Category: Evolutionary Psychology
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Razib Khan Answers My Most Controversial Questions About Genetics: Quillette Cetera Episode 30
A conversation with geneticist and writer Razib Khan.
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How rational is Steven Pinker’s world?
The psychologist and writer is fighting an increasingly lonely battle against fanaticism
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How rational is Steven Pinker’s world?
The psychologist and writer is fighting an increasingly lonely battle against fanaticism
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How rational is Steven Pinker’s world?
The psychologist and writer is fighting an increasingly lonely battle against fanaticism
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Paternity certainty is high in most human societies
A new paper in Current Biology reiterates what we know, A Historical-Genetic Reconstruction of Human Extra-Pair Paternity: Paternity testing using genetic markers has shown that extra-pair paternity (EPP) is common in many pair-bonded species…Here, we use a population-level genetic genealogy approach [6, 8] to reconstruct spatiotemporal patterns in human EPP rates. Using patrilineal genealogies from…
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Napoleon Chagnon, R.I.P.
Napoleon Chagnon has died. It is unfortunate that Chagnon is known to many for the fact that he became involved in a controversy triggered by the activism of a polemical journalist. It will surprise none of the readers of this weblog I agree with Alice Dreger’s take on the whole issue. If you want to…
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An evolved mind
Imagine a human. We are a terrestrial, bipedal, and hairless mammal. This is very atypical in comparison to our relatives the apes and monkeys. These physical differences present us with a question: why?Why do humans lack the fur that is generally comm…
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Turning cheesecake into a weapon of war
Steven Pinker and many other evolutionary psychologists believe that music is cognitive cheesecake. That is, we have a lot of cognitive faculties working in concert, and musical appreciation and ability emerge out of the synthesis. But there wasn’t direct selection for music, as such. Musical appreciation then may not be adaptive. And yet like reading…
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The cuckoldry rate in complex agricultural societies is probably ~1%
One of the most interesting and strange things I’ve ever posted about has to do with extra-pair paternity rates. Basically, the rate of cuckoldry. I first got interested in the topic because people get bringing up the chestnut that 10% of children have misattributed biological paternity. That is, their biological father is different than the…
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Rousseau vs. Descartes & incest
Greta Scacchi, cousin-lover There has been some discussion in the comments why the posts on inbreeding are getting so much attention. I think this is a milder form of the same sort of curiosity about why young males have a fascination with pornograph…
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H. Allen Orr, most influential evolutionary biologist of all time?
A reader reminded me of an amusing paper, Who Likes Evolution? Dissociation Of Human Evolution Versus Evolutionary Psychology. The gist of the results are below (I added some clarification): The propositions to gauge acceptance of evolutionary psycho…
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Jonathan Haidt & Robert Wright: crazy delicious
Last night I listened to a very long discussion between Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal, and Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. If you have been reading my weblog for years the…
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The evolutionary necessity of lying
John Horgan has a long review of Robert Trivers’ long overdue book, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. I really don’t care how well Trivers analyzed the topic, this is such a rich and important issue that I can’t help but think he must have hit some important…
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The New York Times on violence and Pinker
The New York Times has a short piece on Steven Pinker up. Nothing too new to long time followers of the man and his work. I would like to point readers to the fact that Steven Pinker has a F.A.Q. up for The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. He links to my…
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The end of evolutionary psychology
A new paper in PLoS Biology is rather like the last person to leave turning the light off. Evolutionary psychology as we understood it in the 1980s and 1990s is over. Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology: None of the aforementi…
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Is Chris Stringer a multi-regionalist?
In an interesting piece in The Guardian on possible proto-gorilla/proto-human hybridization, the journalist lobs this grenade: But now that the once popular “single-origin model” of the evolution of Homo sapiens has been disproved, and the …
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Love and arranged marriage
In the wake of yesterday’s review of a paper on heritable variance in trait preferences realized in romantic partners I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this new study out of PLoS ONE, Evolutionary History of Hunter-Gatherer Marriage Pract…
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Love is not a hardwired battlefield
Judging by some of the amusing search queries I find every Friday people have a wide range of tastes and fetishes when it comes to pornography. From what I can tell the realized phenotypic interval in mate choice is less varied and eye-opening, but exi…
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Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
Link to review: Mother Nature: a complicated and morally ambivalent tale
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Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
Link to review: Mother Nature: a complicated and morally ambivalent tale