Laurie Santos: A monkey economy as irrational as ours | Video on TED.com

Laurie Santos: A monkey economy as irrational as ours | Video on TED.com
Fascinating talk looking at financial behaviour by monkeys & how similar it is to humans (for example loss aversion).

You say you want evolution?

This essay argues for taking an evolutionary approach to, well, everything and has a pop at both neo-classical and behavioural economics in the process.

Ask Carole: an evolutionary agony aunt just for you

In some previous posts I offered some insights from psychology into affairs of the heart. Just trying to be helpful. Unbeknownst to me that fine newspaper The Guardian has a regular column by an evolutionary agony aunt using peer reviewed research to shed light on all sorts of relationship issues that I would blanche at discussing. She's the real deal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/series/ask-carole

Cute babies, anxious daddys, cheating moms

Investment? Under uncertainty? Thats economics isn't it? Well yes but we don't have a monopoly of the subject and evolutionary biologists have long been interested in parental investment in offspring. Economists could do with looking at some of this stuff. The uncertainty arises because males can't be sure the little one's are actually their offspring. Because some females, well, you know...
So whats a guy to do? Well one theory is that males use facial resemblance: if the baby looks like you (& not the legendary milkman) then the return to your investment, in the sense of passing your genes on, is higher. The paper below test this theory and related ideas.

Are parents' perceptions of offspring facial resemblance consistent with actual resemblance? Effects on parental investment. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31 (2010) 7–15, Alexandra Alvergne, Charlotte Faurie, Michel Raymond

Sympathy and similarity: The evolutionary dynamics of cooperation

If we are to cooperate with those who carry our genes how can we do this?
The answer from commentary this week in PNAS is that we need to have a system for tagging people:

"The first to investigate a tag for altruism was W. D. Hamilton (2). He conceived
what he called a supergene, able to produce (i) a distinctive phenotypic
trait, (ii) the faculty to recognize the trait in others, and (iii) the propensity to
direct benefits toward bearers of that trait, even though this entails a fitness cost."

One way to tag genetically related people to cooperate with is to judge how similar a person's face is to your own according to a study last year in 'Evolution and Human Behaviour'.