What can Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Mortal Kombat teach us about cultural evolution? In shopping malls of the 1970s, arcades were where people played digital games together, huddled around custom-built cabinets.…
Languages spoken by southern African foragers are easily identified by their iconic click consonants. In the past, these languages and their speakers were often referred to by the umbrella term “Khoisan”.…
For more on this topic, read the full article, Relationship between trackmakers of the Laetoli footprints from gait synchronization, by Wataru Nakahashi.…
Cross-cultural research in the social sciences is expanding rapidly, helping us understand how different cultures shape human behaviour. But here’s the big question: Are the tools we use actually measuring what we think they are in diverse populations? This issue of construct validity—ensuring research instruments truly capture what they are meant to—becomes even more complicated when studying children in diverse cultural settings. Our recent paper, Construct Validity in Cross-Cultural, Developmental Research: Challenges and Strategies for Improvement, reveals why this matters and how researchers can (try to, at least!) get it right
Verbal language, one of the hallmarks of human beings, enables us to express intricate thoughts, transmit cultural knowledge, and connect through generations. It is also one of the most studied domains in disciplines ranging from social sciences to neuroscience. Within this broad realm, the suffixing bias has turned out to be a particularly compelling phenomenon that continues to fascinate researchers as they attempted to provide an answer to the following question: Why do most world's languages use suffixes more than prefixes to convey grammatical meanings like tense or number? And what is this related to? Our general cognition? Is it language-specific? Or even an accidental distribution caused by some random factors that are not related to language cognition per se?
Most humans have a preference for—or display a better performance when—using their right hand. This bias has probably existed for around seven million years.
In support of Mariana Carrito and colleague’s article, When he smiles: Attractiveness preferences for male faces expressing emotions. Facial attractiveness has long been a subject of curiosity and study, with scientists attempting to unravel the complex factors that influence our perception of beauty.…
Identifying the factors that drive homicide rates is not only of paramount interest to scholars across the social and behavioral sciences but is necessary to inform policy decisions aimed at reducing lethal aggression. Studies nominate diverse causes of homicide, including ambient temperature, city greenness, firearm ownership, firearm laws, structural racism, income inequality, poverty, and more. However, without general theory scholars struggle to disentangle causal factors from correlated effects. This distinction is vitally important for designing interventions that target underlying causes rather than spurious correlations.
We all know and love discrete models of cultural evolution. We like to discuss the frequencies of hunting strategies, count words in literature across centuries, categorize pottery patterns, and analyze events in fairy tales… and we construct models to fit that kind of data.
The languages we speak today are an incredibly rich record of the past. By analyzing the words they’re made up of, and the rules that guide how those words have evolved, we can gain insights into cultural contacts and the movements of peoples reaching back thousands of years.
Traditional models of conformity posit that individuals respond to the frequency of a behaviour amongst a social group only. This gives the impression that conformity functions like a rule-of-thumb to ‘always copy the majority’. This view does not align with recent research which shows that our use of social learning strategies is likely to be flexible. To extend this research, we ask whether an individuals’ decision to conform to the majority of a group will be flexible based on certain social information about the group from whom they learn.
Lansing is an American anthropologist and complexity scientist, currently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His most recent book is Islands of Order (with Murray Cox), Princeton University Press.
There are several studies which investigated how environmental harshness influences mate choice, in particular whether masculine or feminine faces are perceived as more attractive when the environment is harsh.
Evolution has shaped women’s ovulatory cycles to be characterised by complex recurring physiological processes of changing hormones and organ tissue. However, these changes often bring about unwanted aspects – be it premenstrual symptoms such as mood swings, feeling bloated or anxious, menstrual pain, or – still way too often – menstrual shame.…
There are literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of papers with the same introduction. Human cooperation. Enduring conundrum. Selection. Model. Prisoners’ dilemma.…
Evolutionary researchers have long puzzled over declining fertility rates wanting to understand the reproductive decision-making process. One critical question for this research is: ‘who decides’?
In the Bolivian Tsimané, who supports who during conflicts is affected by physical size, social status, and existing cooperative and antagonistic relationships.
In our recent article, Paula Sheppard and I tested the assumptions of life history theory, which is commonly used in evolutionary anthropology and related disciplines.…
I was first approached about editing at Evolutionary Human Sciences (EHS) at the EHBEA meeting in Pecs, Hungary. I’d recently started submitting my own Registered Reports (RRs) and was enthusiastic about helping to spread what I was finding to be an incredibly valuable new format for doing and reporting science.…
The English language contains a wealth of insults and terms of abuse. Personal insults attack the core and immutable aspects of a person, such as their race, ethnicity, appearance, age, or a disability.…
Even though findings from genetics and other sciences unequivocally refute biological conceptions of race, this erroneous viewpoint remains widespread among the general public.…
A few months ago, we responded to a call for papers for a themed issue for Advances in Archaeological Practice entitled “Advances in Archaeological Labor Management.”…
As newly minted Editor and Co-Editor, we (Shelome Gooden and Mike Putnam) are delighted to invite you to explore the latest issue of Language, the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America, now available for the first time on Cambridge Core!…
The March article of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International is the first blog of the series. The blog is written by Dr Dami Ajayi, Specialty Doctor, Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Trainee/Blog Editor, BJPsych International.…
Some disability-related names have dropped out of usage, because they are now considered to be offensive due to their origins. Down Syndrome (Trisomy 21) is one example.…
For over a century, the giant stone jars of northern Laos have remained one of Southeast Asia’s great archaeological mysteries. Scattered across remote ridgelines and forests on the Plain of Jars, these massive megalithic vessels have sparked debate over their true purpose: storage containers, symbolic monuments, or part of a complex mortuary tradition?…
How long will humankind survive? Besides the fact that we have been able to eliminate ourselves with nuclear weapons for decades, even without a third world war, the challenge to take care of the resources of our planet remains; we need to use them in a way that our children and their children can have a place on Earth as well. In this blog post Andreas Losch discusses his recent review article in the International Journal of Astrobiology, The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
It is an article of faith among ordinary Filipinos that American troops will die with Filipino troops defending Philippine claims to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea (SCS).…
Q&A with Editor-in-Chief of the Precision Medicine Journal, Dame Anna Dominiczak, for International day of Women and Girls in Science
More and more research is finding inflammation as a potential contributing factor towards to the development of various mental illnesses. A systematic review was conducted to determine the association between parasitic infection and mental illnesses in various African populations. Two parasite groups were evaluated; helminths and protozoans, and four mental illness classifications; depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, schizotypal disorders and unspecified mental illnesses.
This is the first post in our new series: “Conversations with Authors.” For our inaugural post, we asked Dr. Vesla Weaver to meet (virtually) with Dr.…
The March article of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International is the first blog of the series. The blog is written by Dr Dami Ajayi, Specialty Doctor, Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Trainee/Blog Editor, BJPsych International.…
The English language contains a wealth of insults and terms of abuse. Personal insults attack the core and immutable aspects of a person, such as their race, ethnicity, appearance, age, or a disability.…
Listen to @BBCRadio4's Start the Week, featuring @NineDotsPrize winner @jkkusiak, talking about her book, 'Radically Legal'. Learn how a group of ordinary people inspired the book when they reclaimed over 240,000 apartments back from corporate landlords 🔗
Start the Week - ‘Left behind’, but not forgotten - BBC Sounds
Tom Sutcliffe with Paul Collier, Joanna Kusiak and Matthew Xia.
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