Every time a new Francis Galton piece is published, I look forward to the Galton trivia. This time it is in an article by Steve Jones (HT: John Hawks): He made statistical inquiries into the efficacy of prayer - he got into trouble for that for he found that those people frequently prayed for, like monarchs, lived no longer than anyone else. He even made a beauty map of Britain, based on a secret grading of the local women on a scale from attractive to repulsive (the low point was in Aberdeen).

In yesterday’s post on crime, I quoted David Eagleman’s statement that “we may someday find that many types of bad behaviour have a basic biological explanation—as has happened with schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, and mania.” What we now consider culpable behaviour may fall into the class of mental illness, with the criminal justice system adjusting its threshold so. This threshold issue extends beyond crime. Take IQ, which is highly heritable and correlates with income and most other life outcomes.

The July/August 2011 edition of the Atlantic has a great article by David Eagleman on the implications of advances in brain science on the way we approach crime (HT: Jeffrey Horn). Eagleman argues that these advances will require a reshaping of the criminal justice system to reflect the declining gap between whether actions can be attributed to biology and free will. Eagleman writes: Technology will continue to improve, and as we grow better at measuring problems in the brain, the fault line will drift into the territory of people we currently hold fully accountable for their crimes.

Niall Ferguson has a slight Malthusian thread running through his book, Civilization: The West and the Rest. At one point, Ferguson touches on the mass emigration from England to the Americas. Ferguson writes: [A]s England’s population accelerated in the late seventeenth century, overseas expansion played a vital role in propelling the country out of the Malthusian trap. Transatlantic trade brought an influx of new nutrients like potatoes and sugar – an acre of sugar cane yielded the same amount of energy as 12 acres of wheat – as well as plentiful cod and herring.

With the cover of Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest stating that it is “Now a Major Channel Four Series”, I should have foreseen the pace and structure of the book would be designed for entertainment and not presenting a painstakingly worked-through framework. Ferguson attributes the West’s ascension to six “killer apps”: competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society and work ethic. As the West possessed all six of these apps, it was able to dominate the world for 500 years, with no other region possessing the full combination.

Chris Mooney of The Intersection has posted on another article (with follow-up by Razib at Gene Expression) supporting the well-established finding that political views are heritable. The research found evidence for linkage between political beliefs and genes. Some of the discussion is interesting. How do genetic influences flow through to political beliefs, particularly when what we consider to be conservative or liberal varies through time? As Razib writes: The disposition toward conservatism and liberalism does not manifest in absolute tendencies, but attitudes and actions comprehensible only against a reference which allows for one’s own bias to come to the fore.

In Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (earlier posts on his book here, here and here - this is the last one for now), Miller discusses how there might be a move away from a consumerist culture. To do this, there is a need to develop and maintain social norms that could act as an alternative to the typical displays of wealth. For example, in a religious community, signalling could be through time and resources given to the church.

For most of Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, Miller treats the genetic influences on human preferences as relatively static over human history. However, in his discussion of the big-five personality trait of conscientiousness, Miller suggests that high conscientiousness was only selected for after the Neolithic Revolution: In several respects, conscientiousness is an unusual personality trait. Because hunter-gatherer life did not require as much planning and memory for debts and duties as life in larger-scale societies with more complex divisions of labor, conscientiousness may have evolved to higher average levels only recently, and perhaps to a greater degree in some populations than others.

Geoffrey Miller’s main thesis in Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior is that the conspicuous consumption we use to signal traits such as intelligence, agreeableness or conscientiousness is unnecessarily indirect. Instead, we should use our evolved abilities to show these characteristics through humour, communication and interaction with others. Miller summarises his position as follows: Consumerist capitalism is largely an exercise in gilding the lily. We take wondrously adaptive capacities for human self-display - language, intelligence, kindness, creativity, and beauty - and then forget how to use them in making friends, attracting mates, and gaining prestige.

Last week I came across a 2007 article by Niall Ferguson on increasing food prices and the potential for future shortages. Leaving aside Ferguson’s predictions of the return of Malthusian misery, he makes an important and often forgotten point about what Malthus described in his An Essay on the Principle of Population. Ferguson writes: Malthus concluded from this inexorable divergence between population and food supply that there must be "a strong and constantly operating check on population"