culture evolves!

Nine month teaching fellowship in Biological Anthropology at the University of Bristol.

The position is in a joint Archaeology/Anthropology department and will provide sabbatical cover for Dr Mhairi Gibson.

Deadline for applications May 16th. Apply through the link above.

David Lawson, Kesson Magid and I have just published On Sex and Suicide Bombing: An evaluation of Kanazawa’s ‘Evolutionary Psychological Imagination’. This is a critique of Satoshi Kanazawa’s 2007 paper: “The Evolutionary Psychological Imagination: Why You Can’t Get a Date on a Saturday Night and Why Most Suicide Bombers are Muslim.”

Many objections to evolutionary psychology are ideological or political. This is not the case in our paper: nothing makes me (and my co-authors) froth at the mouth more than bad science. We say:

The beauty of the scientific method is that it allows us to ask, and sometimes answer, tough questions.
Addressing the tough questions without the transparency afforded by the scientific method is not brave: it is simply cavalier.

Kanazawa’s paper is full of bad science. We are not the first to criticise him on such grounds, but it bears repeating that when there are controversial and sensitive issues at stake, we beholden to demand a high standard of scholarship and science.

The blue-beats-white winning bias in judo as reported in 2006 appears to have been confounded by a number of factors, and there is no bias after all. So say Dijkstra & Preenen in Proceedings B:

A study by Rowe et al. reported a winning bias for judo athletes wearing a blue outfit relative to those wearing a white one during the 2004 Olympics. It was suggested that blue is associated with a higher likelihood of winning through differential effects of colour on opponent visibility and/or an intimidating effect on the opponent. However, we argue that there is no colour effect on winning in judo. We show that alternative factors, namely allocation biases, asymmetries in prior experience and differences in recovery time are possible confounding factors in the analysis of Rowe et al. After controlling for these factors, we found no difference in blue and white wins. We further analysed contest outcomes of 71 other major judo tournaments and also found no winning bias. Our findings have implications for sports policy makers: they suggest that a white–blue outfit pairing ensures an equal level of play.

I love negative results. They’re a complete bummer if it was your darling positive result in the first place, but they provide the clearest demonstration of how science works. The red-wins bias reported in 2006 appears to be still (pardon the pun) in play!

From the realms of philosophy of biology, an interesting article by Bjorn Brunnander about intentional language in evolutionary discourse. Is the trade-off between the efficiency-and-power of metaphorical shorthand, and the misconceptions it produces (the never-ending of conflation of proximate and ultimate), actually producing more problems than it solves?

Many evolutionists today argue for the need to make evolutionary theory an integrated part of psychology and the social sciences. If this is the agenda it should be in the interests of these thinkers to worry about factors that affect the probability of successful communication across boundaries. The track record of communication of evolutionary thinking is not altogether impressive. This is commonly recognised by evolutionists themselves, as shown by presentations of ‘popular misunderstandings’. The fact that some recurring misconceptions are clearly what we would expect to find if processing of the intentional shorthand was unreliable should make us lift questions about efficiency of exposition above the realm of rather effortless rationalisation.

Is the language of intentional psychology an efficient tool for evolutionists?(doi)

The not-blogging-because-I’ve-not-anything-meaningful-to-say phenomena has really got to stop. Email’s become like that, too. I put it off and then it’s three months later and I feel like I have to write a mini autobiography, when really, two lines at the time would’ve been sufficient. So, in points, some interesting things of late:

1. Modern Approaches to Investigating Cultural Evolution, a LERN/CECD postgrad/postdoc workshop organised by my friend Tom Currie here at UCL. We had 13 speakers and over 40 participants discussing the latest cool research in cultural evolution. Lots of empirical stuff on linguistics (yay for data!) but also a good coverage of archaeology, psychology, economics and anthropology as well. More details including photos are at the link.

2. Rediscovering Darwin: The real story of Darwin’s finches. John van Wyhe gave the CEE Grant Lecture this year. van Wyhe has been the man behind Darwin Online, (the project to put the complete works of Darwin on the internet), and he’s an historian of science who gives an entertaining talk. This one traced the evolution of a “meme”: the persistent myth that Darwin “discovered” evolution on the Galapagos while observing the beaks of the finches. The talk did a cracking job of pulling together all the strands of the myth, how and where they originated–nice example of scientific detective work.

3. Gave a lecture for our Bio Anth Masters on Comparative Methods in Anthropology. This was my first “methods only” seminar, so it had some interactive bits, and hopefully seeded the idea that anthropologists can use phylogenetic/comparative methods for a whole range of interesting questions–not just how primates are related to each other!

4. Reviewed some papers, and cracked on with writing my own. (Interesting for me!)

5. Speaking of papers, have become more and more enamoured of Papers, a great little bit of Mac software that does what I couldn’t manage if left to my own devices: organise my PDF library. It’s a bit like iTunes for papers. The latest update has allowed for automatic matching of PDFs with their bibliographic information in the Web of Science and Google Scholar, filling the gap neatly for social sciences. Previously the automatic matching facility had only been in PubMed. You can also do full searches of databases from within the program, and set it all up so your choice of directory structure is created on your drive and each new paper filed into it. The user interface is pretty as well. Check it out.

On a more recreational note, I saw Barry Adamson and Matana Roberts at the London Jazz Festival this week. The drummer for Matana Roberts, Frank Rosaly, was phenomenal to hear and watch. Highly recommended.

Backlash isn’t really the right word.

Evolutionary Psychology Bingo.

I fully expect to see this linked-to, emailed, and generally be the object of a bit of discussion online. On the one hand, I’m all for the satirisation of poor science (a more biting example appeared last week), especially poor science that uses the tools (evolutionary thinking) that I do. We must, after all, stringently promote the self-correcting aspect of the scientific method. And there is some poor “evolutionary psychology” research around.

On the other hand: seeing that bingo card just makes my stomach sink into the floor.

There are plenty of people who are attempting to rehabilitate the term “evolutionary psychology” into an umbrella concept covering all research in the human evolutionary behavioural sciences (EP is much shorter and catchier, for one thing). This encompasses things like evolutionary economics, behavioural ecology, cultural evolution, evolutionary archaeology, etc, i.e. things that I do.

I am not actually in favour of this rehabilitation anymore. A couple of years ago I was, but I do think that the public perception of evolutionary psychology as catastrophically simplistic, sexist, privileged and daft is (sadly) firmly entrenched. We (the academic we) might be able to rehabilitate it within academic circles, but it is badly damaged in public discourse.

I’m not wanting to discuss in detail why EP has a bad name, as that’s a really nuanced and important set of problems that I can’t do justice to today. Part of it is poor science, sure. But there is poor science everywhere, just like there is poor customer service, poor computer hardware, and poor music in the Top 40: all examples where is supposedly a quality filter somewhere along the line. Part of it is bad science reporting. Evolution is a technical subject, and terms such as “nature”, “culture”, and “development” do not have the same meanings to people reading a news report as they do to people writing a research paper. It is also a subject dealing with trends and probabilities and on-averages: not with predictions about individual behaviour.

That last point cannot be stressed enough, as some of the cells in the bingo card seem to stem from a mis-reading from the population level to the individual. For example:

“I can rotate three-dimensional objects in my mind and you can’t.”

If I remember second-year perceptual psychology well enough, men are, on average, better at mental rotation tasks than women are. There are population bell-curves of ability, and they overlap a lot, but the mean of men’s mental rotation ability is some value higher than the mean value of women’s. This does not mean men can and women can’t. This does not mean an individual man will always do better than a woman.

These subtleties are really. Really. Important. And seeing the bingo card does not give me hope that these subtleties have been or can be communicated easily. I think it is the responsibility of scientists to communicate the exact nature of those important messages to journalists and the public. I also think that journalists and the public have a responsibility to want to hear them and not dismiss them as “quibbles” or “difficult statistics”, and simply latch on to the sensational. Especially if it is controversial, as is the case with gender issues.

I can’t cover everything in one blog post, but the other thing that saddens me about the bingo card is the conflation of “evolutionary” with “natural”, “genetic”, “permanent”, and “unchangeable”. A lot of very smart people (Patrick Bateson springs to mind) have written about how this conflation is central to the wearisome “nature-nurture debate”, but this has also not been communicated well beyond academic journals.

I’m not sure how to remedy this. I don’t feel I have any new insights, but perhaps I should start on a couple of posts detailing the ways in which the term “human nature” should be employed with utmost caution. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because we all need to know what exactly we’re referring to.

Anyhow, satire is always useful for stimulating debate. At the very least it’s a clever discussion aid for a seminar on evolutionary psychology.

Unless you spend your Mondays in seclusion, you’ll most likely have heard that yesterday Radiohead announced their new album, “In Rainbows” would be released in just over a week, October 10th. (If you don’t know who Radiohead are then … there really is no hope for you).

The most interesting thing about this–besides the sneak-speed announcement and timeframe for such a long-awaited album–is the method of distribution. Radiohead are currently without a record deal, and so they’ve chosen to release the album themselves via download. A variable-contribution download, which means that you choose how much you are willing to pay for it–including nothing at all.

Cue much discussion on the future of the music industry and record companies; the inherent value of music; consequences for music charts; what people are actually buying when they purchase an album, etc, etc. It is true to say that it was going to take a superstar band to do this and get the industry and public to really take notice, and it’s also true to say that what the band have done is taken control of the inevitable “leak” and subsequent “illegal” file-sharing, and done it on their own terms.

What is intriguing to me, and why I’m writing about this on my ostensibly-academic blog, is that they have set up a really fascinating social experiment, one that is not too far off the sort of thing that psychologists, economists, and anthropologists are increasingly using to understand human social behaviour: an economic game. Economic or public-goods games take some aspect of behaviour that is context-specific and examine how the interplay of private versus social factors affect the decisions we make. Famous examples include the Prisoners Dilemma and the Ultimatum game. These sorts of artificial situations are set up to try and understand why and how prosocial behaviours such as altruism, punishment, co-operation and group co-ordination can evolve. Evolutionarily-minded social scientists are intrigued by these things as often they appear to run counter to our long-term (genetic) or short-term (economic) self-interests.

Which begs the question: why would anyone in their right mind enter anything apart from £0.00 in that little box? Why, furthermore, are there people complaining about the free download, who would rather pay a tenner for a CD? Something to hold in your hands, perhaps? Hardly: CD covers, liner notes, artwork … all these things are available (free) on fansites and music sites 0.0007 seconds after an album release.

Yet people did pay money, according to their self-reports on websites and forums[1]. And people felt guilty about not paying anything … even those who by their own admission regularly download music from file-sharing or peer-to-peer networks without paying for it, or without a twinge of conscience.

What is going on here? (more…)

Matt B. asked the Nature Network bloggers a couple of questions. I meant to answer them on Friday but I couldn’t decide the first one!

Who’s your favourite scientist (dead or alive) and why?

The reason I couldn’t decide was I couldn’t figure out what my criteria for “favourite” should be! There are scientists who have been inspirational or instrumental to me becoming a scientist … but mainly through their communication of ideas, rather than the science they themselves performed.

Then there are people who I know: mentors or colleagues, but that just seems like unfair weighting when they’re people you can chat to in the pub.

So I thought I’d pick someone outside of anthropology or biology: the physicist Richard Feynman. He was a marvellous communicator and teacher, and knew the importance of inspiring people–but he also did groundbreaking theoretical work and defended vociferously the importance of “big idea” science as well as the individual sense of satisfaction from puzzle-solving. And he was the ultimate geek who thought safe-cracking was a fun hobby. And he played the bongos.

Edit: Read everyone else’s answers to the question here.

If you could have another job or career outside of science, what would it be and why?

I have had a job outside of science: I was a jewellery designer for a couple of years. It was rewarding when it was good and dreadful when it wasn’t.

But my alternate life is the one where I became a professional cellist, played with an innovative chamber group like the Kronos Quartet, and had a top ten indie/classical crossover album. Why? Because music is as creative and intriguing and rewarding as science.

In the spirit of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science site (who linked to this), Bad Archaeology:

Bad Archaeology is the brainchild of a couple of archaeologists who are fed up with the distorted view of the past that passes for knowledge in popular culture. We are unhappy that books written by people with no understanding of real archaeology dominate the shelves at respectable bookstores. We do not appreciate news programmes that talk about ley lines (for example) as if they are real. 

I look forward to posts debunking such theories as the drowned civilisations of South East Asia.