At the beginning of a lecture by Robert Trivers at the London School of Economics on his book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Helena Cronin notes the absence of a Nobel prize in biology. The closest substitute, the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, is awarded once every four years, with the winner chosen by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Academy also participates in deciding the Nobel prizes for Chemistry and Physics and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

In Freeman Dyson’s interesting review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Dyson describes a couple of examples of the biases identified by Kahneman. One of them is as follows: The endowment effect is our tendency to value an object more highly when we own it than when someone else owns it. ... In poor agrarian societies, such as Ireland in the nineteenth century or much of Africa today, the endowment effect works for evil because it perpetuates poverty.

As for last year, this year’s top book list comprises the best books I have read this year. I haven’t read enough books published in 2011 to be able to apply a decent filter, plus there are many books out there that we should not forget. In no particular order: Flatland: a romance of many dimensions by Edwin Abbott - Clever, fun satire Sex, Genes & Rock ‘N’ Roll: How Evolution has Shaped the Modern World by Rob Brooks - While the book is generally a fun read, it makes this list for two specific parts: the discussions of sexual conflict in the context of population and on obesity (my discussion of the obesity chapter).

Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil focuses on a message that the situation is more important than the person’s disposition. Good people can do evil things if placed in the wrong situation. One of my main responses to this message was that the disposition of other people forms part of my situation. Disposition and situation cannot be neatly disentangled. This is similar to the case of IQ and income.

The situation is more important than a person’s disposition. This message permeates through Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, and while I disagree with some of the implications that he draws from this message, Zimbardo’s case is compelling. Zimbardo builds the book on the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most cited psychological experiments. Zimbardo and his colleagues selected a group of “psychologically normal” young men and randomly assigned them roles as guards and prisoners in a role-play that they would conduct in the basement at Stanford University.

From 100 years ago, Scientific American calls for more research into human evolution: Mendelian principles have no doubt long been followed by professional animal breeders in an empirical way, but only within recent years have enough data been accumulated to show that they apply with equal force to human beings. We know enough about the laws of heredity, we have enough statistics from insane asylums and prisons, we have enough genealogies, to show that, although we may not be able directly to improve the human race as we improve the breed of guinea pigs, rabbits or cows, because of the rebellious spirit of mankind, yet the time has come when the lawmaker should join hands with the scientist, and at least check the propagation of the unfit.

The Journal of Economic Perspectives has an excellent article by Beauchamp and colleagues titled Molecular Genetics and Economics (ungated pdf here). It is a nice contrast to another article in the same issue, Charles Manski’s bashing of the heritability straw man. The authors argue that “genoeconomics”, the use of molecular genetics in economics, has the potential to supplement traditional behavioural genetic studies and build an understanding of the biology underlying economically relevant traits.

The heritability straw man has copped another bashing, this time in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. In it, Charles Manski picks up an old line of argument by Goldberger from 1979 and argues that heritability research is uninformative for the analysis of policy. Manski starts by arguing that heritability estimates are based on the assumption that there is no gene-environment correlation. Manski writes: The assumption that g and e are uncorrelated is at odds with the reasonable conjecture that persons who inherit relatively strong genetic endowments tend to grow up in families with more favorable environments for child development.

In Benoit Debreuil’s Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies, the opening chapter contains the interesting argument that egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were not built on a wish for equality. Dubreuil writes: Egalitarian social arrangements must build on what Boehm (1999: 66) called an “egalitarian ethos,” which is culturally constructed and transmitted and does not straightforwardly result from our passion for equality. This does not mean that equality does not matter per se.

I missed it when it first went up, but over at The Crux, Discover’s new group blog, Razib Khan has pointed to a couple of interesting papers on the heritability of fertility. As natural selection acts strongly on fertility and the traits that affect it, you might expect that the heritability of fertility would be low as variation is eliminated. But change the environment, and heritability can increase drastically. Razib writes: