The Extension of Biology Through Culture
A juvenile capuchin monkey observes a skilled adult male eating a nut it has just broken using a hammerstone. This picture illustrates a special issue of PNAS on the Extension of Biology Through ...
Cecilia Heyes on the social tuning of reason
How are evolution, cognition, and culture interconnected? Cecilia Heyes and I are both interdisciplinary scholars trying to help address this basic issue but we go about it in generally ...
Sensitivity to shared information in social learning
In July we’re reading Whalen et al. (2017): Sensitivity to shared information in social learning.
In the study, three experiments are presented with regard to the source of informants’ ...
Do apes produce metonymies?
Your friend Olga is coming for a drink. You put two plates on the table, one with olives and the other with almonds. When both plates have been emptied, you ask Olga, “Do you want anything ...
First Social Epistemology Network Event, Oslo, May 22-24, 2018
The Social Epistemology Network Event aims to bring together leading figures in social epistemology — Keynote Speakers will be Cristina Bicchieri, Sandy Goldberg, Alvin Goldman, Katherine Hawley , and Paulina Sliwa — , together with early to mid-career researchers, and outstanding graduate students from around the world....
The sky is falling: negativity bias in social transmission
For June’s edition of the journal club, we’re reading Bebbington et al. (2017): The sky is falling: evidence of a negativity bias in the social transmission of information.
The paper ...
Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development 2018
The Cognitive Development Center at CEU is pleased to announce the eighth annual BCCCD meeting in Budapest, Hungary (BCCCD18, January 4-6, 2018).
We welcome submissions from all areas related to cognitive development. Previous BCCCD meetings featured a variety of topics such as comparative cognition, cognitive bases of culture, biological bases of cognition, conceptual learning, perceptual learning, early social cognition, language acquisition, executive functions, metacognition, communication, numeracy, and object cognition....
EVOLANG XII (2018): Call for Papers
The 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Toruń, Poland, 16-19 April, 2018) invites substantive contributions relating to the evolution of human language. Submissions should be made by September 1, 2017; notification of acceptance will be made by December 1 2017. Registration for the conference opens July 1, 2016. Please share this call widely!...
Tilting titling?
Conversation with Jack Goody was never dull. He combined an endless curiosity for ethnographic details with a deep interest in broad anthropological questions. Here is a picture of some of his books (both English originals and French translations) on my shelves, illustrating the variety of his interests. I hope Jack would have enjoyed this post, but it is not related to his work. Notice a peculiar ethnographic detail in the picture? (I would not have paid much attention to it, except as a source of mild annoyance, if it were not for an article in today’s French edition of Slate). The titles in English read from top to bottom, those in French from bottom to top.
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Modularity and Recombination in Technological Evolution
In May we read Mathieu Charbonneau's 2016 article, Modularity and Recombination in Technological Evolution. The article is describing a key property of cultural variation, recombination, and its ...
Random drift and culture change
In April we chose to read Bentley, Hahn and Shennan's paper Random drift and culture change (2004).
This very interesting study explains cultural variants on three real-world datasets using a ...
Inaugural Cultural Evolution Society Conference, Jena, 13-15 September 2017
Call for abstracts: submission deadline: June 1, 2017.
The Cultural Evolution Society supports evolutionary approaches to culture in humans and other animals. We are committed to fostering an integrative interdisciplinary community spanning traditional academic boundaries from across the social, psychological, and biological sciences, and including archaeology, computer science, economics, history, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy and religious studies....