By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: March 1, 2010, New York Times

“As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.

The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology. The evidence of its activity is the more surprising because culture has long seemed to play just the opposite role. Biologists have seen it as a shield that protects people from the full force of other selective pressures, since clothes and shelter dull the bite of cold and farming helps build surpluses to ride out famine.”

read the rest at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02evo.html

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/

So I log in.  It takes me back to the main page (or worse, sometimes it takes me back to the UBC Blogs main page and I have to find my way back to this blog)

So I click on the post I want to reply to and get the message “You must be logged in to leave a reply”

You can see where this is going.   I feel like I’m in an endless loop.  Obviously I’m logged in, or I couldn’t post this rant.

So why can’t I reply to other posts?

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

EDIT: Ok, now I can click on someone else’s original post and then add a reply.  The problem has been fixed, but I still get the feeling I was doing something wrong the first time.

Nobel Laureate and neurobiologist Gerald Edelman, psychologist Paul Ekman, and anthropologist/neuroscientist Terrence Deacon tell us how Charles Darwin has influenced science and their personal careers.

Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Romance

My favorite paragraph, which refers to a professor right here in the UBC department of psychology:

“At the most recent annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the first plenary speaker was Joseph Henrich, who obtained his PhD with Robert Boyd and whose address was titled “Culture and the Evolution of Human Sociality.” Henrich also spoke about proximate psychological mechanisms that evolved by genetic evolution, not as adaptations to specific adaptive problems, but as adaptations that enable individuals and groups to adapt to their current environments in a rapid and open-ended fashion. For example, a “prestige bias” causes us to grant status to individuals who have something to offer and to use them as role models. A “conformity bias” causes us to copy the most common behavior in the absence of other information. “Strong reciprocity” impels us to uphold norms and punish transgressions, even at our own cost. These are the social equivalents of what B.F. Skinner called “reinforcers,” which guide open-ended individual learning. Henrich’s talk represents what I regard as the most newsworthy development in the field of evolutionary psychology writ large. The headline should read “Evolutionary Psychology Captures the Middle Ground!” There is something between the Cosmides/Tooby blueprint and the Standard Social Science Model that we are beginning to articulate, which is richly innate and richly open-ended at the same time.”