After posting Friday’s piece on Hansson and Stuart’s paper on natural selection and savings, I realised I had not commented on one of the most important assumptions made by the authors. To get their result that people would save such that they maximise consumption across generations, Hansson and Stuart assumed that consumption corresponded with fitness (a relative measure of reproductive success). To maximise fitness, one would need to maximise consumption.

I am at the Social Decision Making: Bridging Economics and Biology conference (the abstracts of which can be downloaded here). As the name suggests, the basic idea behind the conference is to pull together economists and evolutionary biologists to develop new collaborations and examine how their respective approaches to social decision-making might be useful to each other. So far, the most surprising observation (to me) is how many of the evolutionary biologists are working in the behavioural economics area and conducting experiments with human subjects.

David Henderson has posted on a recent presentation by Garett Jones of George Mason University in which Jones discussed IQ and cooperation. As Jones notes, higher IQ people cooperate more in repeated prisoner’s dilemma games, are more trusting, have lower levels of divorce and engage more in activities such as voting and organ and cash donation. Jones suggests that if this link between trust and IQ improves a country’s institutions, countries should seek to raise national IQ, and one way of achieving this is by boosting immigration of high IQ populations.

This is my last post on David Sloan Wilson’s series Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms (my earlier three posts are here, here and here). While much of Wilson’s attack on economics is against a caricature of the discipline, he ties up his series with a few recommendations that are worth noting. One is the need for behavioural economics to adopt evolutionary thinking to allow it to move from being a list of anomalies and biases to a coherent framework.

Jonah Lehrer has expanded his recent focus on measurement and grit (on which I recently posted) in an article on the usefulness of the Wonderlic test, a quasi-IQ test, in predicting quarterback performance. Lehrer cites a paper by David Berri and Rob Simmons which suggests that some metrics, including the Wonderlic test, are influencing draft position even though they are not predictive of performance. Lehrer writes: While they found that Wonderlic scores play a large role in determining when QBs are selected in the draft – the only equally important variables are height and the 40-yard dash – the metric proved all but useless in predicting performance.

In David Sloan Wilson’s blog series Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms (which I have recently posted about here and here), Wilson discusses the invisible hand metaphor that is used in economics. The invisible hand metaphor comes from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and although the particular use of the invisible hand metaphor by Smith relates to preferring domestic to foreign industry, the metaphor has come to encapsulate this broader idea of Smith:

As indicated in my last post, between December 2009 and October 2010, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson wrote a series of posts titled Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms. Wilson’s basic line of reasoning is that evolutionary biology should play a larger role in economics, and I naturally agree with that position. For the foundation of his argument, the second post of Wilson’s series contains a reasonably typical attack on modern economics (I’ll accept this monolithic caricature for the moment).

In the first of a series of blog posts by David Sloan Wilson on economics and evolution (which I will blog about in the coming weeks as the posts contain some interesting ideas), Wilson introduced The Evolution Institute, a think tank that seeks to apply evolutionary theory to modern policy problems. I had not heard of the Institute before, but naturally I consider that integration of evolutionary thinking into any policy framework can bring value.

Following from my recent post on Scott Barry Kaufman’s heritability measurement nihilism, Jonah Lehrer has gone a step further and taken a swipe at measurement in general, and in particular, at short-term tests. Lehrer argues that: The larger lesson is that we've built our society around tests of performance that fail to predict what really matters: what happens once the test is over. I’m not averse to arguments that some people use measurements in inappropriate ways.

Like the level of selection debate, the debate about what heritability means has a life of its own. The latest shot comes from Scott Barry Kaufman who argues (among other things) that: The heritability of a trait can vary from 0.00 to 1.00, depending on the environments from which research participants are sampled. Because we know that genes play some role in the development of any trait, the precise heritability estimate doesn’t matter in a practical sense.