Benoit Dubreuil’s Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies seeks to explain two historical transitions in social hierarchies in human (and pre-human) history. The first is the transition from dominance hierarchies, such as those lived in by our common ancestor with the chimpanzee, to egalitarian social relationships. The second is from those egalitarian relationships to the large-scale, state-based hierarchies we see today. The assumption as to the existence of the first transition is largely taken from the work of Christopher Boehm (Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior).

In an evolutionary sense, resource inequality affects survival and access to mates. While the current “Occupy” debates about growing inequality and the power of the 1 per cent are very much focused on the resource issue, the underlying reason people have an innate aversion to the unequal distribution of power (or, more particularly, their being at the wrong end of that distribution) comes back to these evolutionary factors. But to what extent are survival and reproduction actually affected by the inequality being protested?

I have finally finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, several months after my initial comments. Of the grand history books I have read this year (the others being Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules for Now and Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest), I found Fukuyama’s to be the most convincing. The focus on self-interest as a motivating factor of the individual actor, which is in turn underpinned by biological considerations, creates a more plausible story than one which talks of nations as actors.

From Charles Manski in the latest Journal of Economic Perspectives (pdf): Someone reading empirical research relating human genetics to personal outcomes must be careful to distinguish two types of work. An old literature on heritability attempts to decompose cross-sectional variation in observed outcomes into unobservable genetic and environmental components. A new literature measures specifific genes and uses them as observed covariates when predicting outcomes. I will discuss these two types of work in terms of how they may inform social policy.

Scott Haufman has written a post on the variation in IQ over a person’s life. He writes: In 1932, the entire population of Scottish 11-year-olds (87, 498 children) took an IQ test. Over 60 years later, psychologists Ian Deary and Lawrence Whalley tracked down about 500 of them and gave them the same test to take again. Turns out, the correlation was strikingly high – .66, to be exact. Those who were at the top of the pack at age 11 also tended to be at the top of the pack at age 80, and those who were at the bottom also tended to stay at the bottom.

Over at Wired, Jonah Lehrer has written a post in which he looks at a couple of lines of evidence about the innate response of humans to inequality. The first line, based on brain scans, is nicely discussed by Jeff at Cheap Talk. The second involves an experiment with capuchin monkeys: A similar lesson emerges from a classic experiment conducted by Franz de Waals and Sarah Brosnan. The primatologists trained brown capuchin monkeys to give them pebbles in exchange for cucumbers.

I have been trying to find an electronic version of Thomas Malthus’s second edition of his An Essay on the Principle of Population. The second edition is significantly expanded and revised from the first, while later editions through to the sixth in 1826 are essentially minor revisions of the second (the sixth part one and part two are here). While I have, to now, been unable to find the text of the second edition, the Wikipedia page for the book notes an interesting paragraph that was included in the second edition, but was omitted from later editions:

While IQ research seems to be be emerging from its taboo phase, Anneli Rufus has written an article in Alternet which asks why the study of human intelligence was off the agenda for so long. The analysis points to the usual suspects - the shadow of eugenics and racial research - but the article does have a couple of interesting quotes from Stephen Murdoch and Dennis Garlick. First, in much of the literature on IQ, the focus is on finding ‘g’, a single measure of general intelligence.

From the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Much research shows that people are loss averse, meaning that they weigh losses more heavily than gains. Drawing on an evolutionary perspective, we propose that although loss aversion might have been adaptive for solving challenges in the domain of self-protection, this may not be true for men in the domain of mating. Three experiments examine how loss aversion is influenced by mating and self-protection motives.

Frances Wooley writes: Economists' policy recommendations - our ideas about which policies enhance economic efficiency and which ones detract from efficiency - are all based on the idea that individuals know what's best for themselves. ... But if people’s demands are just a product of framing, salience, and the public prominence of hurty-elbow syndrome, how can we use them to infer the marginal benefits to consumers of consuming health care? How can we make statements like ’the marginal benefits of health care are less than the marginal costs’?