Posted 21 Aug 2013 / 0
WNYC The Leonard Lopate Show “The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments” This great feature uncovers two major sources of scientific distortion: Milgram himself selectively reported his results in order to tell a more sensational story; and Media depictions, fueled by popular preconceptions, further filtered and distorted the meanings of Milgram’s scientific results. Both Read More
A Minor Post, Altruism, Behavior, Emotion, Empathy, Ethics, Human Nature, Methods, Psychology, Radio & Podcasts, Scientific Fraud, Social Norms
Posted 17 Aug 2013 / 0
Times Higher Education “What’s God got to do with evolution?” It is really interesting to see that Coakley, a theologian, is collaborating with Martin Nowak. This is not entirely surprising: after all, the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics that Nowak heads is funded in part by the Templeton Foundation, which likes to support work at the interface of religion Read More
A Minor Post, Ethics, Religion, Web
Posted 15 Aug 2013 / 0
The Scientist “A Twist in Evolutionary Game Theory: Biologists demonstrate the instability of employing a selfish strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma game” Nature Communications “Evolutionary instability of zero-determinant strategies demonstrates that winning is not everything” I am so glad to see that someone did the math and simulations to look at the long-term stability of Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Articles, Behavior, Coevolution, Cooperation, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Individual-based Models, Phenotypic Plasticity, Punishment, Reciprocity, System Stability
Posted 30 Jul 2013 / 0
National Public Radio Morning Edition “For Some Mammals It’s One Love, But Reasons Still Unclear” Although brief, I appreciate how this article lays out the three hypotheses for monogamy: Monogamous co-parenting increases the survival rate of offspring as compared to parenting by the mother alone; Monogamy results from the pattern of resource distribution: if resources are Read More
A Minor Post, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Competition, Cooperation, Evolution, Genetics, Human Uniqueness, Mating systems, Radio & Podcasts, Sex and Reproduction
Posted 27 Jul 2013 / 0
I do think that the old adage “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is apt: if people are willing to copy what you do, they obviously think that what you have done is valuable. So I suppose that I should be flattered by this: Look at bit familiar? Sound a bit familiar? Yeah, that Read More
A Minor Post, Creative Commons, Ethics, Higher Education, WordPress
Posted 23 Jul 2013 / 0
The Harvard Gazette “Learning through doing“
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Art & Design
Posted 15 Jul 2013 / 0
Studio 360 “Isabella Rossellini’s Mammas”
A Minor Post, Radio & Podcasts, Sex and Reproduction
Posted 15 Jul 2013 / 0
The Quarterly Review of Biology “Homosexuality as a Consequence of Epigenetically Canalized Sexual Development” What makes this theory so compelling is how it addresses the “heritable but not at all clearly genetic” problem of explaining the very high prevalence of homosexuality in human populations. There have been other theories of homosexuality that invoke sexual antagonism, but Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Epigenetics, Human Evolution, Sex and Reproduction
Posted 15 Jul 2013 / 0
Wired “Sperm Trajectories” I like the way that color is used to denote time in these images, and how they show these four different trajectory types in multiple dimensions. Now if we can figure out the evolutionary significance of this diversity, we have a real story.
A Minor Post, Sex and Reproduction, Web
Posted 15 Jul 2013 / 0
Wired “Humanity’s Recent Evolution” Of course increased genetic diversity just makes evolution more possible… but there still still needs to be some viable selective force to do something with all this variation. One could argue that the amount of variation we now see ‘tolerated’ by nature suggests that humans have been released from many selective Read More
A Minor Post, Genetics, Human Evolution, Mismatch theory, Population Genetics, Web
