The Wall Street Journal “Making Ourselves at Home” Mark Pagel “Wired for Culture“
A Minor Post, Articles, Books, Breeders, Propagators, & Creators, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Human Uniqueness, Psychological Adaptation, WebGlobal Animal “Dolphins Team Up With Fisherman” Now if only the dolphins can somehow get over that little “needs to breathe air every two minutes” problem with humans through artificial breeding. Seriously, though, this is really interesting as an analog for the kind of coevolution that probably occurred between humans and wolves. Just as was Read More
A Minor Post, Cetaceans, Cooperation, Human Uniqueness, IntelligencesLiterature, Evolution, & the Brain “The Evolution of Cooperation & ‘They Cage the Animals at Night‘” It is fascinating that this blog represents the work of many people, all of whom are looking at literature through the lens of evolution. I encourage this approach — I had better, as I take it myself — but this Read More
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Science in Art & DesignThis morning, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition featured a segment entitled “Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren’t ‘Average’“. I am generally vigilant about stories which make broad claims about human traits and their genetic and environmental underpinnings, and this particular segment triggered my alarms to scream. Analyzing a new study on “academics writing papers, Read More
Adaptation, Genetics, Radio & PodcastsUPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. To complete the set of Evolutionary Games Infographic images that Greg Riestenberg and I have been working on, we created a set of “conceptual” matrices for the Ultimatum Game (UG). These are meant to complement the conceptual images we Read More
Evolutionary Games Infographics, Game Theory, Information DesignUPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. This semester I have been working with Greg Riestenberg, a graduate student in Pratt’s Communications Design program, to come up with a new series of images designed to explain some common evolutionary games. Our first images for the Read More
Evolutionary Games Infographics, Game Theory, Information DesignUPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. For the past two semesters I have been working with Greg Riestenberg, a graduate student in Pratt’s Communications Design program, to come up with a new series of images designed to explain some common evolutionary games (I am Read More
Evolutionary Games Infographics, Game Theory, Information DesignOn the Media “Life in Facebookistan” I am fascinated by the idea that we all belong to many overlapping social groups, and I wonder how these groups might be subject to multilevel selection. “Facebookistan” is an interesting conceptualization of a large international group: Facebook users. With characteristic incisive questioning, On The Media suggests that this might Read More
A Minor Post, Multilevel Selection, Psychology, Radio & PodcastsI 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 before embarking on a final trip into the Alaskan wilderness. McCandless was experimenting with dropping Read More
Books, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Subsistence, Survival, Traditional Ecological KnowledgeContrails captured by NASA scientist Louis Ngyyen Global carbon emissions continue to increase, threatening future generations with catastrophic climate change. And while most of the world agrees that something needs to be done to curb our carbon emissions, several decades of international talks have provided little progress at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Most famously, the Read More
Altruism, Articles, Climate Change, Cooperation, Economics, Environmental Justice, Ethics, Pollution, Public Policy, Punishment, Radio & Podcasts, Sustainability, Web
