now on nature network

I’ll be mirroring “culture evolves!” over at Nature Network from today. Everything will still be here (I didn’t spend hours on that banner for nothing!) as it’s an experimental move on my part. I think that if Nature Network is successful in its bid to become the social networking site for scientists it’ll be a good thing, but for now I think it’s still being treated with caution. Lots of sign-ups and not much activity.

So go! Sign up and join groups and leave comments… and stuff. Especially you social scientists! Get in there with the crystallographers and yeast genomics people. Let there be more participants with “evolution” in their tags. Or anthropology. Or culture that isn’t in a petri dish.

Not that I have anything against petri dishes.

“smoking” rooks: more proof that corvidae will take over the world

I saw this in the Metro this morning but the Telegraph article is virtually the same:

Rooks have been spotted swooping on to the tracks at Exeter St David’s railway station in Devon and placing their wings over the smoke to collect the fumes underneath.

Hee. It’s no news that rooks, ravens and crows are the intellectual heavyweights of the bird world. Crows especially are innovative tool users. Smoking out parasites seems to be a pretty clever trick – if indeed that’s what this one is doing. Of course, it could just be a delinquent juvenile having a sneaky puff. If it starts to bring its mates along I’ll be really impressed.

the need for science

The piece by Harry Kroto is actually entitled “The wrecking of British Science“, but it contains positive messages as well as cautions.

In the Guardian:

Many think of the sciences as merely a fund of knowledge. Journalists never ask scientists anything other than what the applications are of scientific breakthroughs. Interestingly, I doubt they ever ask a musician, writer or actor the same question. I wonder why.

The scientific method is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew “belief”, the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all, curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess, and it is responsible for the creation of the modern, enlightened portion of the world that some of us are fortunate to inhabit.

Coming after the appalling set-piece of science “journalism” concerning an entirely groundless “electrosmog scare” on Panorama this week, such sentiments are timely.

origins of resistance to science

An intriguing piece in Science this week about the childhood origins of adult resistance to scientific ideas. It’s a review, not experimental, and as such doesn’t test any of the hypotheses directly. It’s also USA-centric without really delving into the particularities of the American situation, and there are no substantial further suggestions, but that might be space constraints. It’s worth a read.

a thoughtful piece about thoughtful work

There are any number of articles available on the internerd about How To Give A Good Academic Talk, or Ten Tips To Get Your Paper Published. Etcetera. Current Biology has a piece by Mark Ptashne: On speaking, writing and inspiration. It’s not a how-to guide, but a really nice exposition about the elusiveness (both as a listener and a speaker) of the simple, clear species of academic presentation.

Current Biology is a gem this month, with interesting articles on imitation in dogs, female-led infanticide in chimps, and a new look at sexual selection in barn swallows. Like, actual organisms and behaviour in more than one article!

bob, was it not enough to organise a rock concert?

This makes me cringe:

Bob Geldof and the BBC have unveiled plans for a website and television series that aim to record every human society.

The Dictionary of Man website and an eight-part television series, The Human Planet, will be made with help from BBC Worldwide, the BBC’s commercial arm. Crews will travel the world to try to film the 900 separate groups of people that anthropologists believe exist.

The makers hope the project will produce a definitive record of mankind.

First, it is clearly too much to ask that we cease using “man” and “mankind” as generic terms for all human beings. Humanity. PEOPLE.

Second, and bear in mind I am a big fan of ethnographic databases, why exactly do we need to spend this money in this way? Is it so that when languages die out, and people cannot continue their accustomed lifeways due to things like industrial logging and waterway pollution, then people in the UK can feel okay because they have a glossy set of pictures to look at?

Third: good luck with that.

the two cultures revisited (ad nauseum)

A short while ago I attended one of a series of talks set up to create some dialogue between evolutionary and interpretive approaches in archaeology. I was only able to attend the last of the series, but others who attended earlier talks reported that the presentations themselves (one from each of the two “styles”) were interesting and informative, but that the discussions that took place afterwards, where, ostensibly, the dialogue was to get into full swing, were quite fraught, full of misunderstandings and tense “science versus post-modernism” exchanges.

Which is, as always, a shame. I think to most scientifically-minded archaeologists and anthropologists–indeed anyone in the social sciences who appreciates the scientific method–the lack of useful dialogue, collaboration, and proper communication with our colleagues who have other approaches is felt as a keen deficit. From afar, we can observe the wealth of rich material (dare I say “data”?) collected by social anthropologists (for instance). More importantly, we can observe their ability to contextualise, interpret and suggest new or alternative hypotheses for what we, with the necessity of abstract or simple models, are sometimes missing in our approaches.

However, after attending the last talk, I don’t think that they (“they” being in this case those in the social sciences who probably prefer the term humanities) really feel any keen need for such dialogue in the other direction. I could be (and would be delighted to be) very wrong about this. I got the sense of a lamentable misunderstanding how science as applied to human affairs. Misunderstanding the scientific method is of course a more general malady, from the sub-editors at the Evening Standard right on through to nutritionists with dodgy qualifications.

But at this talk there were some SHOCKERS.

everybody needs a fishbowl

One of the most stimulating talks at the European Human Behaviour and Evolution meeting last week was by Randy Nesse from the University of Michigan, who should be well-known to anyone whose had any interest in evolutionary psychology over the last ten years. Nesse has been at the forefront of investigating how an evolutionary perspective can lead to new and useful insights into psychiatry. I think that in the earliest stages this endeavour suffered a little from over-application of the A word (adaptationism); though I have absolutely no problem with the concept of maladaptive behaviour, I think that detractors were right to be skeptical about the assertion that many psychological problems were in fact “mismatched” “over-active” or “malfunctioning” adaptive psychological mechanisms built in the Pleistocene. Nesse’s talk showed how that kind of thinking has changed into considering that it is not the problem per se, such as depression, that is adaptive, but that the broader class of cognition and/or behaviour into which depression fits, in this case mood, that has adaptive features.

The main point of his talk was that in (evolutionarily?) important life areas such as love, health, work, intelligence, family etc we have (a) wants, (b) expectations, and (c) realities. From these, we can identify where certain things are poorly balanced, and where our “hopes” are unrealistic in the medium-term. Unreasonable “hopes”, Nesse argued, seem to be at the core of much depression that he sees clinically, and restructuring the pursuit of goals can be very helpful.

Relatedly, Presentation Zen links to Barry Schwarz’s TED talk on the illusory link between a plethora of “choices” in life and happiness. Schwarz argues that in an ecology of too many choices, we become detrimentally paralysed, and only ever just-satisfied. Constraints on options (the fishbowl of the title) might lead to less frustration and unhappiness with our choices. I strongly believe this is true, and not just with the trivial example of consumer anxiety. Parental investment and mate choice seem to be two important evolutionary areas where members of industrial/urban societies are overloaded with choices. Whether the choices are real or illusory also seems important too – for instance, the great anxiety of balancing career/family/personal goals seems to me to be clouded by the illusion that one can maximise all those choices.

The video is well-worth watching, as are some of the other TED talks on YouTube. I like the focus of TED, but at US$4400 for an invitation to a meeting, I do feel this is quite the privileged club.

Related paper by Nesse here [pdf]

the shape of things to come

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me, what with conferences and talks and meetings and trying to settle into a post-thesis work routine. As always with meetings I came away with my mind buzzing about potential ideas for the future, and as is usual with me, I just assume I will remember all the details and never write anything down! I will write a little about the EHBE meeting once I dig out the program, and I have a half-written post about tensions in the social sciences that I really should finish so I stop brooding over it.

the “least-publishable unit”

An interesting piece in the Chronical of Higher Education about the least-publishable unit: the smallest chunk of research that could be written up into a paper, and why academics might choose to focus on those instead of the Big Important Paper.