Author: dlende

Charlie Parker’s Anthropology

I went to see a student sing with Notre Dame’s jazz band on Tuesday. She did a great job! I was also reminded of this great tune by Charlie Parker, the jazz saxophonist and composer: “Anthropology.” I found this good clip by Czech saxophonist František Kop. Of course the anthropologist has to have Anthropology in a globalized setting… in this case, the jazz club U malého Glena (Little Glen) in Prague.

You can hear Parker himself on this online recording available at Imeem.

Charlie Parker would be a great person to dwell on for some neuroanthropology. Just not today. But Robert Philen, an anthropologist at West Florida, has a good riff on Parker and how biography informs our appreciation of artistry. And for a long bio, see Parker on Wikipedia. Cultural icon, brilliant musician, heroin addict, the Bird knew how to play.

Wednesday Round Up #9

Tit-for-Tat, Game Theory and the Like

Michael Shermer, The Doping Dilemma
The rationality of doping—through game theory

Jim Rilling et al., The Neural Correlates of the Affective Response to Unreciprocated Cooperation
Anterior insula, left hippocampus, and left lingual gyrus light up when you are getting screwed (pdf)

Jim Rilling et al., A Neural Basis for Social Cooperation
Cooperating in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game lights up the reward centers! (pdf)

Jake Young, The Ruthlessness ‘Gene’ –or- Four Caveats in Interpreting Behavioral Genetics Studies
The Dictator Game, genes and mechanism, and media sensationalism

Ken Binmore, Review of Axelrod’s The Complexity of Cooperation
The tit-for-tat strategy is over-rated

Wendy Grossman, New Tack Win’s Prisoner’s Dilemma
Social recognition and team play wins hands-down…

Tully, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem
Social choice theory, ranked preferences, and the failure of individual-based theories

Research Digest Blog, How Group Cooperation Varies Between Cultures
“students from less democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman and Belarus tended to punish not only free-loaders, but also cooperative players, with the result that cooperation in their groups plummeted”

Joseph Henrich et al., Costly Punishment Across Human Societies
Pdf of the 2006 Science paper on the cross-cultural propensity to punish cheaters based on ultimatum and third-party punishment games

Mark Gimein, The Eligible-Bachelor Paradox
“How economics and game theory explain the shortage of available, appealing men”—grab hold of a good one and don’t let go…

Aging: Evolution and More

Neuroscientifically Challenged, Trying to Make Evolutionary Sense of Menopause
Good summary of previous debates, plus coverage of a new theory: avoiding female reproductive competition

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #9”

Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City

Grand Theft Auto IV comes out tomorrow. Looks like it might be the best in the series, certainly one of the best games of the year. The early reviews gathered at Metacritic have an average score of 99 out of 100 as I write this. Rockstar Games, the gaming company that has made Grand Theft Auto, estimates a pre-order demand around $400 million. So it’s big. Huge.

But why?

I will make a simple argument. It is the combination of creative anthropology, sophisticated game design and game play, and the right brain hooks that makes video games like Grand Theft Auto work so well.

And the reviews show it. In the rest of the piece, I will draw excerpts from three places, the IGN review, the New York Times review, and the highlight quotes from Metacritic.

Creative Anthropology

Take creative fiction, and add world-building and a do-it-yourself story, and then you have what I mean by creative anthropology. Some Geek Love through role playing and fantasy, mixed with narrative to get the cultural buy-in.

So here’s GameSpy: “The very nature of the American Dream is the central theme in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV, a gaming masterpiece that is a picture-perfect snapshot of the underworld of today’s big cities.”

The New York Times gushes, “The real star of the game is the city itself. It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York.”

Continue reading “Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City”

WordPress: Ways to Explore

WordPress has added a new feature, an automatically generated list of related posts that appears at the bottom of each post you view. This list will provide links both within this site and to other WordPress blogs, and occasionally to other blogs on other sites.

They’ve just started rolling this feature out (see the announcement here), and so far it’s mostly in-house: this blog and across WordPress. Posts like the ones on dopamine and addiction, two languages & theory of mind, and others already have links on them. Hopefully it should provide all of us a new way to network.

Of course if you are interested in the stuff on this blog, you can check out our Popular Posts page (just updated), as well as explore things through the category cloud, for example, on stress, brain mechanisms, and cultural theory. The entire category cloud appears on the left side of the main page, down past the blogroll.

Dying Sooner: The New US Pattern

What the hell is wrong with this country? That is what came to my mind when I read a recent PLoS article “The Reversal of Fortunes: Trends in Country Mortality and Cross-County Mortality Disparities in the United States.” The basic conclusion: life expectancy is going DOWN in parts of the United States. How can that be?!

Here is what the PLoS article tells us: From 1983 to 1999, life expectancy declined significantly in 11 US counties for men and in 180 (!) counties for women. Why? “Life expectancy decline in both sexes was caused by increased mortality from lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and a range of other noncommunicable diseases, which were no longer compensated for by the decline in cardiovascular mortality [driven largely by better drugs and interventions]. Higher HIV/AIDS and homicide deaths also contributed substantially to life expectancy decline for men, but not for women.”

In their conclusions, the authors Majid Ezzati, Ari Friedman, Sandeep Kulkarni, and Christopher Murray single out some specific health problems: “The epidemiological (disease-specific) patterns of female mortality rise are consistent with the geographical patterns of, and trends in, smoking, high blood pressure, and obesity. In particular, the sex and cohort patterns of the increase in lung cancer and chronic respiratory disease mortality point to an important potential role for smoking.” So cigarettes kill.

But before we blame it all on individual behaviors, recall that these data are also geographic, by county. Where did life expectancy go down for 4% of the male population and 19% of the female population? “The majority of these counties were in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas.” In the worst performing counties, life expectancy dropped SIX years for women and two and a half years for men. In contrast, in the best US counties, life expectancy rose by as much as five years.

Continue reading “Dying Sooner: The New US Pattern”