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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
Recent Minor Posts
- 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
- Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
- Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
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What I am reading now
Category Archives: Cultural Evolution
Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
Martin Nowak has accomplished a lot for a mid-career scientist. His theoretical work exploring how cooperation evolves has illuminated the importance of a great number of evolutionary mechanisms. He has also been unafraid to tackle real-life problems of cooperation, including … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Books, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Group Selection, History, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Kin Selection, Language Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Punishment, Reciprocity, Religion, Superorganisms, Sustainability
Tagged David Sloan Wilson, Edward O. Wilson, Garrett Hardin, JBS Haldane, John Maynard Smith, Martin A. Nowak, Roger Highfield, Supercooperators, William D. Hamilton
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Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
A few weeks ago I posted an aside about Howard Rheingold’s 6-week online course on cooperation theory. One of my questions about the course regarded how to assess Rheingold’s credentials to teach the course: he is not sanctioned by any … Continue reading
Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
There are so many science books that I want to read that I frequently neglect to read fiction. This is too bad, because good fiction can be as rich with interesting hypotheses about human nature and evolution as any book … Continue reading
Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
For those who don’t know Sam Harris, he is a rather famous critic of theism who often invokes science and broad rationalism in his arguments for the abandonment of organized religion. Along with Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Memetic Fitness, Multilevel Selection, Philosophy, Radio & Podcasts, Religion, Talks & Seminars, Web
Tagged Christopher Hitchens, David Sloan Wilson, Frans de Waal, George C. Williams, Jessica Pierce, Marc Bekoff, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, TED Talks
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How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
One of the ways that I keep up with my field these days (inasmuch as that is even possible given the pace of innovation and activity) is by using Google Alerts. For those of you who are not familiar with … Continue reading
Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
If there is a theme running through my diverse interests, it is stability. For those who understand how ecological systems and evolutionary processes work, this should be entirely unsurprising: the living systems that persist today are those that are stable … Continue reading
Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
I just checked out a lecture given by Martin Nowak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that was recently posted on the MIT videos site. The video was recently posted on the MIT site, but it is not entirely clear … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Kin Selection, Mathematics, Multilevel Selection, Psychological Adaptation, Radio & Podcasts, Reciprocity, Talks & Seminars, Web
Tagged Corina Tarnita, Martin A. Nowak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Supercooperators
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What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
I have a bit of an obsession with why people push limits in particular sports. Although I am far from a big limit-pusher myself, I do enjoy the more dangerous forms of skateboarding, bicycling, and snowboarding. Of late I have … Continue reading
Posted in Articles, Cultural Evolution, Film & Television, Happiness, Memetic Fitness, Play, Psychological Adaptation
Tagged BASE Jumping, Behavioral Syndromes, Dean Potter, Extreme Sports, Free Solo Climbing, Frequency-Dependent Selection, Highlining, Rock Climbing, Slacklining, Social Heterosis
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Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective
If you have been following the news at all this summer, you are undoubtedly aware of the recent phone hacking scandal at The News of the World, a tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s [1, 2, 3] global media empire, … Continue reading
Mexican Culture and Collective Action
Today there was an interesting feature on the Leonard Lopate show highlighting former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda and his new book Manana forever? Mexico and the Mexicans. The central thesis of the book is that Mexicans are a very … Continue reading
“A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster is a book about recent human history. But for those interested in human evolution, this history is essential reading. The primary idea of the … Continue reading
Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
No one denies that contemporary human beings cooperate extensively with non-kin. This social behavior sets us apart from even our closest primate relatives, who tend to only display strong cooperative behaviors with kin. But explaining this difference is no easy … Continue reading
Cultural Evolution in a Hybrid Society
The process of cultural evolution fascinates me. It is still a topic that I need to research further, but I think about it often. My Human Evolution course is steeped pretty heavily in the idea that culture as well as … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural Evolution, Speciation
Tagged Memes, Richard Dawkins, Temes, The Selfish Gene
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“The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
I just finished reading Robert Axelrod’s seminal book entitled The Evolution of Cooperation. Although I had read a lot about Axelrod’s work and am quite familiar with the body of literature that it inspired, I had never actually read his … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Behavioral Ecology, Books, Coevolution, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Human Evolution, Individual-based Models, Interdisciplinarity, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Political Science, Public Policy, Reciprocity, Sociology, Spatially Explicit Modeling
Tagged Prisoner's Dilemma, Richard Dawkins, Robert Axelrod
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The Role of Technology in Human Evolution
Today’s version of The Takeaway featured an interesting interview with Kevin Kelly, author of a new book called What Technology Wants. You can listen to the segment here: Although I have not read the book, I am familiar and interested … Continue reading
National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
I have a rather ambitious list of courses that I want to offer in the near future. As I have indicated before, one of the liberating features of my job as a professor at Pratt Institute is that pretty much … Continue reading
Posted in Animal Domestication, Courses, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolution, Film & Television, Human Evolution, Mutualism, Reviews, Teaching
Tagged Canids
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Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
A recent incident in Obion County, Tennessee has gotten national media attention from the likes of MSNBC, NPR, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. A resident of this rural county called 911 when a fire broke out in … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Film & Television, MSCI-463, The Evolution of Cooperation, Multilevel Selection, Public Policy, Punishment, Radio & Podcasts, Web
Tagged Community Goods & Services, Firefighting, Huffington Post, MSNBC, National Public Radio, NYTimes, Punishment, Tragedy of the Commons
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NPR is all up in evolution
It is kind of amazing how much evolution has found its way into the news of late. National Public Radio usually has pretty good science coverage via Talk of the Nation Science Friday, but lately they have been providing some … Continue reading
The Quest for the Perfect Hive
Gene Kritsky is a renowned bee biologist, so when I learned that he had written The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in Bee Culture, I rushed to get ahold of it. I am very interested in … Continue reading
