Tübingen summer school on “The Evolution of Morality”

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Sunday, 19 February 2012

News Events

 The Forum Scientiarum of Tuebingen University organises a summer school on “The Evolution of Morality” (June 12th – 16th, 2012). Twenty graduate students and junior scientists from all over the world will have the opportunity to work on the question of the evolution of morality with Professor Frans de Waal and Professor Gerhard Ernst. Application deadline, March 30.

Topic: What kind of new perspectives and implications can be drawn from insights of the theory of evolution for the understanding of the morality of human beings?  The summer school will focus on the evolutionary fundaments of morality presenting as lecturer the primatologist Frans de Waal. Spending much time watching the behavior of apes and monkeys, de Waal brings forward the argument that the core concept of morality has already been present in the pre-social tendencies of nonhuman primates. As a consequence he attacks what he calls the "Veneer Theory", which holds that human ethics and morality - established as a cultural innovation - would only be a thin crust masking our Hobbesian brutish nature.

Read more: Tübingen summer school on “The Evolution of Morality”

Sterelny's 'The Evolved Apprentice'

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Sunday, 29 January 2012

News Publications

A new book by Kim Sterelny: The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (MIT Press 2012) : "Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from other great apes. No other great ape lineage--including those of chimpanzees and gorillas--seems to have undergone such a profound transformation. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes.

Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information sharing practices across generations and how information sharing transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging, which led to positive feedback linking ecological cooperation, cultural learning, and environmental change. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments."

Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications

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Friday, 20 January 2012

News Events

A conference on "Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications" at UCLA, October 19–20, 2012

Many lines of research on culture, mind, and brain can no longer be neatly separated. Some questions run together, thanks to our growing understanding of the genome, the biological roots of human sociality, and the mutual constitution of cultures and selves, as well as the complex interactions between the physical, cultural, and social environments underlying health and illness. The aim of this 2-day conference is to highlight emerging concepts, methodologies and applications in the study of culture, mind, and brain, with particular attention to: (1) cutting-edge neuroscience research that is successfully incorporating culture and the social world; (2) the context in which methods are used as well as the tacit assumptions that shape research questions; and (3) the kinds and quality of collaborations that can advance interdisciplinary research training.

Read more: Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications

International Conference on Thinking 2012 London

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Friday, 20 January 2012

News Events

The 7th International Conference on Thinking will take place on the 4^th to 6^th July 2012 at Birkbeck College and University College London focusing on the most recent research on thinking from psychological, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience perspectives. To submit papers, posters, or symposia proposals and to register please go to http://www.ict2012.bbk.ac.uk/.  Deadline for submission: 31 March 2012.

Read more: International Conference on Thinking 2012 London

Early social cognition in three cultural contexts

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Monday, 16 January 2012

News Publications

Coming out of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology An important comparative study on Early social cognition in three cultural contexts by T. Callaghan, H. Moll, H. Rakoczy, F. Warneken, U. Liszkowski, T. Behne, & M. Tomasello, published in 2011 (Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development, 76(2), 1-142) and available here.

Abstract: The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants’ and young children’s earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a series of eight studies in which we systematically assessed the social-cognitive skills of 1- to 3-year-old children in three diverse cultural settings. One group of children was from a Western, middle-class cultural setting in rural Canada and the other two groups were from traditional, small-scale cultural settings in rural Peru and India.

In a first group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children’s most basic social-cognitive skills for understanding the intentions and attention of others: imitation, helping, gaze following, and communicative pointing. Children’s performance in these tasks was mostly similar across cultural settings. In a second group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children’s skills in participating in interactive episodes of collaboration and joint attention. Again in these studies the general finding was one of cross-cultural similarity. In a final pair of studies, we assessed 2- to 3-year-old children’s skills within two symbolic systems (pretense and pictorial). Here we found that the Canadian children who had much more experience with such symbols showed skills at an earlier age.

Our overall conclusion is that young children in all cultural settings get sufficient amounts of the right kinds of social experience to develop their most basic social-cognitive skills for interacting with others and participating in culture at around the same age. In contrast, children’s acquisition of more culturally specific skills for use in practices involving artifacts and symbols is more dependent on specific learning experiences.

Why are the faces of primates so dramatically different from one another?

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Sunday, 15 January 2012

News Publications

UCLA biologists working as "evolutionary detectives" studied the faces of 129 adult male primates from Central and South America, and they offer some answers in research published online Jan. 11, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and available here. The faces they studied evolved over at least 24 million years, they report.

 

 "If you look at New World primates, you're immediately struck by the rich diversity of faces," said Michael Alfaro, a UCLA associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and the senior author of the study. "You see bright red faces, moustaches, hair tufts and much more. There are unanswered questions about how faces evolve and what factors explain the evolution of facial features. We're very visually oriented, and we get a lot of information from the face."
 Some of the primate species studied are solitary, while others live in groups that can include dozens or even hundreds of others.
"We found very strong support for the idea that as species live in larger groups, their faces become more simple, more plain," said lead author Sharlene Santana, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in ecology and evolutionary biology and a postdoctoral fellow with UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics. "We think that is related to their ability to communicate using facial expressions. A face that is more plain could allow the primate to convey expressions more easily.
"Humans have pretty bare faces, which may allow us to see facial expressions more easily than if, for example, we had many colors in our faces."

More here

Anthropology of this Century online

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Sunday, 15 January 2012

News Publications

The new online journal Anthropology of this Century edited by Charles Stafford. "publishes reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles." While not uniquely focused on cognition-and-culture themes, is quite open to them. In the just published 3rd issue, for instance:

•  Rita Astuti: "Some after dinner thoughts on Theory of Mind"
•  Maurice Bloch: "The hard problem: Soul dust: the magic of consciousness By Nicholas Humphrey"

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing

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Tuesday, 10 January 2012

News Publications

 In the online and open access Scientific Reports of Nature, a fascinating paper on "Flavor network and the principles of food pairing" by Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow and & Albert-László Barabási

^{The backbone of the flavor network. Each node denotes an ingredient, the node color indicates food category, and node size reflects the ingredient prevalence in recipes. Two ingredients are connected if they share a significant number of flavor compounds, link thickness representing the number of shared compounds between the two ingredients. (Full size image (162 KB)}

"The cultural diversity of culinary practice, as illustrated by the variety of regional cuisines, raises the question of whether there are any general patterns that determine the ingredient combinations used in food today or principles that transcend individual tastes and recipes. We introduce a flavor network that captures the flavor compounds shared by culinary ingredients. Western cuisines show a tendency to use ingredient pairs that share many flavor compounds, supporting the so-called food pairing hypothesis. By contrast, East Asian cuisines tend to avoid compound sharing ingredients. Given the increasing availability of information on food preparation, our data-driven investigation opens new avenues towards a systematic understanding of culinary practice.

More here

Summer School "Images: Content, recognition, classification"

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Sunday, 08 January 2012

News Events

A CNRS Summer School on : "Images: Content, recognition, classification", Paris, July 1-5, 2012. Organization: Roberto Casati, Institut Nicod, CNRS-ENS-EHESS, Anouk Barberousse, Université de Lille 1, Alberto Voltolini, Università degli Studi di Torino. Deadline for applications:  Feb 10, 2012.

How do we interpret images’ content? How do we tell images from other visual media? What can images represent? What ontology better describes their content? How do humans and machines recognize and classify images? Images are universal instruments of representation and communication. In many intellectually complex activities (the execution of plans and projects, the identification of people and places, navigation, data collection, medical diagnoses) the use of images is essential. Their interpretation requires little teaching (as opposed to, say, that of written language). But at the same time images are inherently ambiguous, and their interpretation may pose difficult problems. This is particularly evident now that countless images are available in online archives. Their content is often made explicit by annotations (captions, tags, place and time stamps). Software for automatic image interpretation has developed at an impressive rate in recent years, but some problems remain hard to tackle, especially when moving from the identification of instances of objects (tokens) or the recognition of simple categories (plants, vehicles) to attempts to work with more complex categories. Ontological/philosophical issues interface here with widening knowledge about cognitive processes and technological development.

Read more: Summer School "Images: Content, recognition, classification"

Attributing Mind to Groups vs. Group Members

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Friday, 06 January 2012

News Publications

 Forthcoming in Psychological Science, an interesting social cognition article by Adam Waytz and Liane Young entitled "The Group-Member Mind Trade-Off: Attributing Mind to Groups Versus Group Members" available here.

Abstract: People attribute minds to other individuals and make inferences about those individuals’ mental states to explain and predict their behavior. Little is known, however, about whether people also attribute minds to groups and believe that collectives, companies, and corporations can think, have intentions, and make plans. Even less is known about the consequences of these attributions for both groups and group members. We investigated the attribution of mind and responsibility to groups and group members, and we demonstrated that people make a trade-off: The more a group is attributed a group mind, the less members of that group are attributed individual minds. Groups that are judged to have more group mind are also judged to be more cohesive and responsible for their collective actions. These findings have important implications for how people perceive the minds of groups and group members, and for how attributions of mind influence attributions of responsibility to groups and group members.

Conference on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective

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Thursday, 29 December 2011

News Call for Papers

Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Cologne (Germany), May 25-27, 2012 on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective. Deadline for poster submission: March 1st, 2012

What are the psychological processes and neural mechanisms enabling social cognition? How might social cognition be modulated depending on whether one is actively engaged in social interaction with someone or merely observing others interact? What is the impact of this distinction for research methodologies in social psychology and social neuroscience as well as for our understanding of conditions like autism? In particular, this conference brings together experts from various fields to promote the prospects of a second-person approach for future research into the foundations of social cognition.

Read more: Conference on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective

Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012

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Tuesday, 27 December 2011

News Events

Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012. Application deadline: February 15, 2012

Brief Course Description:
The course aims to present the state of the art in research on the self from philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience,  sociology,  and  cognitive  anthropology.  Themes  revolve  around  the  nature  of  the  self,  as  revealed through  self-consciousness,  body  perception,  action  and  joint  action,  and  its  embedding  in  society  and  culture. Historical and developmental perspectives provide other angles on the self. The course presents a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion on the self from multiple perspectives. It is directed at advanced graduate students, postdoctoral  fellows  and  junior  faculty  working  in  philosophy,  psychology,  cognitive  neuroscience  and  cognate disciplines.

Read more: Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012

Middle childhood: Evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives

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Tuesday, 27 December 2011

News Publications

 An interesting special issue of Human Nature (22/3, Sept. 2011) on middle childhood:

From Benjamin C. Campbell’s Introduction:

“Middle childhood is recognized by developmental psychologists as a distinct developmental stage between early childhood and adolescence, defined by increasing cognitive development, emotional regulation, and relative social independence. Adults have increasing expectations of children during middle childhood, as reflected in Sheldon’s White’s (1996) description of this stage as “the age of reason and responsibility.” Developmentally, the onset of middle childhood is defined by Piaget’s (1963) “5 to 7 transition,” with the end marked by the onset of puberty... “In this special issue we examine middle childhood in both evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives to understand its origins, physiological correlates, and ecological and cultural variability."

Read more: Middle childhood: Evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives

PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the CEU, Budapest

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Sunday, 04 December 2011

News Jobs

PhD studentships are available for the doctoral program in Cognitive Science at Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary. Application deadline: 25 January 2012.

The Department of Cognitive Science at CEU invites applications for doctoral student positions starting in September 2012. This is a research-based training program in human cognition with social cognition and learning as core themes. Research topics include cooperation, communication, social learning, cultural transmission, embodied cognition, joint action, developmental social cognition, strategic decision-making, problem solving, visual cognition, sensory and statistical learning, visual psychophysics, computational neuroscience, and social cognitive neuroscience. Students will follow courses in cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, cognitive anthropology, computational cognition and linguistics, and will receive practical research training in the laboratories of the members of this new department.

Read more: PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the CEU, Budapest

Summer school on Theories of Communication in Riga (July 2012)

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Thursday, 01 December 2011

News Events

There will be an International Summer School at the University of Latvia, Riga, 8-18 July 2012, on the theme: Theories of Communication. What linguistic knowledge and interpretive mechanisms are required to explain the phenomena of inferential communication? Should we favour an explanation rooted in Relevance Theory? And what insight can a pragmatic approach give us into the evolution of human communication? These and other questions will be the focus of the 2012 edition of the International Summer School in Cognitive Sciences and Semantics. Among the topics explored will be the following: (i) information structure, (ii) temporal reference, (iii) indirect speech acts, (iv) non-literal uses of language, in particular, metaphor and related tropes, including hyperbole, simile, sarcasm and irony, (v) hinting, (vi) the nature of word meaning, (vii) cooperation and antagonism in conversation, (viii) slurs, and (ix) the idea of a dynamic lexicon.

Invited organizers: Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University, US) & Dan Sperber (Central European University, Budapest, H, & CNRS, Paris, FR). Faculty: Elisabeth Camp (University of Pennsylvania, US), Robyn Carston (University College London, UK), Ivona Kucerova (McMaster University, Canada), Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University, US), Peter Ludlow (Northwestern University, US), Dan Sperber (Central European University, Budapest, H, & CNRS, Paris, FR), Matthew Stone (Rutgers University, US), Deirdre Wilson (University College London, UK).

Read more: Summer school on Theories of Communication in Riga (July 2012)

3-year DPhil studentship in anthropology at Oxford to study ritual

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Wednesday, 30 November 2011

News Jobs

Applications are invited for an ESRC-funded 3-year DPhil studentship based in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography to begin in October 2012. The student will be supervised by Professor Harvey Whitehouse (Oxford) and Dr Quentin Atkinson (University of Auckland).

This studentship examines the broad question: what is the relationship between ritual and social organization in the human past? The aim will be to build on recent research suggesting that the intensity of emotional (especially dysphoric) arousal experienced by ritual participants correlates inversely with frequency of performance (Atkinson and Whitehouse, 2010). Whereas low-frequency/high arousal ("imagistic") rituals are associated with small, localized, and intensely cohesive communities, high-frequency/low-arousal ("doctrinal") rituals are found in large-scale, fast-spreading, and diffusely cohesive communities (Whitehouse,1995, 2000, 2004). Temporal and spatial distributions of data may also be used to evaluate predictions generated under a range of models of cultural transmission and evolution (Richerson and Boyd, 2005; Henrich, 2009; Pagel, Atkinson, and Meade, 2007; Turchin, 2009). By matching model predictions to observed data under a variety of simulated conditions this DPhil project will seek to identify likely drivers of the cultural shifts as well as to test the performance of competing models of ritual transmission.

Read more: 3-year DPhil studentship in anthropology at Oxford to study ritual

EHBEA Conference 2012

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Friday, 28 October 2011

News Events

A message from Jamie Tehrani:

This year's European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association Conference is being hosted by Durham University on 25-28th March 2012. On behalf of the local organising committee I would like to warmly invite members of the Institute to come along and consider giving a talk. The deadline for the submission of abstracts for presentations is 25th November 2011. Further details about the conference, deadlines and registration can be found on the website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/jeremy.kendal/EHBEA2012/Welcome.html

Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics

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Saturday, 22 October 2011

News Call for Papers

We are seeking abstracts for a session entitled "Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics" (Panel Organizers: Stephen Chrisomalis and Samar Zebian) to be held at the Society for Anthropological Sciences 8th Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, February 22-25, 2012. Deadline for abstract: November 20, 2011.

A considerable body of important research bears directly on the relationship between mathematics and aspects of language, cognition, and culture.  However, disciplinary trends in anthropology and linguistics have insufficiently integrated this important work into basic theories of human behavior, cognition, and cultural variability.  We are seeking papers on any aspect of mathematics, numeracy, or number systems that clarifies and expands the theoretical contribution of the social-scientific study of mathematics beyond its current purview.  We particularly are interested in papers that bridge the various human sciences including cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, history, and/or philosophy.

(More below the fold)

Read more: Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics

PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the Central European University (Budapest)

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Saturday, 15 October 2011

News Jobs

PhD studentships are available for the doctoral program in Cognitive Science at Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary. Application deadline: 25 January 2012.

The Department of Cognitive Science at CEU invites applications for doctoral positions starting in September 2012. This is a research-based training program in human cognition with social cognition and learning as core themes. Research topics include cooperation, communication, social learning, cultural transmission, embodied cognition, joint action, developmental social cognition, strategic decision-making, problem solving, visual cognition, sensory and statistical learning, visual psychophysics, computational neuroscience, and social cognitive neuroscience. Students will follow courses in cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, cognitive anthropology, computational cognition and linguistics, and will receive practical research training in the laboratories of the members of this new department.

Read more: PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the Central European University (Budapest)

Anthropological light on the mind-body problem

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Friday, 30 September 2011

News Publications

In the last issue of Cognitive Science (vol. 35, #7, Sept 2011), “Cross-Cultural Similarities and Differences in Person-Body Reasoning: Experimental Evidence From the United Kingdom and Brazilian Amazon”, an excellent article by Emma Cohen, Emily Burdett, Nicola Knight, Justin Barrett (available here).

The abstract begins: "We report the results of a cross-cultural investigation of person-body reasoning in the United Kingdom and northern Brazilian Amazon (Marajó Island). The study provides evidence that directly bears upon divergent theoretical claims in cognitive psychology and anthropology, respectively, on the cognitive origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-body dualism. The article ends: "The cross-cultural study reported offers the first systematic, cross-cultural analysis of person-body reasoning across a broad range of capacities, provides firm evidential grounds for the refinement of theory and method in future cognitive psychological and anthropological research, and suggests numerous lines of potential further inquiry on the emergence and spread of patterns of recurrence and variation in mind-body dualism in particular, and person-body reasoning generally."

Evolutionary-psychology bashing analysed

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Wednesday, 14 September 2011

News Publications

Online in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, an interesting article by Edouard Machery and Kara Cohen: “An Evidence-Based Study of the Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences” (doi: 10.1093/bjps/axr029) available here. Here is how Machery describes the article (at the blog It is Only a Theory):

"Philosophers of biology often have a very dim view of evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary-psychology bashing has been a successful cottage industry. I have been unimpressed by many of these criticisms, in part because of the feeling that the critics of evolutionary psychology were very poorly informed about what evolutionary psychology was. Imo, many of them simply have no serious acquaintance with the field they are criticizing. But, so far, my reaction was just that: an opinion, a feeling. Not anymore. 

In a forthcoming article, Kara Cohen and I have provided support for this impression. using a new tool: quantitative citation analysis. We show that the usual, very negative characterization of evolutionary psychology is largely mistaken, and that philosophers of biology have been fighting a strawman. It is also noteworthy that quantitative citation analysis could be particularly useful for philosophers of science who want to add quantitative tools to their toolbox."

Read more: Evolutionary-psychology bashing analysed

Google Effects on Memory

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Friday, 05 August 2011

News Publications

A new article entitled "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips" by Sparrow, Liu & Wegner should be of interest to scholars interested in the effect of culture on cognition. It documents the effect of having access to online ressources of information on the way in which people look for answers (Exp. 1), remember things (Exp. 2), remember where to find information (Exp. 3) and whether they are more likely to memorize where to find some information rather than the information itself (Exp. 4).

Abstract: "The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves."

Generosity as a by-product of selection for reciprocity

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Wednesday, 27 July 2011

News Publications

A new article entitled "Evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can explain human generosity in one-shot encounters" by Andrew W. Deltona, Max M. Krasnowa, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (Published online in PNAS, 25 July 2011) suggests that 'generosity', the fact that we are willing to incur costs to provide anonymous others with benefits, is a necessary byproduct of an adaptation for reciprocity.

Abstract: Are humans too generous? The discovery that subjects choose to incur costs to allocate benefits to others in anonymous, one-shot economic games has posed an unsolved challenge to models of economic and evolutionary rationality. Using agent-based simulations, we show that such generosity is the necessary byproduct of selection on decision systems for regulating dyadic reciprocity under conditions of uncertainty. In deciding whether to engage in dyadic reciprocity, these systems must balance (i) the costs of mistaking a one-shot interaction for a repeated interaction (hence, risking a single chance of being exploited) with (ii) the far greater costs of mistaking a repeated interaction for a one-shot interaction (thereby precluding benefits from multiple future cooperative interactions). This asymmetry builds organisms naturally selected to cooperate even when exposed to cues that they are in one-shot interactions.

Polemics on Evolutionary Psychology

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Saturday, 23 July 2011

News Publications

In PLoS Biology (July 19, 2011) a polemical article entitled “Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology” by Johan J. Bolhuis, Gillian R. Brown, Robert C. Richardson, and Kevin N. Laland criticising ‘Santa Barbara’ (i.e., Cosmides and Tooby’s) approach (that many here at the ICCI favour).

Abstract: Evolutionary Psychology (EP) views the human mind as organized into many modules, each underpinned by psychological adaptations designed to solve problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. We argue that the key tenets of the established EP paradigm require modification in the light of recent findings from a number of disciplines, including human genetics, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and paleoecology. For instance, many human genes have been subject to recent selective sweeps; humans play an active, constructive role in co-directing their own development and evolution; and experimental evidence often favours a general process, rather than a modular account, of cognition. A redefined EP could use the theoretical insights of modern evolutionary biology as a rich source of hypotheses concerning the human mind, and could exploit novel methods from a variety of adjacent research fields.

This has already elicited critical comments from John Hawks. and from Rob Kurzban here. More should come.

The Knowledge Commons: Research and Innovation in an Unequal World

Details

Friday, 08 July 2011

News Call for Papers

The St Antony's International Review (a peer-reviewed, academic journal established by graduate members of St Antony's College at the University of Oxford) is publishing a 'Call for Papers':

"The problem of common-pool management is an ancient and enduring question in public policy and governance. ...Yet much of the literature concerning the problems and benefits of common-pool systems does not obviously apply to the knowledge commons. Knowledge is distinct from limited resources like pastures in several regards. First, knowledge is composed of individuals’ cognitions, rather than material objects. Second, while pastures might be depleted by overgrazing, the knowledge commons seems to be threatened by what Paul David calls “over-fencing”: if key bodies of knowledge are closed off, then it is difficult to innovate. Third, knowledge exchange and innovation are arguably crucial for economic growth. Finally, a lack of knowledge about oneself and one’s environment deprives one of an essential human virtue: the ability to act as a knower"

Abstracts due July 30, 2011, Papers due November 18, 2011. More here

New issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture

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Tuesday, 17 May 2011

News Publications

A new and excellent issue (11, 1-2) of the Journal of Cognition and Culture. For the Table of Contents,

Read more: New issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture

Patrick Suppes Prize for Nancy Nersessian

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Wednesday, 04 May 2011

News Events

Nancy Nersessian has been awarded the inaugural Patrick Suppes Prize for Philosophy of Science. This award to Nancy Nersessian is a nice recognition of what can be done with interdisciplinary approaches taking into account both cognition and culture. Indeed, her work consists in describing "the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that lead up to scientific innovation, both theoretical and experimental."

In her book, Creating Scientific Concepts, Nancy Nersessian provides detailed analyses of model based reasoning, which she shows to be at the heart of conceptual change. He work includes both very detailed analyses of individual scientists' cognitive processes and a specification of the role of the social, cultural and material environments. For instance, she has been illustrating with case studies the theory of distributed cognition, and enriching it with new ideas and concepts. Her methodology includes mainly cognitive history and cognitive ethnography.

A new online journal of reviews in anthropology

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Monday, 02 May 2011

News Publications

ANTHROPOLOGY OF THIS CENTURY is a new free online journal "that publishes reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles". Judging from the first issue (see in particular the reviews by Charles Stafford, the Editor, and James Laidlaw, and the feature piece by Maurice Bloch), anthropological issues of cognition and culture relevance are welcome.

For the Table of contents,

Read more: A new online journal of reviews in anthropology

Bradley Franks' Culture and Cognition

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Sunday, 01 May 2011

News Publications

A new and important book by Bradley Franks: Culture and Cognition: Evolutionary Perspectives ( Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

The blurb: "Human culture depends on human minds for its creation, meaning and exchange. But minds also depend on culture for their contents and processes. Past resolutions to this circularity problem have tended to give too much weight to one side and too little weight to the other.

In this groundbreaking and timely work, Bradley Franks demonstrates how a more plausible resolution to the circularity problem emerges from reframing mind and culture and their relations in evolutionary terms. He proposes an alternative evolutionary approach that draws on views of mind as embodied and situated. By grounding social construction in evolution, evolution of mind is intrinsically connected to culture – resolving the circularity problem.

In developing his theory, Franks provides a balanced critical assessment of modularity-based and social constructionist approaches to understanding mind and culture." For the table of content,

Read more: Bradley Franks' Culture and Cognition

Where and when did languages emerge? The answer

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Saturday, 16 April 2011

News Publications

In Science, a new paper by Quentin D. Atkinson "Phonemic Diversity Supports aSerial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa" is generating a lot of well-deserved interest (see here, here, or here for instance).
Abstract: Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder – effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.