News

 

Big changes and big news! Starting in the Fall of 2015, I will begin as Director of the Environmental Studies Program at Binghamton University. My ‘home’ department will be Anthropology - a large active department with lots of great people doing fantastic research. In addition to the incredible EnvStudies program, I am particularly excited about the chance to work with PhD students  and the opportunity to work with David Sloan Wilson and his fantastic Evolutionary Studies Program. 

We will be moving over the course of the summer. Good bye California beach and sun. Hello, woods of the Northeast!

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B

Ethan just let me know that the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B -- edited by James Steele, Peter Jordan and Ethan Cochrane is now available online.

Cultural and linguistic diversity: evolutionary approaches

Recent work has shown that language and other human cultural practices can be considered as evolutionary systems operating on the Darwinian principle of 'descent with modification'. An emerging field of interdisciplinary science builds on phylogenetic and other methods adopted from biology, and adapts them to explain the transmission histories of suites of cultural traits (whether languages, social structures, or artefacts). This theme issue asks what social processes lead to coupled and decoupled transmission of different cultural traits or suites of traits, and how their transmission histories can be estimated retrospectively using quantitative methods. Understanding the factors affecting descent histories is central to explaining how cultural diversity arises and how it is maintained. These questions are of interest and relevance not just to social science and evolutionary theory, but also to planners working on topics such as endangered language maintenance.

UCLA Lecture Videos on Behavior, Evolution and Culture Now Available Online

The UCLA Center of Behavior, Evolution & Culture hosts lectures by top notch scientists working on issues of evolution and the study of human behavior and culture. In the past, I have given BEC lectures as has Dr. Michael Cannon and (I believe) Dr. Hector Neff. These lectures run throughout the academic year and are held on Mondays at UCLA, Haines Hall. They are a great opportunity to view the latest work on the use of evolution as a means for explanation in the social sciences (including anthropology). You can get more information about the upcoming lectures here: http://www.bec.ucla.edu/BECSpeakerSeries.htm

The UCLA BEC center has now started recording these lecturers and putting them on the internet. These videos are put online a bit after each lecture and make a great way of learning about cutting edge research while not having to suffer the commute to/from UCLA. For example:

Caleb Finch 1/5/09 The Role of Diet and Infection in Human Evolution: http://blip.tv/file/1672088

Karthik Panchanathan 1/12/09 Quantifying the Bystander Effect in a Multi-player Dictator Game: http://blip.tv/file/1672132

You can view the set of already recorded lectures at:http://blip.tv/search?q=ucla+bec&x=0&y=0 . The lectures are also available on iTunes U -- Search for "ucla behavior evolution culture".

An Education in Evolution

Like many universities, the teaching of evolutionary theory at CSULB is front and center in most students' class schedules. Evolution is often taught in classes, but only as a feature of a particular topic. For example, I assume that the classes in biology (and this is actually an assumption since I know there have been reports of faculty who hold creationist beliefs - even in the biology department) teach their subject matter in a way that is consistent with evolution. But there are few (only 1 actually) classes that specifically focus on the details and structure of evolutionary theory. Ironically, that course is not taught by biologists, but by anthropology faculty (physical anthropologists who are part time instructors for biological sciences). I do not believe it is offered very often and given state of our physical anthropologists (moving away from biology and retirement plans) I do not know if it is even taught any more. If it is still taught, that course has minimal influence on the general student body: the set of pre-requisites for the course make it largely an elective option for biology majors -- not a central course that would benefit everyone. One alternative to the biology offering is Kevin MacDonald's course in Psychology (Evolutionary Psychology). MacDonald, though, is a nutball given his interpretive story-telling application of "group evolution" to explain the apparent success of Jewish populations. His connection with Nazis and angering everyone on campus (see also here) means that I don't have much hope that sending a student to one of his classes is going to lead to them learning much about evolutionary theory per se (at least in the way most evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science perceive and use it).

Following David Sloan Wilson's "New Humanities" curriculum, I've started talks with Jeff Davis in Sociology about creating some kind of curricular structure that could link evolutionary offerings in the campus and to provide more of a structured set of courses for everyone. Right now this initiative at CSULB is basically conceptual, but it is a long term goal of mine to find a way of making education in evolution a more central part of every student's degree training. Given the promise of such an effort, I am excited to see it take shape.

One set of resources that might be useful in creating an evolution-focused curriculum are the free online lectures that have been produced by the Cassiopeia Project. Available via iTunes, the videos cover basic science and include lectures on the origins of the universe, complexity, chemistry, physics, quantum mechanics, origins of life, space, relativity, etc. The evolution lectures consist of 10 chapters (ranging from 7 to 17 minutes in length) that can be downloaded and played on any computer equipped with iTunes (i.e., windows or mac). Check 'em out at:

http://www.cassiopeiaproject.com/vid_evolution.php

Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection, Study Shows

The quotes in here suggest that no one has ever demonstrated that cultural variants are shaped by natural selection. Odd, considering that many of the folks I know have been doing just that since the late 1970s. I guess our marketing and press releases weren't up to snuff - or we didn't get the right validators to gush over our work. Nonetheless, it sounds interesting - though it won't be out in PNAS until Feb 19th.

[From Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection, Study Shows]

Announcing: The Journal of Evolutionary and Historical Science

Using the new PLoS ONE model of open-access with community-based reviews as a basis, I am happy to announce the creation of the Journal of Evolutionary and Historical Science (JEHS). JEHS is a journal that is meant to bring together researchers interested in studying the evolution of ourselves. By researchers, I mean archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians, evolutionary biologists, geographers, and many others. Through an open community based review system in which everyone gets to participate in commenting on articles, we hope to foster interdisciplinary discussion on the application of evolutionary theory in the study of historical phenomena. I strongly believe that many disciplines, particularly those moribund through 'traditional' thinking, trapped by the 'haves' who work hard to keep change comfortable for themselves, and those in which change is twittering on the edge of discovery, need to have venues that allow for more rapid innovation and more global and immediate feedback of ideas. As the EHB article demonstrated the engine of change is really innovation rate - and its become clear that in disciplines like archaeology innovation is often stifled, in place of rewordings of the same old kinds of approaches. Community-based publications permit us to present our ideas to the world and let researchers and scientists provide the feedback as to whether they are useful or not. Why let the old-white-men-and-women determine what is "appropriate" or not in secrecy? Free the ideas! Publications in JEHS will initially focus on getting great papers that have no chance of seeing the light of day. Papers that might go into obscure edited volumes that no one will own or read. The edited volume phenomenon is particular detrimental to non-US researchers who may not be able to afford the cost of the books. Through an open-access policy, everyone everywhere can read the material for free. In this way, it will be possible to create a larger international group of scientists than is possible with traditional forms of publications. We will also accept great conference papers or other kinds of submissions that are professionally done but could use feedback from the great minds that exist out in the world. We all have these kinds of papers - and all-too-often the idea of polishing it up to send to a traditional journal (with the attendant and obligatory "correct" citations of individuals, correct "framing" of wording to appease the Old-Men/Women, tricky wording to fool those who might be easily offended, and other huge time sinks) is too horrible to really consider. We want those papers - the world needs those papers. Organizationally, I would like to encourage as many editors (section editors, each with different kinds of expertise) as possible. These individuals (who can serve on multiple sections as desired) simply work to encourage submissions and to do the technical reviews on articles as they come in. The latter task requires making sure that the papers meet technical standards and that spelling and other basic requirements are met. Thus the burden should be fairly light and the turn around on paper submissions should be fast. The more people who can participate as section editors, the better - since it will mean more papers, and faster throughput. If anyone out there wants to become a section editor, simply send me an email (clipo@csulb.edu). Our aim is to get the journal indexed and crawled like a regular journal. Who needs paper anyways these days? We have applied for an ISSN number and will work with the open-access community to integrate JEHS into existing frameworks for citation analysis, indexing, etc. The advantage of all of this is that the cost of running the entire journal is zero (other than our own efforts) with no print costs. This means we can accept innovative articles, long pieces, color figures, huge data sets, etc. It's a new day in the academic publication world. JEHS is hosted on an open-source database back end platform from Simon Fraser called Open Journal Systems. The OJS software is remarkably complete - and comes standard with roles, email feedback, automated submission system, etc. Very impressive. Ultimately, I'd like to migrate the journal to TOPAZ that PLoS ONE uses - once the software (which is also open-source) is released (which is supposed to happen soon).