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...
All posts tagged with evolutionary psychology
Link: Ghostly face emerges from averaging photos of inanimate objects
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...
Evolutionary psychology and the hipster beard
Today this story in ScienceNOW tumbled across my feed:
A new approach to the Prisoner's Dilemma
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...
Leadership prediction and investment risk
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...
Adapting evolutionary psychology
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...
Mental mismatches
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...
Nowhere the rational man
David Sloan Wilson has been posting a series on behavioral economics (“Economics and evolution as different paradigms”). This, broadly speaking, is based on ...
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.”
Depression not adaptation
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...
Flu blues
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...
Religion and evolution book showdown
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...
What does acceleration mean for evolutionary psychology?
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...
"Our brains are fluid and plastic"
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 ...
"Paleofantasies"
In the Science Times today, an essay by Marlene Zuk:
Group celebrations: an "evolutionary urge"?
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...
Guardian interview with Steven Pinker
An interesting interview with Steven Pinker in the Guardian. Favorite quote:
Attractive women have high estrogen?
This BBC story covers this paper (warning! PDF!) that found a correlation (r = 0.48) between attractiveness and estrogen level in women:
Buller on Buller
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...
Evolutionary psychology responds to Buller
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...
Buller on mating preferences
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 ...
Buller on massive modularity
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...
Buller on mental adaptations
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...
Fodor on Buller's Adapting Minds
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 ...