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Entries in the ' cultural evolution ' category
Written July 13, 2008 in anthropology, cultural evolution, evolution, genetics, language, linguistics, phylogenetics
In today’s, Evolution: Education and Outreach, Anastasia Thanukos takes A Look at Linguistic Evolution:
Anyone who has ever tackled a Shakespeare play knows that English has changed substantially in the 400 years since Elizabeth I ruled England. In fact, Elizabethan English can seem like a completely different language from the one we speak today. Just try describing [...]
Written July 4, 2008 in anthropology, cultural evolution, europe, evolution, genetics, human prehistory, it-was-better-in-my-day, language, music, stupidity
….and the award for the stupidest science story I’ve seen in months goes to LiveScience.com for “Cave Men Loved to Sing“, in which we’re told that our cave-dwelling ancestors used echo-location:
With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn’t be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their voices like [...]
Written June 24, 2008 in anthropology, cultural evolution, evolution, genetics, human prehistory, people
Paul Ehrlich talks about his recent study of Polynesian canoes, and whether human culture evolves via natural selection:
Biologists have a pretty good idea of both how flies become resistant to DDT and how humans and primates have diverged over time. That’s because the mechanism underlying these processes is the same. Using evolution we can understand [...]
Stephen Shennan in the 2008 Annual Review of Anthropology (doi):
The term evolution in archaeology has accumulated an enormous range of meanings, with different implications, over many years. Traditionally, however, when not referring to the biological evolution of putatively ancestral species, it has occurred most commonly in the phrase cultural evolution (sometimes used interchangeably with social [...]
John Hawks has a nicely detailed discussion about handling exponential growth in demographic models. Very interesting, and hopefully he’ll keep them coming:
Exponential growth is a feature of current human populations, and was may represent how the human population behaved during some episodes of its demographic history. However, “exponential” can mean different things to different people, [...]
Written May 31, 2008 in chimpanzees, conferences, cultural evolution, evolution, genetics
The annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting is on next week in Kyoto, Japan. Anyone going? Looks like there’s going to be a lot of interesting primatology talks…
Shown here is the phylogeny of biscuits (or maybe the cladogram of cookies). From the ground-breaking work of Smith (2005) The Affinities of Jaffa Cakes: Using Cladistics to Classify Biscuits. Note the controversial basal subgrouping of the pseudobiscuits clade.
Edit: I wasn’t particularly convinced by the treelike-ness of these biscuitoids, so I threw the data [...]
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