As my previous post said, I was at a conference (actually a work group meeting) in Barcelona for TECT. TECT is centred around the The Evolution of Cooperative Trade. The group of which I was de facto a part because of Sam Bowles is called SOCCOP, which is again to do with the evolution of social and cooperative norms.

Over the next while I'll be spending some time blogging about the papers presented. I don't have the expertise to comment rigorously on all the topics as it was an interdisciplinary meeting. I will inevitably have my 'economic hat' on during the analysis.

The papers I'll be talking about are all available here. Most likely I'll have the first one up some time later today and the rest as I manage to read them while studying. I read some before the conference and will dredge up my notes on them too. As a point of foreshadowing, the presentations I enjoyed the most were probably the following:
Douglas Yu on the evolution of mutualisms (ant-plant, wasp-fig tree, etc)
Sam Bowles and Sung-Ha Hwang on Social Preferences and Public Economics
Bob Rowthorn on Slow Learners and Conformism
Simon Gaechter and Benedikt Herrmann on Evolution of Cooperative Punishment

There were several others that were really good, but these appealed to me personally the most. I may spend more time on them than the others.