Christopher X J. Jensen
Associate Professor, Pratt Institute

Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?

Posted 26 Jan 2014 / 0

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 evolutionary approach to cultural change. But as this piece makes clear, de Chardin was already thinking on far more large scales about Read More

A Minor Post, Biography, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ecosystem Ecology, Evolution, Geology, Homo species, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Memetic Fitness, Radio & Podcasts, Religion, The WmD Project

New edited volume joins the growing collection of literature dedicated to how cooperation evolves

Posted 25 Jan 2014 / 0

Cooperation and Its Evolution Edited by Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott and Ben Fraser MIT Press

A Minor Post, Cooperation

In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve

Posted 21 Jan 2014 / 0

Science “How Cooperation Defeats Cheats” Science “Brood Parasitism and the Evolution of Cooperative Breeding in Birds” Live Science “How Birds Cooperate to Defeat Cuckoos” It is fascinating that being a cooperative breeder is both attractive to parasites (because they can achieve better reproductive success by successfully parasitizing the nest of cooperative breeders) and the best way to Read More

A Minor Post, Altruism, Articles, Coevolution, Cooperation, Cooperative Breeding, Phylogenetics

CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!

Posted 15 Jan 2014 / 0

I almost fell out of my seat when I found this video while searching for a concise source explaining why we don’t have an international climate change agreement. This short television piece is basically trying to explain the dynamics of climate change agreement as depicted by Milinski and colleagues (2008) in their PNAS paper “The collective-risk Read More

A Minor Post, Climate Change, Environmental Justice, Film, Television, & Video, Game Theory, Sustainability, Web

Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection

Posted 10 Jan 2014 / 0

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 radio segment ask that question!

A Minor Post, Cultural Evolution, Memetic Fitness, Multilevel Selection, Radio & Podcasts

Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?

Posted 07 Jan 2014 / 0

NPR Morning Edition “Sunday Assembly: A Church For The Godless Picks Up Steam” It is interesting to see people explicitly seeking out the benefits of religious community whilst trying to maintain their objective understanding of the material world. Conventional wisdom is that “god” is needed to make religions work, but perhaps just a collective intention Read More

A Minor Post, Belief, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Group Selection, Radio & Podcasts, Religion

Writing and record-keeping as important tools in the evolution of large-scale human cooperation

Posted 25 Oct 2013 / 0

This View of Life “The Role Of Writing And Recordkeeping In The Cultural Evolution Of Human Cooperation” What is also so interesting about written language is that it is another means of defining a group: only those who are literate and can read the particular recorded language can fully benefit from the cooperation fostered by Read More

A Minor Post, Cooperation, Empathy, Group Selection, Multilevel Selection

Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?

Posted 11 Oct 2013 / 0

Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2013 “A Study on the Evolution of Cooperation in Networks“

A Minor Post, Articles, Game Theory, Social Networks, System Stability

New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits

Posted 11 Oct 2013 / 0

WMAC Northeast Public Radio “Academic Minute: Dr. Alicia Melis, University of Warwick – Cooperation and Chimpanzees” Chimps’ ability to take the perspective of others has been questioned, but this set of experiments seems to show that chimps can mentally put themselves in the place of a comrade, imagining what that comrade should do and then Read More

A Minor Post, Behavioral Ecology, Cooperation, Human Uniqueness, Primates, Radio & Podcasts, Reciprocity, Web

Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation

Posted 10 Oct 2013 / 0

Wired “On the Microbial Frontier, Cheaters Rarely Prosper” This is fascinating, particularly because it attempts to connect the ability of bacteria to sustain cooperation through range expansion with the unique range expansion undertaken by humans in the last 30,000 years. I am not sure this will be a fruitful comparison, but you have to give it Read More

A Minor Post, Articles, Cooperation, Evolutionary Modeling, Microbial Ecology, Web