Archive for 'Culture' Category

A Replicated Typo empire

Just want to note that GNXP contributor bayes has transformed A Replicated Typo into a fascinating group weblog. Feed here.

Cultural Diversity, Economic Development and Societal Instability

Most of you in the science blogosphere have probably come across Razib’s recent post on linguistic diversity and poverty. The basic argument being that linguistic homogeneity is good for economic development and general prosperity. I was quite happy to let the debate unfold and limit my stance on the subject to the following few sentences [...]

Social and individual behavior genetics

I believe it was Bryan Caplan who introduced me to the analogy of a child’s personality being like a rubber band; parents, in particular adoptive parents, can twist and pull a child in particular directions so long as the child is under their direction, but once the child leaves the home the rubber band “snaps [...]

The Media Noose: Copycat Suicides and Social Learning

I always remember 2008 as the year when the entire UK media descended upon the former mining town of Bridgend. The reason: over the course of two years, 24 young people, most of whom were between the ages of 13 and 17, decided to commit suicide. At the time I was working in Bridgend, so [...]

Birth Months of World Cup Players

Four years ago I (and others) got in a dispute with Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt (DL) about their claim that birth month had a meaningful impact on later success in professional sports because kids born in January were “old” for their age group and were, therefore, more likely to make elite travel, national teams [...]

The two cycles

I’m reading Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East. The book basically outlines the international state system in the ancient Near East which fostered diplomatic relationships between the monarchies of the period. It is noted that this state system and diplomatic culture did not make it through the chaos which marks [...]

The returns on homogeneity

A few days ago on Twitter I wondered if economists had calculated the costs of the world having a diversity of languages, instead of one language. The logic is that unintelligibility naturally throws up barriers to communication, and the flow of ideas and labor. This is one reason why the European Union necessarily has less [...]

Population size predicts technological complexity in Oceania

Here is a far-reaching and crucially relevant question for those of us seeking to understand the evolution of culture: Is there any relationship between population size and tool kit diversity or complexity? This question is important because, if met with an affirmative answer, then the emergence of modern human culture may be explained by changes [...]

Experiments in cultural transmission and human cultural evolution

For those of you familiar with the formal mathematical models of cultural evolution (Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981; Boyd & Richerson, 1985), you’ll know there is a substantive body of literature behind the process of cultural transmission. In this respect, we have a great deal of theoretical knowledge regarding the three vectors of transmission: vertical, oblique [...]

Party like a Persian

MTV Not Involved With ‘Jersey Shore’ Imitations: For the show he calls the “Persian Version,” his casting company wrote: “If you are at least 21 years old, appear younger than 30, and are outrageous, outspoken and a proud Persian-American, then Doron Ofir Casting and 495 Productions, the team who brought you ‘Jersey Shore,’ are looking [...]

Cultural innovation, Pleistocene environments and demographic change

It is well documented that Thomas Robert Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population greatly influenced both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace’s independent conception of their theory of natural selection. In it, Malthus puts forward his observation that the finite nature of resources is in conflict with the potentially exponential rate of reproduction, [...]

It’s complicated

Human genome at ten: Life is complicated (H/T Dr. Daniel MacArthur). This is one reason that economists are in more demand than historians in public life. Economics is reducible in a way that history is usually not, or at least historians tend not to be interested in doing. Also, the average economist is much smarter [...]

Phylogenetics, cultural evolution and horizontal transmission

For some time now, evolutionary biologists have used phylogenetics. It is a well-established, powerful set of tools that allow us to test evolutionary hypotheses. More recently, however, these methods are being imported to analyse linguistic and cultural phenomena. For instance, the use of phylogenetics has led to observations that languages evolve in punctuational bursts, explored [...]

Matt Stone & Trey Parker on NPR

They review the past 14 years.

Helicobacter pylori strains among Iranians

Ethnic and Geographic Differentiation of Helicobacter pylori within Iran: The bacterium Helicobacter pylori colonizes the human stomach, with individual infections persisting for decades. The spread of the bacterium has been shown to reflect both ancient and recent human migrations. We have sequenced housekeeping genes from H. pylori isolated from 147 Iranians with well-characterized geographical and [...]