HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries in the ' people ' category
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 [...]
Robin McKee in The Guardian talks about “How Darwin won the evolution race”:
In early 1858, on Ternate in Malaysia, a young specimen collector was tracking the island’s elusive birds of paradise when he was struck by malaria. ‘Every day, during the cold and succeeding hot fits, I had to lie down during which time I [...]
Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker talks about “the woman behind the world’s chattiest Parrots”, Irene Pepperberg:
As the crowd at the Midwest Bird Expo waited for the cognitive scientist Irene Pepperberg to take the podium, the hum of human chatter was punctuated by the sound of parrots whooping it up—twittering and letting loose with wolf [...]
Written May 27, 2008 in Uncategorized, anthropology, language, language preservation, linguistics, people
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Written May 22, 2008 in cultural evolution, genetics, language, linguistics, people, phylogenetics
Emma Marris in today’s Nature reviews my field of research, and chats to a number of my friends and colleagues:
In the past five to ten years, more and more non-linguists such as Pagel have used the computational tools with which they model evolution to take a crack at languages. And one can see why. Like [...]
Over at the Freakonomics blog, the primatologist Frans de Waal answers readers questions on …how polygamist sects mimic the mating systems of animals, and why bonobos eat after sex, amongst other things.
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