monkey's uncle

Perhaps it’s just me being a bit groggy from jet-lag, but I just read one of the most bizarre things I think I have ever seen in the New York Times.  There is a generally very interesting article by Sarah Kershaw on so-called “cougars,” older women who have sexual relationships with younger men. It was [...]

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On 29-31 October, we will be holding our next installment of the Stanford Workshops in Formal Demography and Biodemography, the result of an ongoing grant from NICHD to Shripad Tuljapurkar and myself.  This time around, we will venture onto the bleeding edge of biodemography.  Specific topics that we will cover include:

The use of genomic information [...]

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There is a really cool paper by Buckler and colleagues in the current issue of Science.  The basic gist of this paper is that flowering time in maize (Zea mays) is not controlled by any large-effect genes (actually quantitative trait loci or QTLs — these are positions in the genome that are associated with genes [...]

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Nicholas Kristof has an interesting Op-Ed piece this week in the Times.  Reporting on University of Michigan Professor Richard Nisbett’s new book, Intelligence and How to Get It, Kristof argues for the general malleability of intelligence.  He writes,
If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty [...]

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Well, it’s happened again.  My work has been written up in Science but I am not mentioned.  I’m actually not that concerned this time — we’re going to submit the paper for publication soon. I’ve been telling myself (and other people) that this thing we’ve ben working on (all the while being very cryptic about what [...]

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I received a message the other day informing me that my series of posts of evolutionary psychology had “hit the blue.”  That is, I made the front page of Metafilter.   Cool.  I have to admit, I didn’t know what that meant.  Now I do. I just saw evidence of my hitting the blue in my Google Reader. [...]

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So, I’ve been spending a bunch of time recently thinking about evolutionary psychology (EP). This is a field about which I have some serious reservations for a variety of reasons both technical and philosophical. That said, I do find the constant in-fighting among human evolutionary biologists tedious and think that it’s absurdly unproductive. [...]

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My holiday reading on modularity has led me into some of the literature on the evolution of complexity.  Some of the most interesting work in theoretical biology that I’ve read in a while relates to the ideas of nearly neutral networks and holey adaptive landscapes, an area developed by Sergey Gavrilets at the University of [...]

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As the next installment in my series on evolution psychology (see previous posts here and here), I thought that I would write about some thoughts on evolutionary modules.  As should be obvious from previous posts, I have serious concerns about evolutionary psychology.  Nonetheless, I don’t want to repeat the knee-jerk criticisms that attended the rise [...]

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This is an ongoing series of meditations on evolutionary psychology inspired by my recent reading of David Buller’s piece in Scientific American.  I have been thinking quite a bit in the last year about the relationship between evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, and evolutionary genetics, and maybe these ruminations will help me get my thoughts [...]

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