HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries written in March 2007
Quentin Atkinson’s finally got himself a shiny new webpage
I am an evolutionary psychologist, interested in the evolution of human language and culture. I currently hold a post-doctoral fellowship within the Evolutionary Biology Group at the University of Reading in the UK. This site has just a bit of information about me, my research interests and some of the work I have done.
25 Oct 07: …and his website’s moved, so I’ve updated the above link to the new location.
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Written March 31, 2007 in evolution
Confirming something that Hollywood’s long suspected, a meta-analysis of 80 field studies show that alien species are far more dangerous predators to both mammals and birds, than the existing native predators (Alternate link).
Alex Mesoudi and Kevin Laland in Proceedings of the Royal Society B:
Recent anthropological findings document how certain lowland South American societies hold beliefs in ‘partible paternity’, which allow children to have more than one ‘biological’ father. This contrasts with Western beliefs in ‘singular paternity’, and biological reality, where children have just one father. Here, mathematical models are used to explore the coevolution of paternity beliefs and the genetic variation underlying human mating behaviour. A gene–culture coevolutionary model found that populations exposed to a range of selection regimes typically converge on one of two simultaneously stable equilibria; one where the population is monogamous and believes in singular paternity, and the other where the population is polygamous and believes in partible paternity. A second agent-based model, with alternative assumptions regarding the formation of mating consortships, broadly replicated this finding in populations with a strongly female-biased sex ratio, consistent with evidence for high adult male mortality in the region. This supports an evolutionary scenario in which ancestral South American populations with differing paternity beliefs were subject to divergent selection on genetically influenced mating behaviour, facilitated by a female-biased sex ratio, leading to the present-day associations of female control, partible paternity and polygamy in some societies, and male control, singular paternity and monogamy in others.
Abstract only here, or by-pass the publishing mafia and get it from Alex Mesoudi’s webpage
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Joe Campbell in the BBC News: “The UK’s regional accents are changing – and it’s not just the spread of Estuary English behind this shift, but the slang and intonation of Caribbean and Asian voices…”
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Creationists are funny – example #1, evilc27 on Youtube:
“The fact that we are born babies and evolve into people is evidence enough to dispel the myth of evolution. If we were born monkeys, then there would be billions of monkeys in the world as there are billions of people. This does not equate. People have [...]
The 10th anniversary issue of the wonderful Trends in Cognitive Sciences has a collection of interesting papers.
First up is Uddin et al’s The self and social cognition: the role of cortical midline structures and mirror neurons, which reviews some of the recent work on mirror neurons and social cognition and concludes:
Self- and other- representations are [...]
It’s actually thursday, but I think Mirror Neurons are so cool as to be worth a post on their own:
A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal. Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of [...]
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