-down solutions: Inaction in Rio would be disastrous, but a single international agreement would be a grave mistake. We cannot rely on singular global policies to solve the problem of managing our common resources: the oceans, atmosphere, forests, waterways, and rich diversity of life that combine to create the right conditions for life, including seven billion humans, to thrive.

Below are three passages that capture a small part of the evolutionary flavour of the now late Elinor Ostrom’s work. From David Sloan Wilson: Lin’s work was like a breath of fresh air compared to the forbidding world of neoclassical economics, which was top-heavy with theory and required assumptions about human preferences and abilities that were manifestly unrealistic. In contrast, Lin’s work was empirically well grounded and her eight design principles were highly congruent with the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and the biocultural evolution of our own species.