As I indicated in my recent post on Rob Brooks’s Sex, Genes and Rock ’n’ Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World, Brooks devotes some time to the issue of obesity. Rob has also blogged about obesity and published a paper with Steve Simpson and David Raubenheimer on it (although the book covers more ground). First, why is obesity an evolutionary problem? In his book, Brooks set out why:

I’ve just read Geoffrey Miller’s Spent, which I enjoyed. There are many interesting threads to the book, which I’ll blog about over the coming weeks. In one of the earlier chapters, Miller discusses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy, from the base to the top, consists of physiological, safety, love, esteem and self-actualisation needs. It is only on satisfaction of the first four needs that one will focus on self actualisation, which includes (among other things) morality, creativity and discovery.

Australian evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks’s book Sex, Genes & Rock ’n’ Roll: How evolution has shaped the modern world has been released. It’s a good read - accessible and amusing. The books ranges between more serious issues such as obesity, population control and infanticide to the more light-hearted, the exploration of rock ’n’ roll that the book title foreshadows. It is a book I’ll be adding to my list of recommendations for those who ask why evolution is relevant today.

In my previous two posts, I described the model contained in Galor and Moav’s paper Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth and an extension in which we introduced genotypes with a low preference for educating their children. Having been through the process of parametrising and simulating a complex economic model, I would recommend it as a method of increasing understanding of the basic model mechanics. More importantly, it can also highlight issues that are not clear from the mathematical consideration that is traditionally given to models.

In my last post, I discussed Oded Galor and Omer Moav’s paper Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth. As I noted then, my PhD supervisors, Juerg Weber and Boris Baer, and I have written a discussion paper that describes a simulation of the model. In the discussion paper we discuss an extension of the model in which we consider the entry of people into the population that have a low preference for child quality - i.

Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth by Oded Galor and Omer Moav is somewhat of an outlier. I’m not aware of any other paper that models the Industrial Revolution as a result of natural selection, apart from a similar paper by Galor and Michalopoulos. Zak and Park wrote a paper that examines population genetics and economic growth but they do not directly tackle the Industrial Revolution. In A Farewell to Alms, Greg Clark notes that Galor and Moav’s paper reignited his interest in this topic, but Clark does not model his hypothesis.

I have just started reading Geoffrey Miller’s Spent. It opens with a mildly amusing faux discussion in which a modern person seeks to convince some Cro-Magnons of the benefits of the modern way of life. The modern person is unable to do so as the discussion focuses on how the modern way of life does not increase the ability to attract and hold a mate (as opposed to, say, the rate of child mortality).

Over the weekend I read Diane Coyle’s The Economics of Enough. I particularly enjoyed her dismantling of the concept that to increase happiness we should forget about growth. My reading list on this area has increased considerably - and it seems that I should place Amartya Sen high on that list. Coyle writes: Those researchers like Richard Layard and Robert Frank who believe the link between growth and happiness tails off to nothing above a certain income level argue for taxes to make people stop working so hard or spend less on various consumer goods.

Recently, I was asked whether the idea that I was espousing - considering human evolution in economics - was dangerous. For a perspective on debating dangerous ideas, it was suggested that it was worthwhile reading Steven Pinker’s introduction to the book What is Your Dangerous Idea? (HT Erik Postma). Pinker argues both for and against treating some ideas as dangerous and possibly limiting their discussion. In addition to the usual arguments such as sunlight being the best disinfectant and that people will twist the debates to suit their own purposes, Pinker made some interesting observations.

In all the debates about human biases, I like to believe that there is some benefit to being right. There must be some evolutionary benefit to knowing the true state of the world (on average). That is not to say that the benefits will always outweigh the costs, as the aim is to reproduce. Attracting a mate or surviving within a group may require holding some beliefs, such as religion. However, knowing that the snake will kill you will have fitness benefits.