Nick Enfield reviews Hurford’s The Origins of Grammar
In the Times Literary Supplement, Nick Enfield reviews James R. Hurford's new book The Origins of Grammar, Oxford UP, 2011 (a sequel to The Origins of Meaning, Oxford UP, 2007):
"If you could travel back to a time around the dawn of humankind, and if you encountered a people there whose only form ...
What explains foxhole theism?
The well-known dictum that there are no atheists in foxholes (the source of this phrase is uncertain) is false. After all, there is even a military organization for atheists, the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers. Having read several the testimonies from these military men and ...
Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death
A team of mathematicians and phycisists, Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, and H. Eugene Stanley, studied the "Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death" by analysing the dynamic properties of 107 words recorded in English, Spanish and ...
Emotion in Eastern and Western Music
Just out in PLoSOne, an article on musical cognition entitled "Expression of Emotion in Eastern and Western Music Mirrors Vocalization" by Daniel Liu Bowling, Janani Sundararajan, Shui'er Han, Dale Purves (all from the Purves-lab at Duke).
Abstract:
In Western music, the major mode is typically ...
Policing friendships. Lessons from the equine world
Imagine two young chimpanzees. One is swaggering, stood on two feet, his coat all puffed up, frantically waving his arms. The other, few meters away, is hooting loudly while beating his hands on the bark of a dead mango tree. They’re both ready to charge. Yet, their postures give away much of ...
The Psychosemantics of Free Riding
Forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and available here, "The Psychosemantics of Free Riding: Dissecting the Architecture of a Moral Concept" by Andrew W. Delton, Leda Cosmides, Marvin Guemo, Theresa E. Robertson, and John Tooby. It illustrates the progress that has been ...
The Social Evolution Forum
Peter Turchin (co-author of Secular Cycles [1]) and Michael Hochberg recently launched the Social Evolution Forum (socialevolutionforum.wordpress.com), a web platform dedicated to naturalistic thinking about institutions.
From the site's presentation:
The Social Evolution Forum has three dimensi...