Promiscuity goes with Inbreeding

"Researchers from the U.K. set out to test this idea, and the results were pretty conclusive. Red flour beetles were mated sibling-to-sibling for fifteen generations, effectively creating a “genetic bottleneck,” before being compared to their non-inbred (i.e., outbred) counterparts. Inbred and outbred females were offered 10 virgin males to mate with (insert joke I don’t have the guts to make), and the inbred females were more promiscuous by all measures:"

Read the whole blog here: http://trynerdy.com/?p=1177

The evolution of overconfidence (abstract)

The evolution of overconfidence

Dominic D. P. Johnson & James H. Fowler

Nature 477,317–320(15 September 2011)

Abstract

Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health to sports, business and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence—believing you are better than you are in reality—is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success. However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here we present an evolutionary model showing that, counterintuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition. In contrast, unbiased strategies are only stable under limited conditions. The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars.

AIDS Vaccine

from http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2011/3303085.htm

 Dr David Cook, who is the Executive Vice President of IAVI, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, interviewed by Norman Swan:

David Cook: We have and in fact the early promise that people were making that a vaccine would come in three years, it's obviously now 30 years since the epidemic. I think though that the last 2 years have seen progress unlike the last 20 and we now have evidence that a vaccine can actually work in humans. We've had some recent early breakthroughs in vaccine design and so I think the betting crowd would say in the next 10 to the outside 15 years we'll have a vaccine.
...
Norman Swan: So what's the bill for developing an HIV vaccine over the next 10 years?
David Cook: Currently we spend about $850 million globally, that's all the agencies.
Norman Swan: A year?
David Cook: A year, so it's a substantial bill but if you compare that to the actual cost of treatment, the projected cost of treatment by the year 2032 or so is in the order of $30 to $35 billion per year and that bill doesn't go away because you're treating people with lifetime infections. If you believe that you can get to a vaccine in the next 10 years at $800 million a year it turns out it's a relative bargain for all the infections you can avoid.

30E9 / 800E6 = 37.5 

Essentialism and Evolution

Bloom’s idea is that we are all essentialists. That is, we pay special attention to the history of an object – where it has been, what it has touched, and who has touched it. As Bloom explains, we subscribe to “the notion that things have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly and it is this hidden nature that really matters.” And, moreover, “the pleasure we get from many things and activities is based in part on what we see as their essences.”

Why are we essentialists?

McNerney: Is there an evolutionary advantage of being an essentialist?
Bloom: I think the case is most obviously made about other people. If I want to safely interact with you, I must be cautious of your history. For example, it is advantageous for me to know how you’ve treated me in the past, who your friends are, who you know and what you know. There is a long list of things that are invisible but are part of you, and they could be important for, say, my survival.

McNerney: So you could say that when we assess others we look at them physically, but we also examine their “resumes,” if you will.
Bloom: Exactly, that’s right. And the same is true with animals. You want to know more than just the physical – the history is important too. For example, is it dangerous? Does it tend to move quickly? Likewise for food, you want to know its history and what it has touched before you eat it.

McNerney: So evolution did not favor people who weren’t able to think as essentialists?
Bloom: Yes, think about what a disadvantage it would be if you only assess things as they are. Here’s the interesting part, you could argue that humans have taken it too far. We are so caught up in history that we collect irrelevant things. We care about the difference between an original and a forgery.

[from http://whywereason.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/the-psychology-of-pleasure-interview-with-paul-bloom/]

The Jolly Captain of Fate

Itzhak Fried, Roy Mukamel and Gabriel Kreiman have extended earlier work of Freid et al into the relationship between intention and consciousness:

Some researchers have literally gone deeper into the brain. One of those is Itzhak Fried, a neuroscientist and surgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Tel Aviv Medical Center in Israel. He studied individuals with electrodes implanted in their brains as part of a surgical procedure to treat epilepsy4. Recording from single neurons in this way gives scientists a much more precise picture of brain activity than fMRI or EEG. Fried's experiments showed that there was activity in individual neurons of particular brain areas about a second and a half before the subject made a conscious decision to press a button. With about 700 milliseconds to go, the researchers could predict the timing of that decision with more than 80% accuracy. "At some point, things that are predetermined are admitted into consciousness," says Fried. The conscious will might be added on to a decision at a later stage, he suggests.

http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273%2810%2901082-2?script=true

The psychology of dealing with things going wrong

Over the weekend I auditioned for a pantomime, and narrowly missed out on the role of the pantomime dame. Unfortunately, a friend of mine got another lead role, leading to more jealousy than I am comfortable with, and my thoughts have gone to the psychology of dealing with things going wrong: something we all have to be familiar with in the course of our careers when we fail to get a promotion, or are beaten onto a good project by someone else.

According to Zuckerman (1979) we take credit for our successes but deny blame for our failures. I’ve certainly been doing that today – I have preferred to blame the heat of the rehearsal room, when in fact in all likelihood I just wasn’t right for the role. This is the same reason we attribute luck to someone else beating us.

There is a huge amount of fascinating reading out there about how we cope with failures, and one of the areas I find particularly interesting is the effect of self-esteem. People with high self-esteem will follow the pattern above.

Conversely, people with low self-esteem will typically enter a cycle of self-blame, reinforcement and repetition. The phrase “I must have done something wrong” comes into their heads.

In real life, of course, we don’t have “high” or “low” self-esteem, we sit somewhere on a spectrum. And there are advantages to different positions – lower self-esteem will at least open ones eyes to the opportunity of learning from mistakes (and as an introvert with not especially high or low self-esteem, I self-reflect regularly) while higher self-esteem leads us to taking care of ourselves better (see Harris and Napper, 2005).

http://www.setsights.co.uk/2011/09/11/i%E2%80%99m-good-you%E2%80%99re-lucky/