These are the topics and issues that I prepared for the evolution foot polls I ran at Burning Man. The game was that I, acting as emcee, would have the players move right or left to indicate their stance on various topics related to evolution. In addition to straight dichotomies, I would sometimes run a poll on two axes. Players would move left or ( Read more... )

Not to get embroiled in the nature/nurture business again, but here's a Slog article about female hormones and differential preference for males (link). Basically, when women are ovulating and fertile, they shift measurably toward preferring more masculine lovers (to snag good genes) while when women are not ovulating or fertile they prefer less ( Read more... )

Republican governor Mark Sanford admits to his affair, not long after Republican senator John Ensign has done the same. Why don't these powerful men live up to their own standards and keep it in their pants? Or if they can't live up to their own standards, why don't they make the politically smart, calculated choice to keep it in the pants?

Back ( Read more... )

The political opponents of ev psych accuse its proponents (e.g., me) of wickedly supporting the "status quo."  This accusation is bizarre, but I know where they're coming from. I remember being a young man impatient with society's imperfections and hostile to the "establishment." But over the last 20 to 25 years I've acquired a different ( Read more... )

"Evolution is cleverer than you are."
-- evolutionary biologist Leslie Orgel

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Busy week starting tomorrow, so I'll be suspending the conversation for a while.

In the mean time, here's an informative list of human universals, elements of culture found in each society we've ever documented. It gives you a rough outline of human nature: who we are, what we feel, what we do, how we see ourselves, how we get along, etc. I used to ( Read more... )

We evolved to misunderstand evolution. Intuitively, evolution feels wrong. We're built to look for motives, but evolution has none. We're built to make complex things by following plans. Evolution has no plan. We're built to understand things on the scale of seconds to lifetimes. Evolution happens over eons. Just as quantum mechanics doesn't make ( Read more... )

If you think humans are basically good, then before you read about the death of the noble savage, you should outfit yourself with some other hopeful belief that can sustain you once basic human goodness isn't there any more. I recommend believing that we can learn to be better even if we're not born perfect.

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People strongly, irrationally resist admitting that they're wrong. The current conversation on this journal may be a relative oasis of open-mindedness, but I think we're all well aware how hard it is to convince people that they're wrong even when the evidence is against them. Why? Wouldn't it make sense to evolve fair-mindedness so you wouldn't be ( Read more... )

Some opponents of ev pscyh go so far as to state that the larger size and strength of human males did not evolve to be that way. The idea that evolution didn't determine the relative sizes of our ancestors a million years ago contradicts evolutionary theory.

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