How Fatty Foods Curb Hunger:

Fatty foods may not be the healthiest diet choice, but those rich in unsaturated fats - such as avocados, nuts and olive oil - have been found to play a pivotal role in sending this important message to your brain: stop eating, you're full.

The broad point is probably known to you, but read the whole press release, as there's more biochemical detail....

There's a new paper out which models human behavioral ecology, Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution. Anthropology.net has a good review, so I'll just point you there. I was going to read this paper, and a few others on models of human group dynamics...but lately, I've been wondering, aren't there enough models now??? It seems like there is a large sample space of models which can generate a set of testable predictions. Perhaps it is time to catch up on data and experiment and hold off on more model generation? I'll probably keep reading these papers...but of late I've started to get the feeling that without more data the task of understanding human behavioral history is Sisyphean.

The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality:

We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational concerns are heightened. Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior among anonymous strangers. Experiments demonstrate an association between apparent profession of religious devotion and greater trust. Cross-cultural evidence suggests an association between the cultural presence of morally concerned deities and large group size in humans. We synthesize converging evidence from various fields for religious prosociality, address its specific boundary conditions, and point to unresolved questions and novel predictions.

Ron Bailey at Reason has an article up, Does Religion Make People Nicer?, which ruminates on the implications of the above paper. He concludes:

Yesterday I attempted to rebut Steve Jones' ridiculous contention that evolution is going to stop in the modern West. Sometimes it is difficult to really know when to start, especially when your interlocutor seems to be in "incoherent spray arguments mode." Some of the commenters also noticed the internal lack of consistency in the model which Jones was putting forward. But saying it is a model is being overly generous. In short, Jones' most solid (that is, least vague) claim is that reduction in the number new mutations being added to the population every generation is decreasing because men are having children at younger ages, on average, than in the past. Why focus on men? I noted the evidence that new mutations are about an order of magnitude more common in sperm than in ova; the reason being that sperm is produced in massive quantities through serial replication which introduces more error into the transmission process cumulatively. Of course I have to add that Jones' argument here is weak because the extant historical and anthropological does not support his contention.

Part of the problem here is that Jones is good at throwing out buzzwords and sound bites. After all, most people "know" that evolution is about "survival of the fittest" and that nature is red in tooth and claw. Therefore, it naturally stands to reason that when mortality declines evolution will be a weaker force. I think the problem here is that our conception of evolution is focused too greatly on proximate modes and large scale dynamics. That is, selective high mortality rates are a "common sense" way in which the "weak" can be weeded out from the "strong." But what about the extremely high human spontaneous abortion rates? Evolutionary biologist Mark Ridley has argued that increased miscarriage rates will "balance" out the fact that more individuals with deleterious mutations are reproducing today than in the past. Selection therefore occurs in utero; we don't observe it so it is not salient to us. But it is selection nonetheless.