The not-blogging-because-I’ve-not-anything-meaningful-to-say phenomena has really got to stop. Email’s become like that, too. I put it off and then it’s three months later and I feel like I have to write a mini autobiography, when really, two lines at the time would’ve been sufficient. So, in points, some interesting things of late:

1. Modern Approaches to Investigating Cultural Evolution, a LERN postgrad/postdoc workshop organised by my friend Tom Currie here at UCL. We had 13 speakers and over 40 participants discussing the latest cool research in cultural evolution. Lots of empirical stuff on linguistics (yay for data!) but also a good coverage of archaeology, psychology, economics and anthropology as well. More details at the link.

2. Rediscovering Darwin: The real story of Darwin’s finches. John van Wyhe gave the CEE Grant Lecture this year. van Wyhe has been the man behind Darwin Online, (the project to put the complete works of Darwin on the internet), and he’s an historian of science who gives an entertaining talk. This one traced the evolution of a “meme”: the persistent myth that Darwin “discovered” evolution on the Galapagos while observing the beaks of the finches. The talk did a cracking job of pulling together all the strands of the myth, how and where they originated—nice example of scientific detective work.

3. Gave a lecture for our Bio Anth Masters on Comparative Methods in Anthropology. This was my first “methods only” seminar, so it had some interactive bits, and hopefully seeded the idea that anthropologists can use phylogenetic/comparative methods for a whole range of interesting questions—not just how primates are related to each other!

4. Reviewed some papers, and cracked on with writing my own.

5. Speaking of papers, have become more and more enamoured of Papers, a great little bit of Mac software that does what I couldn’t manage if left to my own devices: organise my PDF library. It’s a bit like iTunes for papers. The latest update has allowed for automatic matching of PDFs with their bibliographic information in the Web of Science and Google Scholar, filling the gap neatly for social sciences. Previously the automatic matching facility had only been in PubMed. You can also do full searches of databases from within the program, and set it all up so your choice of directory structure is created on your drive and each new paper filed into it. The user interface is pretty as well. Check it out.

On a more recreational note, I saw Barry Adamson and Matana Roberts at the London Jazz Festival this week. The drummer for Matana Roberts, Frank Rosaly, was phenomenal to hear and watch. Highly recommended.

Just realised I’ve not successfully managed this double-posting thing, and three recent posts on my blog have not gone up here (it’s the different formatting! My tiny brain can only handle one sort of HTML).

So links instead:

1. On sex and suicide bombing
Why your science should be flawless if you statements are controversial. Myself and my colleagues David Lawson and Kesson Magid publish a critique of Satoshi Kanazawa’s “evolutionary psychological imagination”.

2. Blue is not better than white, and metaphor is unhelpful
A discussion of colour effects in sports contests, and the metaphorical language that evolutionary biologists use: is it effective?

3. Science and Design are both about communication
My fan-post about Mike Dickison’s Pictures of Numbers blog and website. A must for anyone wanting to communicate scientific data with effective visuals.

From Sunday’s Observer, Split over health risk to cousins who marry

A major medical row will erupt this month when scientists and health experts hold two key meetings to discuss the controversial subject of marriages between cousins and their impact on health in Britain.

Really? I love the clairvoyance afforded to newspaper journalists. They obviously also considered that by Monday morning this article hadn’t made waves enough, as the title has been changed to Row over health risk”.

Some researchers and politicians say inter-cousin unions, which are highly prevalent among British Pakistanis, have led to a striking rise in the incidence of rare recessive disorders, many of them fatal, in areas such as Bradford. The trend has led to calls for cousin marriages to be banned.

There is reasonable science in this piece, and my point for this post is contribute actual data. But as usual, data and science follow after the experiential, moral-panic-related anecdote from an MP, who, despite any obvious medical qualifications, says that:

’I also know of several sets of parents in my constituency who are cousins and whose children are severely disabled. I have no doubt that the mothers and fathers being closely related to each is a key factor.’

“Striking rise”. “No doubt”. And my favourite:

”you have a child with your cousin, the likelihood is there will be a genetic problem”.

That last from an environment MP, who is presumably drawing this conclusion from an episode of the X-Files.

I have been blog-blocked since before December last year and need to make a concerted effort to move beyond it. Part of the problem has been journalistic—I’ve not wanted to write about anything that isn’t (a) news and (b) an exclusive. Considering the proliferation of science blogs, and considering that I too like to read multiple perspectives on different issues, I have no idea why that block took over my brain.

So, onwards.

There’s a real tension in talking about your work and your ideas in a public forum. I have three or four ideas for future projects that I feel quite excited about. One is really relevant to what I’m doing at the moment and is just waiting for me to get my head around some genetics. One is a sortof logical extension of the types of cultural phylogenetic work I do, and I have a masters student potentially interested in getting that strand of thinking out of the abstract and into real work. Another is a similar sort of project that I’d like to write a grant about in the future but I need to do some hardcore networking as it would encroach on other people’s databases. And the final one is totally left-field and while it’s evolutionary anthropology, it has nothing to do with phylogenies, the Pacific, and is only marginally kinship related.

I think it’d help me to articulate thoughts about these ideas, leave me some brain space for the other work I’m doing at the moment. But with most of them I do feel like I’ve actually had original and important ideas, and the urge to be discrete and cautious is winning out.

Still, the aspect of competition is motivating.

Backlash isn’t really the right word.

Evolutionary Psychology Bingo

I fully expect to see this linked-to, emailed, and generally be the object of a bit of discussion online. On the one hand, I’m all for the satirisation of poor science (a more biting example appeared last week), especially poor science that uses the tools (evolutionary thinking) that I do. We must, after all, stringently promote the self-correcting aspect of the scientific method. And there is some poor “evolutionary psychology” research around.

On the other hand: seeing that bingo card just makes my stomach sink into the floor.

Unless you spend your Mondays in seclusion, you’ll most likely have heard that yesterday Radiohead announced their new album would be released in just over a week, October 10th. (If you don’t know who Radiohead are then … there really is no hope for you).

The most interesting thing about this—besides the sneak-speed announcement and timeframe for such a long-awaited album—is the method of distribution. Radiohead are currently without a record deal, and so they’ve chosen to release the album themselves via download. A variable-contribution download, which means that you choose how much you are willing to pay for it—including nothing at all.

Cue much discussion on the future of the music industry and record companies; the inherent value of music; consequences for music charts; what people are actually buying when they purchase an album, etc, etc. It is true to say that it was going to take a superstar band to do this and get the industry and public to really take notice, and it’s also true to say that what the band have done is taken control of the inevitable “leak” and subsequent “illegal” file-sharing, and done it on their own terms.

What is intriguing to me, and why I’m writing about this on my ostensibly-academic blog, is that they have set up a really fascinating social experiment, one that is not too far off the sort of thing that psychologists, economists, and anthropologists are increasingly using to understand human social behaviour: an economic game. Economic or public-goods games take some aspect of behaviour that is context-specific and examine how the interplay of private versus social factors affect the decisions we make. Famous examples include the Prisoners Dilemma and the Ultimatum game. These sorts of artificial situations are set up to try and understand why and how prosocial behaviours such as altruism, punishment, co-operation and group co-ordination can evolve. Evolutionarily-minded social scientists are intrigued by these things as often they appear to run counter to our long-term (genetic) or short-term (economic) self-interests.

Which begs the question: why would anyone in their right mind enter anything apart from £0.00 in that little box? Why, furthermore, are there people complaining about the free download, who would rather pay a tenner for a CD? Something to hold in your hands, perhaps? Hardly: CD covers, liner notes, artwork … all these things are available (free) on fansites and music sites 0.0007 seconds after an album release.

Yet people did pay money, according to their self-reports on websites and forums¹. And people felt guilty about not paying anything … even those who by their own admission regularly download music from file-sharing or peer-to-peer networks without paying for it, or without a twinge of conscience.

What is going on here?

Matt B. asked the Nature Network bloggers a couple of questions. I meant to answer them on Friday but I couldn’t decide the first one!

Who’s your favourite scientist (dead or alive) and why?

The reason I couldn’t decide was that I just couldn’t figure out what my criteria for “favourite” should be! There are people who have been inspirational or instrumental to me becoming a scientist … but mainly through their communication of ideas, rather than the science they themselves performed.

Then there are people who I know: mentors or colleagues, but that just seems like unfair weighting when they’re people you can chat to in the pub.

So I thought I’d pick someone outside of anthropology or biology: the physicist Richard Feynman. He was a marvellous communicator and teacher, and knew the importance of inspiring people—but he also did groundbreaking theoretical work and defended vociferously the importance of “big idea” science as well as the individual sense of satisfaction from puzzle-solving. And he was the ultimate geek who thought safe-cracking was a fun hobby. And he played the bongos.

If you could have another job or career outside of science, what would it be and why?

I have had a job outside of science: I was a jewellery designer for a couple of years. It was rewarding when it was good and dreadful when it wasn’t.

But my alternate life is the one where I became a professional cellist, played with an innovative chamber group like the Kronos Quartet, and had a top ten indie/classical crossover album. Why? Because music is as creative and intriguing and rewarding as science.

Science reporting is in general rubbish, that’s a given. So this story (I hate myself for linking to the Daily Mail) Why blue-eyed boys (and girls) are so brilliant should have just made me roll my (no pun intended) eyes and slide on by, but it’s cropping up all over the place.

I’m not feeling the best today, and as a little rage is good for the digestion, I think: Fine, I’ll go read the paper. But lo! There is no paper? There’s not really even any clues about the researcher(s). This Joanne Rowe seems to be an emeritus professor of Physical Health at Lousiville, Kentucky. No web page of her own.

So I look on the magic academic databases, and the only things I can find are:

Percept Mot Skills. 1992 75(1):91-5.
Correlation of eye color on self-paced and reactive motor performance.
Miller LK, Rowe PJ, Lund J.

Percept Mot Skills. 1994 Aug;79(1 Pt 2):671-4.
Ball color, eye color, and a reactive motor skill.
Rowe PJ, Evans P.

These studies are 13 and 15 years old! Why is this news now? I could go for the benefit of the doubt, and say there is a paper, it’s just under the Wednesday science embargo. Likelihood?

I shall eat my hat or do follow-up detective work tomorrow.

Next up: Girls Prefer Pink O RLY? or, The Boring Nature/Nurture Debate, Redux.

There’s an engaging conversation in Nature this week with four science-fiction writers who concentrate on the life-sciences in their writing:

The biologists strike back.

I have this tremendous block about sci-fi. I have dabbled on the real fringes and read Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks like everyone else, but virtually no classic sci-fi. Genre fiction intimidates me, I think, because it has its own rules and hierarchies. The other part of my block is self-preservation in the face of gateway drugs: because I’m fascinated by the communication of scientific ideas, I feel like indulging in a sci-fi reading habit would just be the end of it all and I’d never read anything else.

But perhaps that’s a cop-out? I’ve got a whole list of recommendations from various sources. I just need to start, I guess.

Radio silence for the last couple of weeks as I was in New Zealand at the Evolution 2007 meeting. Yes, there is internet access on my small island home, but I’m not one of those superstars who can multitask a big conference and blogging. So before it all dribbles out of my brain, here’s a brief rundown. [link to program pdf]

Russell Gray and I organised a symposium on Cultural Phylogenetics. There are pictures, but they will have to wait another day.

Our speakers (Mark Pagel, Michael Dunn, Simon Greenhill, Quentin Atkinson, Russell, and myself) spoke on different aspects of applying phylogenetic and comparative methods to interesting and cool questions in linguistics and anthropology.