In anticipation of the lecture on the Brain in Greg’s undergraduate Human Evolution class next week, I have compiled a bunch of fun links to learn about brain structure and function. Please suggest a link to your educational blog or a brain school website that I perhaps haven’t included on the list!
Cultural Evolution Round Up
I have not been the biggest fan of cultural evolution research—treating culture in too biological a fashion, a lot of theory without a lot of mechanism, not enough consideration of the brain, difficulties with ideas about progress and direction. But the field has slowly advanced, and there has been some interesting blogging and research lately.
I also think cultural evolution, done right, has direct implications for how to think about neuroanthropology. If brain and culture interact (with camping caveats), then how they came to interact plays a central role in understanding neuroanthropological dynamics. So, with that brief introduction, here’s the latest topical round up.
Canoe Design
Deborah Rogers and Paul Ehrlich, Natural Selection and Cultural Rates of Change
Open access article from PNAS on how the functional and aesthetic design of Polynesian canoes change at different rates. Basically Rogers & Ehrlich arguing that the functional parts (i.e., that interact more significantly with the environment) go through stabilizing selection and thus are more conserved, while aesthetic aspects tend to get elaborated locally and exhibit faster rates of change.
For those of you looking for something briefer, here’s the overview in the press release, which also includes praise from Jared Diamond and Nina Jablonksi.
John Skoyles had his critical response published in PNAS, but without open access, so here’s Anthropology.Net discussing Skoyles’ reaction to the Rogers & Ehrlich article.
For additional commentary, see Gene Expression and Anthropology.Net’s initial reaction to proposals about canoe design and natural selection.
And don’t forget Malinowski’s original chapter on Polynesian canoes!
Projectile Points
R. Lee Lyman and colleagues have a Journal of Archaeological Science article entitled “Variation in North American dart points and arrow points when one or both are present.”
The paper argues that projectile points are subjected to experimentation and selection, and thus an optimizing design. For the press release, click here.
Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2
A while back, I posted a piece on recent evolutionary psychology research on human sexuality, specifically Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1. The previous post discussed a couple of research projects that have found a correlation between the ‘dark triad’ of narcissism, psychopathology, and manipulative Machiavelianism at low levels and the number of sexual partners that college-aged men reported having. The conclusion, baldly stated: chicks dig jerks, according to the researchers.
Today, I’m going to discuss a different set of articles, this time on ‘female guilt,’ sparked by research done by Prof. Anne Campbell, a psychologist at Durham University. Prof. Campbell surveyed people online and found that women regretted ‘one-night-stands’ more than men. This has led her to argue that women are ‘ill adapted’ for promiscuity, that the ‘sexual and feminist revolutions’ didn’t work because women couldn’t shake their inherent nature, which is to long for committed relationships and loathe themselves if they act like cheap floozies.
I delayed posting on this because I cannot get to the original article (my university library has a six-month delay on the journal Human Nature; Springer press release here). I hate posting on second-hand versions, but I feel like I don’t want to wait six months to write #2 in my series on ev psych stereotypes…. I mean, ‘perspectives’ on human sexuality or to put in my own two cents worth of opinionation. So I have to base most of my discussion on the press release from Durham University about Prof. Campbell’s recent article.
I can’t imagine that I’m EVER going to persuade the hardened core of evolutionary psychologists that there is not a thing called ‘human nature’; I’m not opposed to the concept for political, feminist reasons but because I don’t think living organisms have ‘essences,’ especially when it comes to behaviour. Nothing I can say, no theoretical point or comparative data from around the world of human variation, will convince the evolutionary psychologists because they know, they just know, that human nature — especially sex — has been shaped by evolution, hardened and set in our genes (or brains or hormones…), to rear it’s head when we do something against our nature (like a woman having sex and not trying to find a mate).
Continue reading “Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2”
Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1
In our continuing exploration of facile examples of ‘evolutionary’ explanations for human behavior (usually described instead as ‘human nature’), I have another couple of exhibits: Do Jerks Get Laid More?, a great attack on recent research by Jill Filopovic at Feministe (h/t: Alternet); and Science Daily‘s story, Women Have Not Adapted To Casual Sex, Research Shows (which I’ll discuss in the next posts). Daniel already discussed some of the recent research on homosexuality in The Gay Brain: On Love and Science, but this piece, the first of two, is dedicated to recent ‘evolutionary’ work on male-female relations, especially arguments about what is ‘natural’ in sexuality including that all-important question, ‘What do women want?’
Some of the problems that beset these articles are pretty general objections a person could have to evolutionary psychology, so I feel like I want to go over them a little bit (but I’ll try to keep it short).
Why women like bad boys: ev psych explains
Jill Filopovic discusses a story, Do Jerks Get Laid More? Good news for psycho-narcissists, by Jessica Wakeman, which is commentary on a story in New Scientist, Bad guys really do get the most girls (a similar piece also appeared on ABC News). In other words, this story has been ricocheting around the Internets for a while, getting reposted and commented upon all over the place (such as here, here, here and, my favourite, here, where democracy confirms ev psych stereotypes). With all sorts of people having things to say, some share a bit too much about their own personal lives and some involve cueing up familiar cliches (‘nice guys finish last,’ for example, is a favourite).
Continue reading “Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1”
Genomics and ‘Post-Neo-Darwinism’
I’ve been trying to put together my reader for a new unit (class) on human evolution at Macquarie University that I’ll be doing next semester. As usual, I’m doing this at the 11th hour, but this should be my last completely new, never-before-taught-at-my-university class for at least a year (I hope). In the process of checking out the most recent edition of my favorite human evolution journals, I happened across an odd and really thoughtful piece by Prof. Kenneth Weiss, who’s at Penn State. In the past, I’ve remarked about ‘post-neo-Darwinism,’ a term that I’m sure causes grimaces and eye-rolling, but that I think is worth discussing (I can’t take credit for the term; I think I heard it from Prof. Emily Schultz of St. Cloud State University at the last meeting of the American Anthropology Association).
By the way, Daniel posted a great ‘Evolution Round Up’ just recently with a whole lot of interesting material (I especially enjoyed Mo’s piece at Neurophilosophy on ‘Synapse proteomics & brain evolution’). We’re not really an evolution theme website, but it’s obvious how important it is to locate brain development in frameworks consistent with evolution. (I’ll come back to why being overly persuaded by evolutionary frameworks can be pernicious in a second, and it’s broader than my recent rant about memetics.)
Unfortunately, because the Weiss piece is more of an essay, in his recurring column entitled ‘Crotchets & Quiddities,’ there’s really no abstract of it, so I can’t link through to a nice concise summary of the piece. So, more than usual, I’m going to copy blocks of text from his essay, ‘All Roads Lead to… Everywhere?: Is the genetic basis of interesting traits so complex that it loses much of its traditional evolutionary meaning?’, before I get into my own commentary. Obviously, if you have access through a good research library, you should be able to get your hands on the original article. (More on Weiss’s columns can be found here — they’re quite good.)
The set-up for Weiss’s discussion is the idea that it doesn’t make sense to talk about ‘THE road’ to any particular place in a complex systems of highways and secondary roads because there are many routes:
With such choices, it doesn’t make much sense to ask, ‘‘What is the road to Rome?’’ In a somewhat similar way, rapidly growing knowledge about the nature of genomes and what they do suggests that what’s good for the Romans is good for biology as well. Instead of a gene for this and a gene for that, we face the possibility that all genes lead to everywhere, which may have important
implications with regard to our understanding of the genetic basis or evolution of traits like the shape of the skull, a skull, or this skull. If all real roads lead to the Circus Maximus, do all our craniofacial genetic roads lead to the foramen magnum?
Evolution Round Up
On the Basics
John Wilkins, What Is A Species?
The history and new emerging consensus on an old evolutionary consensus: on the origin of species
Todd Oakley, Coming to Grips with Common Descent
The real biggie in Darwin’s theory—common descent and the importance of phylogeny to understanding life
Robin Marantz Henig, Resolving Evolution’s Greatest Paradox
Marc Kirschner, systems biology, and how to get complexity from small, gradual changes. Also, the constraints on phenotypic variation enable evolutionary change. Includes a video.
PZ Myers, Historical Contingency in the Evolution of E. coli
Complex novelties can evolve, but depend not just on hopeful monsters but also the genetic background of the population
Andrew Brown, The Kindness of Strangers
Excellent biography of Robert Trivers, wunderkind of evolutionary theory
Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish
Podcast with the author, curator at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, of the same-titled book
Mo at Neurophilosophy, Synapse Proteomics and Brain Evolution
Synapses and their role in the history of life
On Humans and Other Primates
Randolph Nesse & Stephen Stearns, The Great Opportunity: Evolutionary Applications to Medicine and Health
Open-access article by two of the biggest names in evolutionary medicine in inaugural issue of the peer-reviewed Evolutionary Applications
Neuroanthropology 