BBC News “Big rise in North Pacific plastic waste” Two unsurprising findings here: The amount of plastic garbage in the ocean has dramatically increased over the past 40 years; and Some organisms are going to utilize this new resource to their advantage.
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Marine Ecosystems, Pollution, WebThe 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, WebThis morning, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition featured a segment entitled “Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren’t ‘Average’“. I am generally vigilant about stories which make broad claims about human traits and their genetic and environmental underpinnings, and this particular segment triggered my alarms to scream. Analyzing a new study on “academics writing papers, Read More
Adaptation, Genetics, Radio & PodcastsOn the Media “Life in Facebookistan” I am fascinated by the idea that we all belong to many overlapping social groups, and I wonder how these groups might be subject to multilevel selection. “Facebookistan” is an interesting conceptualization of a large international group: Facebook users. With characteristic incisive questioning, On The Media suggests that this might Read More
A Minor Post, Multilevel Selection, Psychology, Radio & PodcastsI 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 KnowledgeContrails captured by NASA scientist Louis Ngyyen Global carbon emissions continue to increase, threatening future generations with catastrophic climate change. And while most of the world agrees that something needs to be done to curb our carbon emissions, several decades of international talks have provided little progress at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Most famously, the Read More
Altruism, Articles, Climate Change, Cooperation, Economics, Environmental Justice, Ethics, Pollution, Public Policy, Punishment, Radio & Podcasts, Sustainability, WebMartin 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, SustainabilityA few weeks ago I posted an aside about Howard Rheingold’s 6-week online course on cooperation theory. One of my questions about the course regarded how to assess Rheingold’s credentials to teach the course: he is not sanctioned by any university (although he does call what he does — modestly — “Rheingold U”), and there Read More
Altruism, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Game Theory, Group Selection, Mutualism, Punishment, Reciprocity, Talks & Seminars, WebThere are so many science books that I want to read that I frequently neglect to read fiction. This is too bad, because good fiction can be as rich with interesting hypotheses about human nature and evolution as any book illuminating evolutionary theory. Towards the end of thinking about how my field informs and can Read More
Books, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Fiction, Group Selection, Happiness, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Multilevel Selection, Pratt Institute, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Science in Art & Design, SuperorganismsThis month’s issue of PLoS Computational Biology contained an interesting article entitled “Signalling and the Evolution of Cooperative Foraging in Dynamic Environments“. Authored by Colin J. Torney, Andrew Berdahl, Iain D. Couzin (all of Princeton University), the article seeks to understand the ecological conditions under which costly signaling can evolve. Many animals emit signals to Read More
Altruism, Articles, Cooperation, Game Theory, Group Selection, Individual-based Models, Modeling (General), Reciprocity, Spatially Explicit Modeling