Posted 17 Jul 2012 / 2
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. On Mount Everest — the most storied and trafficked Himalayan peak — ten people have died this season. Only the years 1996 and 2006 have seen more deaths. While Read More
A Major Post, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Human limits, Memetic Fitness, Mismatch theory, Play, Survival
Posted 19 Jun 2012 / 0
Science News “Diet Sodas May Confuse Brain’s ‘Calorie Counter’“
A Minor Post, Health & Medicine, Mismatch theory, Neuroscience, Web
Posted 18 Jun 2012 / 0
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 theory
Posted 18 May 2012 / 0
Social Evolution Forum Peter Turchin “The Dark Side of Cultural Evolution” I love the evolutionary nuance unravelled in this post: both the idea of “staged traits” and the strong assertion that traits are produced by networks of genes are critical subtleties often ignored by evolutionary hypotheses. I am a bit skeptical, however, about the assumption Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Cultural Evolution, Mismatch theory
Posted 10 Apr 2011 / 0
Recently, Scientific American‘s “Science Talk” podcast featured a valuable interview with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researcher Kathleen Barnes called “Can It Be Bad to Be Too Clean?: The Hygiene Hypothesis“. In the interview, Dr. Barnes explained the state of contemporary research into the “Hygiene Hypothesis”, which suggests that the reason we are seeing an Read More
Coevolution, Host-Pathogen Evolution, Mismatch theory, Radio & Podcasts
Posted 23 Mar 2011 / 0
Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster is a book about recent human history. But for those interested in human evolution, this history is essential reading. The primary idea of the book is that our dramatic portrayals of how people react to disaster are wrong: rather Read More
Altruism, Books, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, History, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Mismatch theory, Reciprocity
Posted 13 Mar 2011 / 0
No one denies that contemporary human beings cooperate extensively with non-kin. This social behavior sets us apart from even our closest primate relatives, who tend to only display strong cooperative behaviors with kin. But explaining this difference is no easy task: modern culture exerts such a strong influence on our behavior that it is easy Read More
Articles, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Kin Selection, Mismatch theory
