Stone Age minds in internet time
The journalist Kenneth Miller has an article in the current Discover magazine on “How Our Ancient Brains Are Coping in the Age of Digital Distraction”. I mak...
The journalist Kenneth Miller has an article in the current Discover magazine on “How Our Ancient Brains Are Coping in the Age of Digital Distraction”. I mak...
From Ethan Siegel: I’m weirdly fascinated by the ghostly image of a human face that emerges after averaging dozens of inanimate objects: “Averaging Inanimate...
Today this story in ScienceNOW tumbled across my feed:
Daniel Lende has described some evolutionary and anthropological import of a recent paper in PNAS on game theory: “Prisoners Dilemma and the Evolution of Ine...
The Guardian has printed an excerpt of economics Nobelist Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The story addresses the question of why invest...
I’ve been reading the new paper, “Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology”, in PLoS Biology. The paper, by Johan Bolhuis and colleagues...
A Primate of Modern Aspect (“The sexuality wars, featuring apes”) writes about some of the reactions to the new book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of...
David Sloan Wilson has been posting a series on behavioral economics (“Economics and evolution as different paradigms”). This, broadly speaking, is based on ...
Michael Balter writes in Science about a meeting called “Culture Evolves”: “Probing Culture’s Secrets, From Capuchins to Children.”
Every so often I see the argument that psychological depression is common because it evolved for a purpose. Usually the idea is that depressive symptoms brin...
Will the swine flu lead to the next big evolutionary change for humans? No. But it has already begun to affect the way people interact with each other. I wan...
William Saletan reviews Robert Wright’s book, The Evolution of God, with some discussion of Nicholas Wade’s upcoming book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion E...
The Newsweek a couple of weeks ago had a long (7 pages in the magazine!) essay/article titled, “Don’t Blame the Caveman”. Writer Sharon Begley sets out the t...
For some reason, it’s “bash evolutionary psychology” week. First, Sharon Begley writes a 7-page essay in Newsweek, “Don’t Blame the Caveman.”, and now David ...
In the Science Times today, an essay by Marlene Zuk:
There’s no end of bunkum just-so stories about the evolution of human behaviors. Not saying they’re all bunkum, just that many are, particularly when they’re...
An interesting interview with Steven Pinker in the Guardian. Favorite quote:
This BBC story covers this paper (warning! PDF!) that found a correlation (r = 0.48) between attractiveness and estrogen level in women:
On the subject of objections to Buller's book, I should point out that Buller himself has a website where he has additional work and some responses to criti...
A reader forwarded me a reference to this website, which is a placeholder for present and future critiques to David Buller's book, Adapting Minds : Evolutio...
Chapter 5 of David Buller's Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature is mostly about the critique of studies that ...
Chapter 4 of David Buller's Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature is a critique of the concept of massive modul...
I'm reading through David Buller's Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. It's a back-burner read for me; I pic...
Jerry Fodor reviews David J. Buller's book, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature in last week's Times Literary ...