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...
All posts tagged with culture
Link: Language development in the Tsimané
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...
Link: Biologists working for political initiative on anti-extinction
“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 ...
Culture, mathematical models, and Neandertal extinction
I am not philosophically opposed to building a mathematical model of Neandertal populations. Some of my best work has involved mathematical model-building. M...
Quote: Stanley Garn on the evolution of brain size
Stanley Garn, writing in “Culture and the direction of human evolution” (1963: 222):
Notable: Culture and compressibility
Notable paper: Tamariz, Monica and Simon Kirby. 2015. Culture: Copying, Compression, and Conventionality. Cognitive Science 39:171-183. doi:10.1111/cogs.12144
Neandertal painted shell pendant
The final paragraph of this new paper by Marco Peresani and colleagues Peresani:2013 lists all the essential details:
Mathematical thinking
The Kavli Foundation sponsored an interesting conversation among four scientists about whether mathematical concepts are natural or inventions of humans: “Wh...
Cultural neuroscience and pedigree-based neuroimaging
I’ve been meaning for awhile to link Daniel Lende’s thoughtful post on how cultural neuroscience relates to anthropology: “Advances in cultural neuroscience”...
Quote: Geertz on the variable
From Clifford Geertz’ 1965 essay, “The impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man” Geertz:1965:
Quote: Sapir on the slipshod
From Edward Sapir’s response to Alfred Kroeber’s 1917 essay on “The Superorganic” Sapir:superorganic:1917:
Quote: Malinowski's Metropolis
Bronislaw Malinowski, in his 1936 article, “Culture as a determinant of behavior” Malinowski:determinant:1936:
Culture in the brain
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. ...
Book sample: Mark Pagel's Wired for Culture
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...
Primate extractive foraging and tool use
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...
Mailbag: Cultural evolution
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....
Culturomics
From the Guardian: “Google creates a tool to probe ‘genome’ of English words for cultural trends”.
Mailbag: The capuchin australopithecines
Re: australopithecine tools:
Language loss
Razib Khan: “Linguistic diversity = poverty.”
Better than a finger in the eye
Michael Balter writes in Science about a meeting called “Culture Evolves”: “Probing Culture’s Secrets, From Capuchins to Children.”
Chimpanzee mating tools
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:
Swimming orangutans
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...
Computer composer
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...
SNPs and culture history
Razib lists a taxonomy of culture-gene historical scenarios. Real worked examples for several of these would be worthwhile.
Orangutan facts
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...
Levi-Strauss, RIP
Claude Lévi-Strauss has died, and the obituary tells me this:
Army ant chimpanzee toolkits
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:
Orangutan music
One step closer to Ewoks:
Whale societies
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...
Names, culture, and popularity
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:
Darwin smiling
Fig. 20 from Darwin 1872. "Terror"
A debate: information overload?
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...
"That kind of stuff goes over well in sociology"
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...
Migration and social change
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...
Cultural impedance, demographic growth, effective population size
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...
Numbers, Amazon-style
In last week’s Science, Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues describe the relation of cultural invention to “universal intuition” about mathematical logic:
Acceleration's discontents
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...
A view on human differences
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...
"Like Vikings in America"
Current Biology is running an interview with biologist and Mutants author Armand Leroi. I found this part interesting:
Chimp spear-hunting
Ann Gibbons reports on the upcoming article in Current Biology:
Chimpanzee archaeology
Here's a LiveScience story by Heather Whipps, about the discovery of chimpanzee nutcracking stones dating back to 4300 years ago:
Repressed memories in fact and fiction
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...
A quick primer on bioaesthetics
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....
The chimpanzee grapevine
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 ...
The past is before us, or behind, whatever
A recent paper in Cognitive Science by Nuñez and Sweetster has evoked several interesting strains of blog commentary. The paper is about the cognitio...
Ape tool curation skills
An accessible story by Bjorn Carey discusses the paper by Mulcahy and Call, titled "Apes save tools for future use." From the story:
Utopia wanted, animals optional
In another post I discussed a paper by Dominique Lestel concerning animal cultures. Lestel closes with this sentiment:
Learning from the best, monkeywise
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...
Animal cultures, communication, and signs
I have been reading an interesting article from 2002 by Dominique Lestel, considering the definition of culture and its applicability to animals. The focus ...
Complex structure of whale song
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...
Cultural gorillas
There's lots of news this week from the AAAS meetings. One story reports on behavioral variations among zoo gorillas:
Evolution of the offensive line
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.
Chimpanzee language antics
Carl Zimmer has an article in Forbes covering recent experiments in chimpanzee vocal communication.
Chimpanzee lets eight cousins drown
Reuters is reporting on a current study by Joan Silk and colleagues in Nature.
Itebero the nutcracking gorilla
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...
Personality and stereotypes
A paper by A. Terracciano and a raft of coauthors in Science has this abstract:
Messing with chimpanzee minds
On the subject of ape tool use, Andrew Whiten and colleagues have an interesting experiment in Nature this week (9/29/05).
Gorillas use tools too
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 ...
Why are organisms modular?
Modularity is a property of biological organization: organisms are composed of subunits that perform different functions. At the cellular level, the cell is...
Moving eyes, moving minds
A paper by Hannah Faye Chua and colleagues of the University of Michigan asserts that there are significant differences between Chinese and American graduat...
Dolphin sponge cultures
A new paper by Michael Krützen and colleagues (2005) presents evidence for extractive foraging in bottlenose dolphins. Evidently some individuals break...
Sex differences in chimpanzee learning
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...
Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine"
This post in progress...