Link: Current thinking on the evolutionary history of menopause
The evolutionary history of menopause in humans has been one of the longest-standing areas of research interest in life history evolution. One of the big ide...
The evolutionary history of menopause in humans has been one of the longest-standing areas of research interest in life history evolution. One of the big ide...
A nice article in Scientific American by Dana Smith looks at a new study of language development in the Tsimané people of Bolivia: “Parents in a Remote Amazo...
“Making a Mass Anti-Extinction Movement” in Pacific Standard covers some of the concerns that led a group of 49 biologists to pen an open letter calling for ...
I am not philosophically opposed to building a mathematical model of Neandertal populations. Some of my best work has involved mathematical model-building. M...
Stanley Garn, writing in “Culture and the direction of human evolution” (1963: 222):
Notable paper: Tamariz, Monica and Simon Kirby. 2015. Culture: Copying, Compression, and Conventionality. Cognitive Science 39:171-183. doi:10.1111/cogs.12144
The final paragraph of this new paper by Marco Peresani and colleagues Peresani:2013 lists all the essential details:
The Kavli Foundation sponsored an interesting conversation among four scientists about whether mathematical concepts are natural or inventions of humans: “Wh...
I’ve been meaning for awhile to link Daniel Lende’s thoughtful post on how cultural neuroscience relates to anthropology: “Advances in cultural neuroscience”...
From Clifford Geertz’ 1965 essay, “The impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man” Geertz:1965:
From Edward Sapir’s response to Alfred Kroeber’s 1917 essay on “The Superorganic” Sapir:superorganic:1917:
Bronislaw Malinowski, in his 1936 article, “Culture as a determinant of behavior” Malinowski:determinant:1936:
The Guardian has a dialogue between David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis in which the two authors debate the importance of culture as a constraint on behavior. ...
I’ve just bought a new book by Mark Pagel, titled Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind. I’ll be doing a review when I get through it, but in t...
An important difference among some primate species is their ability to get foods that are hidden or protected by natural defenses. A little cleverness may yi...
I just finished listening to your lectures of rise of humans and it was thoroughly a very nice and complete coverage of recent understandings of this matter....
From the Guardian: “Google creates a tool to probe ‘genome’ of English words for cultural trends”.
Re: australopithecine tools:
Razib Khan: “Linguistic diversity = poverty.”
Michael Balter writes in Science about a meeting called “Culture Evolves”: “Probing Culture’s Secrets, From Capuchins to Children.”
John Tierney riffs on a short review paper by William McGrew, a brief tour of chimpanzee technology. In a pool of academese, he finds a salacious bubble:
New Scientist is running a gallery of orangutans interacting in water. These are orphaned orangutans that were relocated to an island and have since been obs...
An article about classical composer David Cope and the AI programs he wrote to make original music. It’s not new news, but a nice profile with many “what doe...
Razib lists a taxonomy of culture-gene historical scenarios. Real worked examples for several of these would be worthwhile.
Current Biology has a Q and A with orangutan researcher Anne Russon. It’s a good discussion to freshen one’s knowledge of orangutan behavior. Here’s an inter...
Claude Lévi-Strauss has died, and the obituary tells me this:
A nice story about Crickette Sanz’ and David Morgan’s work with chimpanzees of the Goualango Triangle, and the tools they use to forage for army ants:
One step closer to Ewoks:
Wired’s science blog has a piece on cetacean culture and communciation: “Whales might be as much like people as apes are”. Dalhousie University researcher Ha...
I’ve had this paper about “adoption speed” and cultural tastes on my desktop for more than a month, meaning to write something about it. Here’s the abstract:
Fig. 20 from Darwin 1872. "Terror"
If you’re looking for a way to waste your time today, you might check out The Economist’s online debate, which focuses on the question of whether the world i...
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long article about the tentative pairing of genetics and sociology. The occasion for the article is a recent issue of...
Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd are well-known for their studies of processes of culture change. They apply principles from biological evolution to form hypo...
This is a complicated story with many interlocking parts. Telling the whole story may well take me fifty posts. There’s a lot of new science hiding in here w...
In last week’s Science, Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues describe the relation of cultural invention to “universal intuition” about mathematical logic:
The June Scientific American (no link available) has an article on page 32 about the “therapeutic value of blogging.” That’s some relief, after the stories a...
I'm doing some research for an essay, which relies quite a bit on the work of Dobzhansky and a few of his contemporaries. There are some great quotes that I...
Current Biology is running an interview with biologist and Mutants author Armand Leroi. I found this part interesting:
Ann Gibbons reports on the upcoming article in Current Biology:
Here's a LiveScience story by Heather Whipps, about the discovery of chimpanzee nutcracking stones dating back to 4300 years ago:
The NY Times writer Benedict Carey has an interesting short article about research into repressed memories. There is a group of researchers who claim that t...
It's not here, but at Brainethics, where Martin Skov has written up a short intro to the evolution of aesthetics with a booklist from the recent literature....
Victoria Horner and colleagues (2006) set up two "diffusion chains" of chimpanzees, to see if a learned task could be transmitted faithfully from one chimp ...
A recent paper in Cognitive Science by Nuñez and Sweetster has evoked several interesting strains of blog commentary. The paper is about the cognitio...
An accessible story by Bjorn Carey discusses the paper by Mulcahy and Call, titled "Apes save tools for future use." From the story:
In another post I discussed a paper by Dominique Lestel concerning animal cultures. Lestel closes with this sentiment:
Nutcracking by capuchin monkeys has become the best non-hominoid example of tool use, and serves as a marker of the potential for anthropoids to develop and...
I have been reading an interesting article from 2002 by Dominique Lestel, considering the definition of culture and its applicability to animals. The focus ...
An interesting story from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (via Science Blog) about the information content of whale song. They don't know what the whales ar...
There's lots of news this week from the AAAS meetings. One story reports on behavioral variations among zoo gorillas:
George Will's Newsweek column is about football this week -- specifically a discussion of changes in the sport since the days of the late "Bear" Bryant.
Carl Zimmer has an article in Forbes covering recent experiments in chimpanzee vocal communication.
Reuters is reporting on a current study by Joan Silk and colleagues in Nature.
On the heels of last month's paper on walking-stick use in gorillas, the AP reports on nutcracking by a juvenile gorilla at the Dian Fossey sanctuary in Con...
A paper by A. Terracciano and a raft of coauthors in Science has this abstract:
On the subject of ape tool use, Andrew Whiten and colleagues have an interesting experiment in Nature this week (9/29/05).
A short paper in PLoS Biology by Thomas Breuer and colleagues describes the first two observed instances of tool use in wild gorillas. Reuters has reported ...
Modularity is a property of biological organization: organisms are composed of subunits that perform different functions. At the cellular level, the cell is...
A paper by Hannah Faye Chua and colleagues of the University of Michigan asserts that there are significant differences between Chinese and American graduat...
A new paper by Michael Krützen and colleagues (2005) presents evidence for extractive foraging in bottlenose dolphins. Evidently some individuals break...
A new article in the New York Times discusses an upcoming paper by Elizabeth Lonsdorf and colleagues in Animal Behavior that examines the way that Gombe chi...
This post in progress...