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Recent Major Posts
- Pratt Institute holds 124th Commencement, special gallery show
- Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
- Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
- My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
- Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
- Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
- Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
- Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
- Concept mapping as a creative tool
- Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
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Recent Minor Posts
- Useful guides for writing good pseudocode
- The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
- Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
- NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
- Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
- Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
- Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
- Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
- “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
- Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
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What I am reading now
Category Archives: Cultural Evolution
Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
The Cornell Daily Sun “Darwin Days Lecture: “Can Cooperation Evolve by Natural Selection?”“
Posted in A Minor Post, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Group Selection, Kin Selection
Tagged Allen MacNeill
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Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
arXiv “Self-Organization Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation with Cultural Propagation“
NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
National Public Radio Shots “Give And Take: How The Rule Of Reciprocation Binds Us” I appreciate the far-ranging nature of this piece, and how it applies a basic understanding of reciprocity to larger social phenomena. There is not much here … Continue reading
New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
The November 2012 issue of National Geographic features an interesting article entitles “Vikings and Native Americans” that suggests that Viking settlers and Native Americans enjoyed a cooperative relationship. Archaeological evidence suggests that Europeans were depicted positively in Native American artifacts, and the pattern of … Continue reading
Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
National Public Radio Shots “Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning” This piece went in a direction that I just did not expect. There is so much focus on the role of rote learning versus problem solving … Continue reading
Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
Physical Review E “Building cooperative networks“
Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
In an election season when global climate change has been a subject that neither Obama nor Romney seem interested in discussing (see reports by The New Yorker and The Huffington Post), along comes Hurricane Sandy. With the arrival of the … Continue reading
Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
Slate “The Russian Anarchist Prince Who Challenged Evolution” I really appreciate the fact that Dugatkin uses Kropotkin to bring to light that Darwinian evolution has been — even in the time and work of Darwin — a process that was … Continue reading
Can playing games make the world a better place?
One of the very talented students I work with in the Envirolutions club, Rhett Bradbury, pointed me towards the work of Jane McGonigal, a game designer and evangelist for the idea that games can save the world. For Rhett, her work is … Continue reading
Posted in A Major Post, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Development, Emotion, Evolutionary Psychology, Happiness, Health & Medicine, Human Evolution, Mismatch Theory, Phenotypic Plasticity, Play, Psychological Adaptation, Psychology, Radio & Podcasts, Social Networks, Subsistence, Web
Tagged Envirolutions, Jane McGonigal, Rhett Bradbury
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What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
CreationRevolution “If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?” It is striking how this reaction lacks any self-consciousness. Research like that referred to in this post is a potential means of understanding how religions and their particular constructed righteousness (in other words … Continue reading
Posted in A Minor Post, Altruism, Cooperation, Creationism, Cultural Evolution, Game Theory, Punishment, Web
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Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment “A world of their own” This is an absolutely fascinating article. I was not aware that there were any cultures outside of Amazonia that have maintained such isolation. As Burton points out, we need … Continue reading
“School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
On Being “Alain de Botton on a School of Life for Atheists” Religion for Atheists What I find very interesting about this philosopher’s approach are his implicit memetic assumptions: that religions have nested within their complex cultural structure extractable “ways of … Continue reading
National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
National Geographic “Tibetan Gold” This story encapsulates a whole host of unsustainable human behaviors: First, we have people over-harvesting an ecological product in a manner that risks its collapse; Second, the over-harvesting is driven by a cultural superstition that has spread … Continue reading
Posted in A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Belief, Biodiversity Loss, Coevolution, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Evolution, Ecology, Economic sustainability, Ecosystem Services, Memetic Fitness, Parasitism, Population Growth, Resource Consumption, Sustainable Harvesting, System Stability, Tundra
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Mount Everest and the limits of play
Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panoramique_mont_Everest.jpg The traditional spring climbing season has come to an end in the Himalaya and 2012 has turned out to be a pretty deadly year. On Mount Everest — the most storied and trafficked Himalayan peak — ten people … Continue reading
Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
Frequently I feel like I am listening to an early 2000′s George W. Bush speech when the ‘opponents of group selection’ step up to the podium. Seemingly, you are either “with us or against us” when it comes to considering … Continue reading
Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
Back in March, David Barash used his regular column in the Chronicle of Higher Education to unveil “The Truth about the Temple of Templeton“. Reacting to an increasingly-large funding stream coming out of the Templeton Foundation, Barash questions whether receiving money … Continue reading
Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
I just finished reading Jon Krakauer’s classic 1996 book Into the Wild. The book chronicles the adventures and eventual demise of Christopher McCandless, a young man who reinvented himself as “Alexander Supertramp” and spent two years wandering the United States … Continue reading
