Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy
Alice Evans has a long write-up of some of her ideas about the origins of patriarchy, Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy: Patriarchy has persisted for at least ten millennia. Cereal-cultivation, […]
WEIRD cultures collapse traditional social technologies
In the comments Matt reminded me of this preprint that came out last week, Human Parental Relatedness through Time – Detecting Runs of Homozygosity in Ancient DNA. When I first skimmed it my thought was on how ingenious the methods for generating runs-of-homozygosity (to measure inbreeding) from lower coverage (i.e., low quality) ancient genomic results […]
A WEIRD society and the extinction of informal alloparenting
Today I saw a Twitter thread where the issue of raising children came up, and how best professionals can manage the challenge when public schools are not available in the same way as they were in the past with distance learning (this is all due to COVID-19). All sorts of “culture war” topics get entangled […]
The Dark Age roots of Western modernity
Since Joe Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous isn’t out until September, I will wait to pitch a full review (probably to National Review) until then (well, actually, I’ll pitch later this month and have it ready to go with the book is out). But […]
Culture and the norm of reaction
A new preprint, Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability, is useful at least as a literature review for the uninitiated: Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior, but largely independently of each other. Here we reconcile these two fields using a dual inheritance approach, which offers a more nuanced understanding […]
Peasant cultures abide
Many years ago I read Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815. Some portion of it was dedicated was the attempt of scientifically oriented rulers to encourage the cultivation of potatoes amongst their subjects. Today Russia is huge on potatoes, but during the reign of Catherine the Great, […]
Certainty in nonpaternity among the Himba of Namibia
Over the years one issue I’ve revisited over and over is that paternity certainty is quite high in Western societies (and from the spotty evidence we have, in most Asian and Middle Eastern societies as well). The reason this is interesting or of note is that there is an urban myth that 10% or so […]
Why cultures explode and fizzle
David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery is one of the few books on economic modeling which is written well enough to be a page-turner. Warsh’s narrative deals mostly with endogenous growth theory, which focuses on innovation as being the primary driver of economic growth (as opposed to classical […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 11: Cultural Evolution
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 11: Cultural EvolutionThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Podcasts)we discussed the field of cultural evolution with Richard McElreath of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthrop…
Going being WEIRD dichotomies-cultural anthropology with a genetical lens
From my 10 questions for Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza I asked him about the reaction of anthropologists to Cultural Evolution and Transmission, a book written in the late 1970s with Marcus Feldman: I entirely agree that the average quality of anthropological research, especially of the cultural type, is kept extremely low by lack of statistical knowledge […]
Rice culture reduces individualism
The above map comes from a 2014 paper, Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture. From the abstract: Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more […]
Learning from cultural anthropology as opposed to unlearning from cultural anthropology
On my other weblog one of the commenters, who I have nicknamed Syme (others call him Bentwig), proudly boasts about his training anthropology. Those who know me personally are aware that for me this is often a red flag for an individual who is willing to furiously declare that up is down if Edward Said […]
Most people have always thought human sacrifice was bad
A few days ago a minor controversy about the cultural context of human sacrifice in Mesoamerica cropped. A writer at Science, wrote a piece, Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital. The article was good. But it elicited some emotional responses from readers. As one sees in […]
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 […]
Why Darwinian metaphors work for start-ups
Peter Thiel is a deep thinker. I say that because some of my friends in the Bay Area who I respect for being punctilious practitioners of cognitive hygiene nevertheless exhibit awe in relation to their conversations with him (for what it’s worth, most do not agree with his politics). Though Thiel has the standard educational […]
Pick the right team, not the right answer (most of the time)
Often you will hear people say “why do people always engage in ‘group-think’”? As if group-think is always a bad thing! The reality is that group-think is often highly adaptive. That’s why people engage in it. You’re outsourcing expensive cognition to the collective, tradition, or in some cases to someone with expertise. Of course, there are […]
Why our society might go “splat!” on the windshield sooner than we think
Ray Kurzweil likes to talk about the fact that humans are bad at modeling exponential rates of growth. In this case, he’s talking about the rate of change in information technology. Whatever you think about Ray’s general ideas as outlined in books such as The Singularity Is Near, I think it’s a pretty good insight that […]
Why our society might go “splat!” on the windshield sooner than we think
Ray Kurzweil likes to talk about the fact that humans are bad at modeling exponential rates of growth. In this case, he’s talking about the rate of change in information technology. Whatever you think about Ray’s general ideas as outlined in books such as The Singularity Is Near, I think it’s a pretty good insight that […]
In 2546 Richard Dawkins will be remembered for “memes”
In 2006 South Park premiered Go God Go. The episode synthesized Buck Rogers in the 25th century, the Wii craze of the middle 2000s, and Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion engendered fame. In some ways, this was a sad reflection on Dawkins’ reputation, because before he got full-bore into atheist activism he was a great science […]
The return of the repressed: savage tunes
Fascinating paper, Evolution of music by public choice, in PNAS.* The paper is open access, but ScienceNow has a serviceable summary. One somewhat obvious implication from this sort of research, which utilizes human preference to shape a cultural form…