What Explains the Emergence of Moralizing Religions?
An ambitious article: “Increased Affluence Explains the Emergence of Ascetic Wisdoms and Moralizing Religions”, by Nicolas Baumard, Alexandre Hyafil, Ian Morris, and Pascal Bo…
An ambitious article: “Increased Affluence Explains the Emergence of Ascetic Wisdoms and Moralizing Religions”, by Nicolas Baumard, Alexandre Hyafil, Ian Morris, and Pascal Bo…
A new, interesting, and original book by Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt: A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion. MIT…
An interesting paper by Laura Fontanari, Michel Gonzalez, Giorgio Vallortigara, and Vittorio Girotto: “Probabilistic cognition in two indigenous Mayan groups“, forthcoming in PNAS….
Svan village in the municipality of Tetritskaro (Kvemo Kartli) Voell, Stéphane, Natia Jalabadze, Lavrenti Janiashvili and Elke Kamm 2014. Identity and Traditional Law: Local Legal Conceptions in Svan…
A great cultural epidemiology story by Ole Bjørn Rekdal, “Academic urban legends,” in Social Studies of Science (2014, 44(4)) freely available here Abstract: Many of the me…
“Outside of the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan” (© Grzegorz Wąsik). Das wird wohl das Titelbild des Sammelbands. Bin ich glücklich, dass mein Sammelband endlich erscheinen wird?…
An excellent post by Michael Schulson at Aeon magazine entitled “How to choose? When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the…
A very interesting comparison between crows and humans in a new (free access) paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B entitled “Of babies and birds: complex tool…
Here is a challenge to standard views about the evolution of linguistic generativity: ““Combinatorial Communication in Bacteria: Implications for the Origins of Linguistic Generativity” by Thomas…
A new article by Dan Fessler, Anne Pisor,& David Navarrete, highly relevant to cultural epidemiology in PLoS ONE 9(4): e95167. doi:10.1371 Abstract: The functions of cultural beliefs are often…
Poster der Konferenz in Batumi, November 2011 Warum machte ich das überhaupt? Eigentlich ging es mir doch gut. Ich habe eine tolle Familie und mein Job ist auch…
A new, important article by David Pietraszewski, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby: The Content of Our Cooperation, Not the Color of Our Skin: An Alliance Detection System Regulates Categorization…
Voell, Stéphane and Ketevan Khutsishvili (eds.) 2013. Caucasus Conflict Culture: Anthropological Perspectives on Times of Crisis (Curupira Workshop, 18). Marburg: Curupira. 296 pp. My daughter took t…
2013 was a very busy year for me. It was a great year, but it was overly full at work and so-called work-life balance thus was not much…
[Updated] This series began in the wake of an instance in which I, to the irritation of most observers, questioned a case of self-piracy. Soon thereafter, self-piracy was…
A new book by the archeologist David Wengrow: The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Princeton U.P.)The blurb: It has often been …
An interesting, methodologically innovative paper by Jamie Terhani in PLoS One on the phylogeny of “Little Red Riding Hood.”Abstract: Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuit…