on sex and suicide bombing

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.

blue is not better than white, and metaphor is unhelpful

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)

too many ideas, not enough blog

I have been blog-blocked since before December last year and need to make a concerted effort to move beyond it. Part of the problem has been journalistic–I’ve not wanted to write about anything that isn’t (a) news and (b) an exclusive. Considering the proliferation of science blogs, and considering that I too like to read multiple perspectives on different issues, I have no idea why that block took over my brain.

So, onwards.

There’s a real tension in talking about your work and your ideas in a public forum. I have three or four ideas for future projects that I feel quite excited about. One is really relevant to what I’m doing at the moment and is just waiting for me to get my head around some genetics. One is a sortof logical extension of the types of cultural phylogenetic work I do, and I have a masters student potentially interested in getting that strand of thinking out of the abstract and into real work. Another is a similar sort of project that I’d like to write a grant about in the future but I need to do some hardcore networking as it would encroach on other people’s databases. And the final one is totally left-field and while it’s evolutionary anthropology, it has nothing to do with phylogenies, the Pacific, and is only marginally kinship related.

I think it’d help me to articulate thoughts about these ideas, leave me some brain space for the other work I’m doing at the moment. But with most of them I do feel like I’ve actually had original and important ideas, and the urge to be discrete and cautious is winning out.

Still, the aspect of competition is motivating.