Anthroplogy
razib | June 1, 2006Dave Munger reports that "face blindness," prosopagnosia, might be found in ~2% of the population. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, so I'm not convinced, but, if it does pan out this seems to have two primary implications off the top of my head
1) It is a signal for mutational load, and the genetic pathways that lead to face blindeness are sensitive to developmental stress (due to bad environment or genes) or the loci that control them are subject to abnormally high mutational rates
2) There is something else going on and face blindness is a pleiotropic side effect
In…
razib | April 24, 2006Check out John Hawks' commentary on this story about chimpanzees attacking a taxi and killing the driver. Never forget that we are a relatively gracile species.
razib | March 21, 2006Dienekes points me to this article, Aurignacian ethno-linguistic geography of Europe revealed by personal ornaments. In case you don't know, the Aurignacians were the first modern humans in Europe and flourished between 35-20,000 years BP. It isn't surprising that cultural diversity was a feature of our species at this point, the famous "Great Leap Forward" had come and gone, but this story reminds me of a book I read a few years ago, The Ancestress Hypothesis. In many ways the author's argument is a focused response to the ideas promoted by Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind. While…
razib | March 5, 2006This story about the consumption of Bonobos is getting a lot of circulation today. Several years ago there was a book published on this topic, Eating Apes, so this shouldn't surprise anyone. To some extent the "ape eating" stories are partly fueled by P.T. Barnum like fascination, I believe that ape consumption is cognitively redolent of cannibalism, without quite fitting the bill. The stories about ape consumption in Africa highlight two opposing tendencies, the first to treat apes as just another food source, and the second to consider apes a form of human. It seems likely to me that…
razib | February 9, 2006Blonde children exhibit more fear response? A new paper reports:
...Hair pigmentation was found to be significantly associated with behavioral inhibition in the sense that blond children exhibited higher fear scores. As in American samples, blue-eyed children had a higher fear score than did other children, but this difference was not statistically significant.
Jerome Kagan has reported these sort of findings before. Coloration is a funny trait, for example, there is now evidence that Europeans are highly constrained on one locus which affects complexion, while being high polymorphic on…
razib | January 25, 2006This article about the halting of land development in Scotland because of "fairies" under a rock is illustrative. When comparing nations in regards to belief in the paranormal we often assume that "modernity" and education have banished magical thinking. I don't believe it is so, rather, magic is still there, ready to surface when given an opportunity. Many would commend Europeans on their acceptance of evolutionary theory, but it is important to note that surveys of public opinion on the other side of the Atlantic suggest a folk far more demon-haunted imagination than one might suppose (…
razib | January 20, 2006In the interview below with anthropologist Dan Sperber I allude to the "naturalistic paradigm" in anthropology. What does this mean? Sperber, along with Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer and Laurence Hirschfield are anthropologists who treat culture as an outgrowth of a natural and reducible process mediated by the human mind. Sperber often speaks of the "epidemiology of representations." He examines the dynamics which constrain the transmission of cognitive representations within and between cultures, in short, memetics with an awareness of the limits and biases of the mind as elucidated by…