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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: Human Evolution
Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
Do everyday people have any sense of their place in the world? Human beings live in incredibly complex societies undergirded by convoluted economies and overwhelmingly diverse cultures. Do we have a sense of how these societies came to be, or … Continue reading
Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
WNYC “NYC’s Top Dogs: Mapping Names & Breeds in the City” WNYC “Dogs of NYC” Data sets like these, even flawed by their incompleteness (only 20% of dogs in New York City are registered) are fascinating. The human relationship with dogs has … Continue reading
Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
In a recent short opinion piece (Scientific American “Creation, Evolution and Indisputable Facts“), Jacob Tanenbaum argues that selectively rejecting evolutionary biology is dangerous to the scientific culture of America. He rightly points out that our populace does not reject science … Continue reading
Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
The New York Times “Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain” While I think that the finding that brain size and capacity for endurance are linked is interesting and important, I am a bit baffled by this article’s take on the … Continue reading
Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
Neuron “Fractionating Human Intelligence” What is crazy about these findings is that they are novel. Is this really the first time that anyone decided to tackle the question of what different “intelligence tests” measure? The first time that anyone has … Continue reading
Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
Institute for Advanced Study “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” One of my favorite skateboarders when I was young was Natas Kaupas, an innovative skater who pioneered a lot of modern streetstyle. Natas was one of those skaters who could do things that … Continue reading
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
Ready for eugenics 2.0?
The Chronicle of Higher Education “Reinventing Ourselves” This article is — in a word — scary. After dangling a couple of vague promises to engineer our susceptibility to viruses out of our collective genome (7 billion visits to the DNA … Continue reading
On becoming a psychopath
The Chronicle of Higher Education “Psychopathy’s Double Edge” There are so many fascinating elements to this article and what it says about human behavior. First, there is the fact that most people walk around with a very potent regulatory of … Continue reading
Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
The Chronicle of Higher Education “The Marketplace in Your Brain” I think that this article suggests that much of economics is not much of a science. Faced with new information, mainstream economics has failed to update its models of how … Continue reading
Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
PLoS ONE “What Are Punishment and Reputation for?” Once again, a valuable and ingenious experiment over-reaches on the meaning of its finding, and the over-reach bleeds into the popular media. This is a really valuable experiment in that it asks … Continue reading
Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
Science Now “Bearing Sons Can Alter Your Mind” Once again, epigenetic effects complicate our understanding of biological evolution! Two interesting omissions in this article: The fail to point out that female fetuses might also be donating DNA to mom: it … 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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Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “No third-party punishment in chimpanzees” This is pretty astonishing, but perhaps not entirely surprising. As numerous other studies have shown, there are many qualitative differences in the cognition and resulting behaviors of humans … Continue reading
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
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
