Rob Brooks has posted an article (also published in The Conversation) outlining his argument that the relatively cheap price of carbohydrates compared to the price of protein is driving the obesity crisis. Drawing on material from his book Sex, Genes and Rock ’n’ Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World, Rob argues that as our recent evolutionary history involved a diet of lean meat and high fibre plant foods, modern humans are poorly evolved for the cheap simple carbohydrates that dominate many modern diets.

I have started reading Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order and am enjoying his starting point of human prehistory. I will write a full review when I have finished, but in the meantime, some of Fukuyama’s initial observations are worth noting. In particular, he takes biology to be the foundation of our understanding of political development. To understand this, then, we need to go back to the state of nature and to human biology, which in some sense sets the framework for the whole of human politics.

Nigel Barber of The Daily Beast (Psychology Today) has posted on a forthcoming article in which he shows that the level of atheism increases with the quality of life. Barber explains the trend as follows: The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms. First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people's daily lives and hence less of a market for religion.

Another piece from the vault, this time A Farewell to Alms author Gregory Clark in an interview with Phillip Adams: Jared Diamond in his famous text actually has has a throw away reference to this, where he speculates that New Guinea tribesmen are actually much smarter than Europeans because New Guinea tribesmen live by their wits, whereas Europeans it was their gut bacteria that determined whether they survived or not. And I actually knew that cities in Europe had very poor survival rates, that that's where the educated people were, and I expected going into this to show that we were all, the current Europeans, were the remnants of rural idiocy.

The June edition of the Asian Development Review has an article by Garett Jones titled National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia (pdf). The abstract is as follows: A recent line of research demonstrates that cognitive skills—intelligence quotient scores, math skills, and the like—have only a modest influence on individual wages, but are strongly correlated with national outcomes. Is this largely due to human capital spillovers? This paper argues that the answer is yes.

Yesterday I visited Down House, Charles Darwin’s home from 1842 until his death in 1882. Darwin wrote most of his major works there. The house contained a lot of interesting artefacts and bits of information, but one of the more interesting was a copy of Das Kapital sent from Karl Marx to Darwin. Inscribed inside the book was: Mr. Charles Darwin On the part of his sincere admirer Karl Marx London 16 June 1873 Modena Villas Maitland Park Seeing this, I did a quick search to find out the extent to which Marx was in contact with and influenced by Darwin (having not yet read Das Kapital) and it seems that there is a history of storytelling and exaggeration around it.

As I’ve sat on trains and planes over the last week, I sorted through my article archives. Among them I found one by Michael Lewis from January 2007 lamenting the doom and gloom in Davos. In criticising the pessimism, Lewis writes: But the most striking thing about the growing derivatives markets is the stability that has come with them. More than eight years ago, after Long-Term Capital Management blew up and lost a few billion dollars, the Federal Reserve had to be wheeled in to save capitalism as we know it.

Paul Krugman’s oft-quoted critique of Stephen Jay Gould is one of the more brutal dismissals of his work (it is from a 1996 speech on what economists can learn from evolutionary theorists): Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is beloved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon.

David Sloan Wilson has just posted a five-part series on the importance of the evolutionary toolkit in the social sciences. I’ve found the series hard work, but in the fifth post Wilson has pointed to an interesting exchange in Edge between his cousin Timothy Wilson and Steven Pinker. Timothy Wilson starts with an examination of the state of social psychology, and then turns to the role that evolutionary psychology can play:

I’ve been waiting for someone to defend Stephen Jay Gould from the accusations contained in a recent paper by Lewis and Colleagues. In a nutshell, the authors found that in Gould’s analysis of skull measurements by Samuel Morton, “most of Gould’s criticisms are poorly supported or falsified.” I haven’t yet found that specific defence, but John Horgan in Scientific American has stepped in to defend Gould’s broader crusade against “biological determinism”.