"…it’s very tempting to believe things when they imply many self-serving benefits. This is why integrity is a virtue, because it’s hard, uncommon, and helpful."
— Eric Falkenstein, Do Academics Overfit?
by Mark James Adams
A student of quantitative genetics and primate psychology. I research the evolutionary dynamics of correlated suites of behavior in wild animals. I am trying to answer the question Why do our personalities differ?
About Differential biology? Ask the Reader
A student of quantitative genetics and primate psychology. I research the evolutionary dynamics of correlated suites of behavior in wild animals. I am trying to answer the question Why do our personalities differ?
About Differential biology? Ask the Reader
January 28, 2012
January 26, 2012
"I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don’t succeed are: they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don’t. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I’ve told you how easy it is; furthermore I’ve told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!"
— Richard Hamming, You and Your Research via @dantekgeek via @PsychScientists
January 6, 2012
Photography by Martin Schoeller
from Peter Miller, “A thing or two about twins”, National Geographic
January 4, 2012
Timothy Bates
Theory-driven behavior genetics: An example from psychological wellbeing
ISSID 2011
Behavior genetics has shown that almost all behaviors are heritable. And ‘if everything is heritable, then behavior genetic designs are essential to test almost all social science theories.”
December 30, 2011
Whatever you do, somebody in psychometrics already did it long before
Andrew Gelman notes a long-standing principle in statistics.
December 28, 2011
Heart of Darwin
It is hard summarizing the heart of a great idea or the intellectual history of a paradigm being integrated in a few words or even a paragraph. I think I have a hard time doing it, so I am interested in instances that don’t quite seem to capture it.1
Going over various thinking on the evolution of psychological diversity, I came across Tooby & Cosmides2 contending that
At the heart of Darwin’s theory of the origin of adaptations is the following precept. The more important the adaptive problem, the more intensely selection should have specialized and improved the performance of the mechanism for solving it. (p 27)
This is not the heart of Darwin’s theory (which is instead modification by differential reproduction, i.e., natural selection) and seems to be the opposite of his thinking. Darwin notes that that highly specialized adaptations (such as the eye) present “difficulties” for this theory (Origin p 186). Morever, he did not see nature as crafting ‘perfection’ but only sufficiency. You don’t have to be great, just better than your competiion.3
Tooby & Cosmides then define the Modern Synthesis:
Neo-Darwinism is an account of how functional integration in biological systems can arise through selective retention of a superior functional variant—superior in the sense that the variation modifies the functioning of the system in ways that promote the variant’s own propagration. (p 28-29)
The Modern Synthesis was the formal integration of Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian and Weismannian conceptions of transmission and inheritance. I don’t see what ‘functional integration’ has to do with it.
It is bothersome to get caught up on small details like this in an essay, where you can skip over these glosses and get to the new arguments made by the authors. But it sharpens in one’s own mind the exact expression of these ideas by previous thinkers and how we got to where we are now. Perhaps it is the quality of the rest of Tooby & Cosmides explanations (even if I do not agree with many of their conclusions) that make these two minor scuffs stand out.
-
As Montaigne notes, we profit more by listening to a poor argument than a good one: “A good equerry does not make me sit up straight in the saddle as much as the sight of a lawyer or a Venetian out riding” (III:8. On the art of conversation. Trans. M. A. Screech) ↩
-
“On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual”. Journal of Personality 58. ↩
-
“Natural selection tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country with which it has to struggle for existence” (Origin p 201). ↩
December 28, 2011
Phylogenetic inertia in primate sociality
Social structure seems to evolve more slowly than morphological adaptations. Shultz and co. tested alternative models of the evolution of social structure in primates and challenge the notion that social structure adapts fluidly to ecological conditions (the ‘socioecological hypothesis’). This fits with the observation that social and behavioral evolution in macaques is also highly constrained by phylogeny.
I wouldn’t go so far as Nick Wade’s summary that this finding suggests genes play a major role as one could imagine a parallel cultural transmission system that would be perfectly confounded with the phylogenetic signal.
So social behavior in primates is uncoupled quite a bit from ecological functioning.
- Shultz Opie Atkinson. 2011. Stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates. Nature 479: 219–222.
December 17, 2011
Aegithalos caudatus (Linnaeus, 1758)
Vitaliy Khustochka
December 5, 2011
Total Impact
Interesting new search-citation engine that tracks down how many people are reading, citing, bookmarking, and blogging about articles, data, presentations, genes, and code. This generalized the citation of traditional articles and makes them only on instance of a research object.
I searched for a few of my papers and Total Impact turned up Mendeley listings and a blog post by Elizabeth Preston on our orang-utan happiness/death study that I hadn’t seen before.
via @kaythaney
November 22, 2011
"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other."
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
(via psychotherapy)
September 20, 2011
"Even people who only run randomized experiments could benefit from a little more depth than the sophomore-year slogan that seems to be all some researchers (AHEM, Reviewer B) have been taught about causation."
— Sanjay Srivastava, Do not use what I am about to teach you.
August 19, 2011
An elephant having an ‘aha’ moment.
- Foerder P. 2011. Insightful Problem Solving in an Asian Elephant. PLoS ONE.
August 10, 2011
"This foundation [for sociobiologists concerned with cooperation] includes Hamilton’s reformulation of natural selection as a force that maximizes “inclusive fitness” rather than individual fitness, George Williams’ expository evisceration of old-school group selection, Robert Trivers’ explanation of cooperation between unrelated individuals with the theory of reciprocity, and John Maynard Smith’s application of game theory to the study of animal behavior. Sadly, too few of us include George Price in this august company."
— Panchanathan K. George Price, the Price equation, and cultural group selection. Evol Hum Behav
July 5, 2011
Nonhuman primate ageing resembles its human counterpart…We examined whether, as in humans, orang-utan subjective well-being was related to longer life. The sample included 184 zoo-housed orang-utans followed up for approximately 7 years. …in a model that included, and therefore, statistically adjusted for, sex, age, species and transfers, orang-utans rated as being “happier” lived longer. The risk differential between orang-utans that were one standard deviation above and one standard deviation below baseline in subjective well-being was comparable with approximately 11 years in age. This finding suggests that impressions of the subjective well-being of captive great apes are valid indicators of their welfare and longevity.
Our analysis was prospective rather than causal, but it is good evidence for a general covitality factor in our and allied species. The figure shows the year-over-year risk of death depending on subjective well-being (SWB, i.e., happiness).
The BBC have some comments from Alex and Dick Byrne.
- Weiss, Adams, King. Happy orang-utans live longer lives. Biology Letters.
- figure CC-by the authors.
July 4, 2011
"Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind."
— David Sosa, “The Spoils of Happiness,” via brainpicker (via dianakimball)
RSS feed: http://reader.differentialist.info/rss
1 of 8
Next page
