Flipping through Ronald Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection this morning, I was reminded of this quite stunning factoid from the 1912 Australian Census: The extraordinary variation in fertility in Man has been noticed in a somewhat different manner by Dr. D. Heron, using material provided by the deaths (30,285 males and 21,892 females) recorded in the Commonwealth of Australia for 1912. Heron finds that half of the total number of children come from families of 8 or more, which are supplied by only one-ninth of the men or one-seventh of the women of the previous generation.

First, from Rob Brooks: Lead author Moshe Hoffman and his collaborators compared two tribes living in north-east India. ... Karbi women may not own land, and property is passed from father to the oldest surviving son. But the Khasi ban men from owning land, and men are expected to hand their earnings over to their wives. The youngest daughter in a Khasi family traditionally inherits the land from her mother. …

There have been a few reviews of Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good recently, but John Whitfield’s in Slate is one of the more interesting. First, Whitfield picks on Frank’s choice of evolutionary metaphor: As a biological analogy, Frank suggests the difference between running speed and antler size. A faster gazelle is better equipped to outrun a cheetah, and so, he writes, "being faster conferred advantages for both the individual and the species.

In his new book, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, Robert Frank argues that within the next century, Charles Darwin will become known as the intellectual founder of economics, displacing Adam Smith from that role. Frank’s prediction rests on the contrasting perspectives on competition provided by the two. Smith had the counterintuitive insight that selfish actions could increase the common good, while Darwin recognised that competition could be wasteful as individuals compete for survival and mates.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor is one of the most powerful ideas in economics. Individual action, even in the pursuit of pure self-interest, can serve the interests of others. Charles Darwin’s evolution by natural selection is an even more powerful idea in the world of evolutionary biology. In Darwin’s world, individual actions can be at the expense of others, as competition for survival or mates can leave others out in the cold.

From an article by Gijsbert Stoet in the latest issue of Evolution and Human Behaviour: The hunter-gatherer theory of sex differences states that female cognition has evolutionarily adapted to gathering and male cognition to hunting. Existing studies corroborate that men excel in hunting-related skills, but there is only indirect support for women excelling in gathering tasks. This study tested if women would outperform men in laboratory-based computer tests of search and gathering skills.

A study by Berri and colleagues on quarterback performance and their attractiveness has gained some attention over the last couple of months: We show that attractiveness, as measured by facial symmetry, leads to greater rewards in professional sports. National Football League quarterbacks who are more attractive are paid greater salaries and this premium persists after controlling for player performance. This is relatively consistent with the picture painted in Dan Hamermesh’s Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful.

In a post earlier this month, Eric Johnson put together an interesting argument on the evolution of collective violence (I recommend reading his whole post). Johnson opens with some of the arguments that group violence is a consequence of our evolutionary history. One of this arguments is the called the Elaborated Social Identity Model of crowd behaviour: Each individual remains a rational actor, but has been primed by natural selection to identify with the group during a period of crisis.

Larry Arnhart’s recent post at Darwinian Conservatism makes a couple of interesting points on family values and classical liberalism. The piece is largely a response to Geoffrey Hodgson’s claim that a market individualist cannot support family values: “Generally, if contract and trade are always the best way of organising matters, then many functions that are traditionally organised in a different manner should become commercialized . . . Pushed to the limit, market individualism implies the commercialization of sex and the abolition of the family.

Ronald Bailey has written an article for Reason on Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher’s work linking disease and liberalisation. Bailey writes: Thornhill and Fincher argue that the risk of infectious disease affects elites’ willingness to share power and resources, the general social acceptance of hierarchical authority, and the population’s openness to innovation. Their central idea is that ethnocentrism and out-group avoidance function as a kind of behavioral immune system. Just as individuals have immune systems that fight pathogens, groups of people evolve with local parasites and develop some resistance to them.