If you don’t think that culture can make us do maladaptive things, check out...
Scientific American Images of the Week “Guns in Ancient Egypt and Nubia?“
View ArticleJason Collins questions the utility-to-fitness conversion
Evolving Economics “Gandolfi, Gandolfi and Barash’s Economics as an Evolutionary Science” Great commentary on the fitness-maximizing behavior (or lack thereof) by the ultra-rich. Clearly humans are...
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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...
View ArticlePeter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
Social Evolution Forum “The ‘Big Mistake’ and ‘Grand Deception’ Hypotheses: Alternatives to CMLS?” These are flaws in Pinker’s arguments that I failed to identify in my own critique, and Turchin...
View ArticleNational Geographic feature on “Vanishing Languages”
National Geographic “Vanishing Languages” I am fascinated and a bit horrified by the process of language extinction described in this article. The parallels with biodiversity loss are obvious and...
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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....
View ArticleNational 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...
View Article“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...
View ArticleAre 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...
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Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate...
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...
View ArticleDoes American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our...
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...
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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...
View Article“Brainchildren”— another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
The Chronicle of Higher Education “Bringing up brainchildren” This is such a fun and insightful essay on the relationship between our pursuits that yield — alternatively — genetic and memetic fitness....
View ArticleMoney Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
WNYC Money Talking “Helping Ordinary Americans Focus Of Fed Under Janet Yellen” Should the economy serve the society as a whole, or only some individuals in that society? Wow is it refreshing to hear a...
View ArticleWas Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to...
On Being “Teilhard de Chardin on The “Planetary Mind” and Our Spiritual Evolution” We often give credit to Richard Dawkins — who is undeniably the inventor of the term “memetics” — for introducing an...
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The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
To most Americans, it sounds crazy. In response to a satirical movie, a country mobilizes its strategic hackers to attack the website of a major movie studio and threatens violence on any movie...
View ArticleThe most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
National Public Radio “For Prospective Moms, Biology and Culture Clash” Seven years later, I need to check and see how these American demographic trends have developed. Are even more women having...
View ArticleDoes the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
PLoS ONE “Future Discounting in Congo Basin Hunter-Gatherers Declines with Socio-Economic Transitions” These findings are really fascinating, because they suggest that some degree of “building towards...
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Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is...
There’s a new paper out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by David W. Lawson and colleagues that looks at whether the cultural practice of polygyny is disadvantageous. It’s a...
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Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons The Los Angeles Times “China drops its ‘one-child’ policy, now let’s ban the ‘population bomb’” Great op-ed that makes it really clear that impact is a function of...
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