When measured against his fantastic The Company of Strangers, Paul Seabright’s new book The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present was always facing a tough task. The War of the Sexes contains some interesting insights, and it is accessible and easy to read. However, some parts of the book feel flat. Part of my reaction stems from the first half of the book, titled “Prehistory”, which contains little new for someone who is well-read in evolutionary biology.

From Jared Diamond’s review of Why Nations Fail: But it’s obvious that good institutions, and the wealth and power that they spawned, did not crop up randomly. For instance, all Western European countries ended up richer and with better institutions than any tropical African country. Big underlying differences led to this divergence of outcomes. Europe has had a long history (of up to nine thousand years) of agriculture based on the world’s most productive crops and domestic animals, both of which were domesticated in and introduced to Europe from the Fertile Crescent, the crescent-shaped region running from the Persian Gulf through southeastern Turkey to Upper Egypt.

There is an interesting podcast on Science Talk titled The Coming Entanglement, with Fred Guterl interviewing Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Danny Hillis. The basic argument by Joy and Hillis is that we are reaching a point where our systems are so entangled (most of the conversation is in terms of technical systems) that no one understands the whole thing. They suggest that we need to get over the fact that there is no expert who understands what is going on.

From an excellent article in Nature News by Ed Yong on problems with replication in psychology: One reason for the excess in positive results for psychology is an emphasis on “slightly freak-show-ish” results, says Chris Chambers, an experimental psychologist at Cardiff University, UK. “High-impact journals often regard psychology as a sort of parlour-trick area,” he says. Results need to be exciting, eye-catching, even implausible. Simmons says that the blame lies partly in the review process.

At the recent The Biological Basis of Preferences and Behaviour conference, Colin Camerer presented the results of a paper about work he and his co-authors had done on chimpanzees at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University. At the beginning of the presentation, Camerer showed a couple of videos of experiments dealing with the working memories of chimps. The videos show subjects undergoing a test in which they see five numbers briefly flash on a screen before the numbers are covered with white boxes.

Following the publication of two new articles in the Annual Review of Economics and PNAS (my summary here), genoeconomics has been getting some press. From the Boston Globe: But for all their throat-clearing and the cold water they feel compelled to throw on their work as they introduce it to the general public, they are confident that it’ll eventually be possible to match up patterns in a person’s genome with patterns of financial behavior.

Following the Consilience Conference and some suggestions for additions to my reading list, I have been convinced to read some more work by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson. I’ve started with The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. One quote in the introduction caught my eye: [A]cquiring adaptive information from others also opens a portal into people’s brains through which maladaptive ideas can enter—ideas whose content makes them more likely to spread, but do not increase the genetic fitness of their bearers.

Evidence from twin studies implies that economic and political traits have a significant heritable component. That is, some of the variation between people is attributable to genetic variation. Despite this, there has been a failure to demonstrate that the heritability can be attributed to specific genes. Candidate gene studies, in which a single gene (or SNP) is examined for its potential influence on a trait, have long failed to identify effects beyond a fraction of one per cent.

Over at Cheap Talk, Jeff Ely has posted on a presentation by Balazs Szentes at The Biological Basis of Preferences and Behavior conference. Ely writes: Balazs Szentes stole the show with a new theory of the peacock’s tail. ... Suppose female peacocks choose which type of male peacock to mate with: small or large tails. Once the females sort themselves across these two separate markets, the peacocks are matched and they mate.

The application of evolutionary biology to politics and policy spans the political spectrum. From Peter Singer’s A Darwinian Left to Larry Arnhart’s Darwinian Conservatism to Michael Shermer’s libertarianism, there is something in evolutionary biology for everyone. One of the best of of these applications is by Paul Rubin in Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom. While the arguments lead to conclusions that reflect Rubin’s political leanings, the book reads as though the evidence shapes the result and Rubin gives the evidence fair consideration.