The New York Times “Our Animal Natures” I find it particularly interesting how domesticated animals find themselves in some of the same behavioral traps (addiction, self-harm, obsessive-compulsiveness) as domesticated humans. This certainly suggests that mismatch theory has some validity.
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Mismatch theoryThe Christian Science Monitor “What killed the woolly mammoth? A whole bunch of things, say scientists“
A Minor Post, Articles, Extinction, Fossil DataScience “Fears of Damage to Great Barrier Reef Delay Mine“
A Minor Post, Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Habitat Destruction, Sustainable EnergyScienceNow “Aging Is Recorded in Our Genes“
A Minor Post, Articles, Genetics, SenescenceNature “The bonobo genome compared with the chimpanzee and human genomes” Nature News “‘Hippie chimp’ genome sequenced” ScienceNow “Bonobos Join Chimps as Closest Human Relatives“
A Minor Post, Articles, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Phylogenetics, Primates, Primatology, WebThe New York Times “Lessons from Ants to Grasp Humanity” Funny how the media likes to trot out Jerry Coyne whenever someone questions Darwinian orthodoxy. I cannot entirely blame Coyne for how he is quoted, but his quotes never seem to offer much a substantial critique. The bit on religion is interesting here: Wilson seems Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Books, Cooperation, Group Selection, SuperorganismsThe “Early Edition” of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America just posted online a paper entitled “Direct reciprocity in structured populations“. Authored by Matthijs van Veelen, Julián García, David G. Rand, and Martin A. Nowak, the paper combines two well-explored factors that influence how cooperation evolves: repeated Read More
Articles, Behavior, Cooperation, Evolutionary Modeling, Information Design, Reciprocity, Social NetworksProspect Magazine “The descent of Edward Wilson” First comment on this: what’s up with the ad hominem attacks on Wilson implying (not-so-subtly) that he is somehow slipping (look here for another example) in his old age? Given the massive departure that Dawkins has made from science in his writings on religion, he is the last one Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Books, Cooperation, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, SuperorganismsEcology Letters “Experimental climate change weakens the insurance effect of biodiversity“
A Minor Post, Articles, Climate Change, Community EcologyToday’s New York Times Business section features an interesting article on the recent JPMorgan multi-billion loss. Entitled “The Hunch, the Pounce and the Kill: How Boaz Weinstein and Hedge Funds Outsmarted JPMorgan“, the article explains how a risk-prone hedge fund manager named Boaz Weinstein was able to exploit errors by JPMorgan and end up on Read More
Articles, Economic sustainability, Economics, Ethics, Parasitism, Public Policy, Social Capital, System Stability