Posted 12 Jun 2012 / 0
Prospect 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, Superorganisms
Posted 12 Jun 2012 / 0
The Huffington Post David Sloan Wilson blog “Richard Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson, and the Consensus of the Many” This is a very clear articulation of the history of multilevel selection. If only all biologists (in particular those who do not work in areas investigating altruistic behavior) could be compelled to read this; a lot of Read More
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Superorganisms, Web
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 18 May 2012 / 0
Social Evolution Forum Robin I.M. Dunbar “Networking Past and Present” Social Evolution Forum Nicholas Baumard “The Evolution of Cooperation: from Networks to Institutions” Social Evolution Forum Herbert Gintis “Commentary on Dunbar and Baumard” Some interesting stuff here: We may no longer live in fission-fusion tribes, but we still move around a lot socially (changing family partnerships, looking Read More
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Punishment, Social Networks
Posted 17 May 2012 / 0
Daily Mail “Did dogs help humans conquer the world? Man’s best friend may be the reason why we flourished over the Neanderthals” The Atlantic “Humanity’s Best Friend: How Dogs May Have Helped Humans Beat the Neanderthals“
A Minor Post, Animal Domestication, Articles, Canids, Homo species, Human Evolution
Posted 09 May 2012 / 0
The New York Times “Why We Lie“
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Communication, Human Evolution
Posted 08 May 2012 / 0
The Wall Street Journal “Making Ourselves at Home” Mark Pagel “Wired for Culture“
A Minor Post, Articles, Books, Breeders, Propagators, & Creators, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Human Uniqueness, Psychological Adaptation, Web
Posted 07 May 2012 / 0
Global Animal “Dolphins Team Up With Fisherman” Now if only the dolphins can somehow get over that little “needs to breathe air every two minutes” problem with humans through artificial breeding. Seriously, though, this is really interesting as an analog for the kind of coevolution that probably occurred between humans and wolves. Just as was Read More
A Minor Post, Cetaceans, Cooperation, Human Uniqueness, Intelligences
Posted 29 Jan 2012 / 0
I just finished reading Jon Krakauer’s classic 1996 book Into the Wild. The book chronicles the adventures and eventual demise of Christopher McCandless, a young man who reinvented himself as “Alexander Supertramp” and spent two years wandering the United States before embarking on a final trip into the Alaskan wilderness. McCandless was experimenting with dropping Read More
Books, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Subsistence, Survival, Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Posted 03 Nov 2011 / 0
Martin Nowak has accomplished a lot for a mid-career scientist. His theoretical work exploring how cooperation evolves has illuminated the importance of a great number of evolutionary mechanisms. He has also been unafraid to tackle real-life problems of cooperation, including questions like “why do we get cancer?” and “how did language evolve?”. Nowak likes to Read More
Altruism, Books, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Group Selection, History, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Kin Selection, Language Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Punishment, Reciprocity, Religion, Superorganisms, Sustainability
