from month 08/2009

How much of a difference does culture make ?

In my latest post, I mentioned a very nice study that looked at differences in face-processing between East Asians and Westerners. Though it made a couple of fascinating points, the study also claimed that Asian culture strongly hindered Asians from understanding Western emotions. In fact, their ...

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Japanese smileys vs. Ekman faces

Some medias and the blogosphere (see [1] and [2]) are celebrating a new study [3] published in Current Biology, allegedly showing that recognition of facial expressions is not universal. Psychological universalists and relativists never seem to get tired of chewing that old bone of contentio...

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How cultural is cultural epidemiology? 2. Cultural embedding

This is the second part of Christophe's series of posts on what culture does to culture (the first post is here). *** Most cultural phenomena are embedded in other cultural phenomena. For one thing, any cultural phenomenon takes place within a community that already has many traditions, cultural ...

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Meaning in sounds?

Disclaimer: I'm venturing far, far, from my domain of expertise, supposing I even have such a thing. I know nothing about psycholinguistics (i.e., I need to be reminded on a regular basis about the difference between a phoneme and a morpheme). Please feel free to point out the inevitable inaccura...

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Linguistic Epidemiology – Part 1, Units of analysis

In his insightful post ‘Is language a replicator?’ (June 1, 2009), Nicolas Claidière usefully critiques a recent review article by Mark Pagel on evolutionary approaches to language change (Nature Reviews Genetics Vol. 10, June 2009). Pagel’s paper (and Nicolas’s critique) raises a range of ...

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Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller's new book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (Viking, New York, 384 pages) has stirred a controversy that we have already blogged about here. Dylan Evans has just reviewed the book in The Guardian. From his review: "Miller argues that marketers ...

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Scylla and Charybdis

Some of the most enduring kinds of cultural traditions have been interpretive in nature. My research has focused on the interaction of cognition and culture surrounding the Christian Bible, but in this series I am explore a broader general model of interpretive traditions. This is the fifth and ...

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Repeated learning makes cultural evolution unique

To appear in PNAS, a critique of close analogies between biological and cultural evolution : "Repeated learning makes cultural evolution unique" by Pontus Strimling, Magnus Enquist, and Kimmo Eriksson from the Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University. Abstract: Although ...

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Murder in Saint Andrews

Last week I was enjoying a very pleasant evening in St Andrews. The sky was clear, the last rays of sun were warming the beach, the sound of the sea was pleasanty resting my exhausted mind. On my way back from the beach I crossed a small car park and while I was peacefully enjoying this last moment ...

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The energetic benefits of cooperation in modern humans

Coming out in PNAS an article based on evolutionary modelling and suggesting that the energetic benefits of cooperation in modern humans explain human expansion: "Population stability, cooperation, and the invasibility of the human species" by Marcus J. Hamilton, Oskar Burger, John P. DeLong, ...

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