I’m not sure how much drive-by traffic gnxp is continuing to receive, but figured it worthwhile to post a note about my latest working paper, which explores whether male signalling may have a role in driving economic progress. The abstract: Sexual Selection, Conspicuous Consumption and Economic Growth The evolution by sexual selection of the male […]

*This is a cross post from Evolving Economics. Evidence from twin studies implies that economic and political traits have a significant heritable component. That is, some of the variation between people is attributable to genetic variation. Despite this, there has been a failure to demonstrate that the heritability can be attributed to specific genes. Candidate […]

I have added a new page over at Evolving Economics with a suggested reading list for those interested in the intersection of economics and evolutionary biology. The list is here. The list is a work is progress, and I plan to update it as new sources emerge or are suggested (or when I realise what […]

A cross post from Evolving Economics: The heritability straw man has copped another bashing, this time in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. In it, Charles Manski picks up an old line of argument by Goldberger from 1979 and argues that heritability research is uninformative for the analysis of policy. Manski starts by arguing that heritability estimates are […]

*A cross-post from Evolving Economics There is another interesting topic in this month’s Cato Unbound, with Michael Shermer arguing in the lead essay that human nature is best represented by the libertarian political philosophy. Shermer (rightly) spends most of the essay shooting down the blank slate vision of humans that underpins many policies on the […]

**This is a cross-post from my blog Evolving Economics 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. […]

**This is a cross-post from my blog Evolving Economics As I have focussed my PhD research on the link between evolution and long-term economic growth, for months I have meant to blog on the core paper in this area, Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth by Oded Galor and Omer Moav. I have […]

Bryan Caplan has a simple recommendation. Have more kids. If you have one, have another. If you have two, consider three or four. As Caplan spells out in his book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, children have higher private benefits than most people think. Research shows that parents can take it easy, as there […]

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 […]

As I noted in my recent post on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Gladwell ignored the possibility that traits with a genetic component, other than IQ, might play a role in determining success. His approach reminded me of a useful paper by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis from 2002 on the inheritance of inequality. Bowles and Gintis […]

It is a bit over a year since Geoffrey Miller wrote this piece foreshadowing a crisis in conscience by human geneticists that would become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis had two parts: that new findings in genetics would reveal less than hoped about disease and that they would reveal more than feared about genetic […]

The History and Geography of Human Genes has probably influenced the way I think about human evolution more than any other book. Even though it is getting old at a time when masses of population genetic data are being accumulated, a flip through the maps depicting the geographic distribution of genes provides a picture that […]