“Times Higher Ed”, stop muddying the waters
I don’t want to turn myself into a blogger obsessed with sloppy scientific coverage in the media, but I feel someone ought to note, if only for the record, the absurd and misleading comments by Hannah Fearn in the British Times Higher Education Supplement – the trade journal of UK academics. In ...
Claude Lévi-Strauss: the first 100 years
Claude Lévi-Strauss - who is 100 years old today! - may well be the most famous anthropologist in the history of the discipline (or is it Margaret Mead?). Among French intellectuals, he cut a singular and imposing figure, second to none and close to none. By making their hearts beat faster with ...
Epidemiology of flu, epidemiology of names
Each week, millions of Google users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer.
Google labs compared ...
Journalistic teleology
(editor's note) This is Noga Arikha's first post here. She will be blogging regularly on cognitionandculture.net. A philosopher and science historian, Noga published Passions and tempers: a history of the humours, a New York Times Book Review editor's choice, in 2007. Welcome, Noga!
From a New ...
Do we bend it like Beckham?
This post is part of a small series of posts on social learning and cooperation.
Jean-Baptiste's reaction to Laurent Lehmann's (and his colleagues') criticism of Boyd and Richerson's models made me brood over the notion of prestige-biased imitation. This notion is central to their whole system: ...
A new book by Daniel Everett on the Pirahã
A new book on the Pirahã by Daniel L. Everett:
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.
(Pantheon Books in the US and Profile books in the UK, November 2008)
"A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while ...
This week: social learning and cooperation
This week on cognitionandculture.net, several posts will dwell on social learning and cooperation. Laurent Lehmann, Marcus Feldmann and others have a series of papers that call into question many assumptions frequently made about cultural transmission and the part it played in the emergence of ...
Is culture what makes us cooperate?
This post by evolutionary biologist Jean-Baptiste André is part of a small series of posts on social learning and cooperation.
A recent series of papers by Laurent Lehmann and colleagues (including Marcus Feldman) shed new lights on the cultural evolution of social behaviors, at least on a ...
Fame!
(Editor's note) Why are we interested in famous people? Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that social information served as gossip is inherently interesting for us - information about alliances, personal hatreds, couple formation and splits, is intrinsically rewarding to our brain - ...
Your brain needs a British headmistress
(Editor's note) Anthropologist Michael Stewart considers the unexpected impact of pop-cognitive science on British schoolgirls.
I was struck this week how easily work in the field of cognition and culture is acquired and transposed by others with strange agendas – as is always the case with an ...
“You work in WHAT field?”
I've been thinking for a while about the relevance of cognition and culture to the wider world. This problem is of course not restricted to our field , but we may have to overcome some special obstacles. During the US campaign, Palin and McCain raised (what they perceived to be) objections to the ...
Neuroanthropology or ethnographical neurosciences?
In Cognition and Culture, we often emphasize the value of experimental methods combined with fieldwork when studying culture. In contrast, using the tools of anthropology in psychology is rarely advocated but is also worth pursuing. Mindhacks (mindhacks.com) reports an interesting interview where ...
Intuitive fatalism: adaptation or by-product?
Most of us do not believe in supernatural causes. However, we may feel that celebrating an exam before having received the official result can influence our chances of success. Some of us might also have the intuition that it’s more likely to rain if we do not take our umbrella.
On Tuesday, ...
Phil. Trans. B issue on cultural transmission and the evolution of human behaviour
The November 12, 2008 issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Volume 363, number 1509) is a theme issue devoted to ‘Cultural transmission and the evolution of human behaviour’ compiled by Kenny Smith, Michael L. Kalish, Thomas L. Griffiths and Stephan Lewandowsky.
Here ...
Community and Religion: poor predictors of the bliss of nations
Let me begin with this video - it was shot last Sunday in Jerusalem, in the Basilic where the Holy Sepulchre, the tomb of Jesus Christ, is vigilated by two opposing platoons of Armenian priests and Orthodox popes, under the surveillance of two Muslim families, helped by the occasional police ...
Picture of the week: a Sangaku
This five-meters long triple tablet was hung in 1797 in the Onnma shrine in the Aichi prefecture (Japan) and contains 30 problems. It is called a Sangaku, a mathematical ex-voto representing solved geometrical problems. A book about Sangakus is forthcoming, Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple ...
Book: Us and Them, by David Berreby
A book by David Berreby:
Us and Them: The Science of Identity - Second edition with a new preface
(University of Chicago Press 2005, 2008)
As human beings we sort ourselves into groups. And once we identify ourselves as a member of a particular group—say, Red Sox fans—we tend to feel more ...
Book: Iron in the Soul: Dispacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus
A book by Peter Loïzos (Anthropology, LSE):
Iron in the Soul: Dispacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus
(Berhahn, 2008)
In his vivid, lively account of how Greek Cypriot villagers coped with a thirty-year displacement, Loïzos follows a group of people whom he encountered as prosperous ...
Cold and warm relationships: A universal metaphor?
Two papers have recently come out on the relationship between physical and interpersonal warmth.
Pedersen's illustration of Andersen's tale "The Little Match Girl"
The first, by Zhong and Leonardelly, shows that feelings of social exclusion can literally make you feel cold, while the second, by ...
Picture of the week: Is fieldwork ecologically valid?
Many anthropologists are uncomfortable with the idea of performing experiments on the people - friends - they meet during fieldwork. This is partly for ethical reasons (which, one might add, are rarely seriously reflected on). But it is also because they doubt the ecologically validity of tasks ...
“No evidence of Human Mirror Neurons”
That claim can be found in the latest issue of the Journal of Neurosciences.
If I were a sociologist of science, I would jump on mirror neurons - they are the perfect object if you want to study a scientific controversy today.
On the one hand, Mirror Neurons, found in several regions of the ...
Magic and inference
I must confess a predilection for the anthropological and psychological writing of the mid-twentieth century, when anthropologists were still trying to explain culture and the principles of the cognitive revolution in psychology were first being worked out. It was in the course of my most recent ...
Book: The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature
A book by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin:
The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature
(Bradford Books, MIT Press, 2008)
Surveys show that our growing concern over protecting the environment is accompanied by a diminishing sense of human contact with nature. Many people have little ...