Culture, its evolution and anything inbetween
Zach Weinersmith of SMBC comics and various science folk are putting on a Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses. The festival will include presentations of “well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect evolutionary theory”. They’re looking for people to give 5 minute presentations. It takes place at MIT on the 20th April, submissions are due … Continue reading “Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses”
Update: I have carried out some more analyses that paint a different picture to the one presented below. Oops! A recently accepted paper by Keith Chen has been getting a lot of press coverage. Chen has discovered a close link between the properties of the language people speak and their economic decisions. People who speak … Continue reading “Whorfian economics reconsidered: Why future tense?”
Last month saw the publication of a paper by James and I (our first paper!) on the so-called ‘nomothetic’ approach to links between language structure and social structure. In it we review the recent trend of using large-scale cross-cultural statistical analyses to find links between cultural traits and social structures (e.g. Lupyan & Dale, 2010). … Continue reading “Most important paper on cultural evolution that includes acacia trees published”
After all of this talk of spurious cross-cultural correlations it might be time to direct the discussion back to ways to resolve an over-reliance on statistical tendencies. Sean and James did a workshop on this at this year’s EvoLang about how constructive, idiographic and experimental approaches also need to be considered when investigating how linguistic and social structure are linked. … Continue reading “The Role of Foreigner-Directed Speech in Language Evolution”
Last month there was a paper published about a correlation between chocolate consumption and Nobel Laureates. EDIT: I now see the article may not be accessible to everyone. Here’s a summary: Messerli suggests that, because some flavinoids that are found in chocolate have been linked to improved cognition, one might expect a country that eats … Continue reading “Chocolate Consumption, Traffic Accidents and Serial Killers”
I vowed never to look at any more spurious correlations. But there is time for one final foray into the word of acacia trees and traffic accidents. Some of my previous posts showed correlations between bizarre variables such as alcohol consumption and morphological complexity, acacia trees and tonal languages and the sonority of a language … Continue reading “The final correlation: Bayesian Causal Graphs as an alternative to Phylogenetics”
Last week in an EU:Sci podcast, Christos Christodoulopoulos challenged me to find a correlation between the basic word order of the language people use and the number of children they have. This was off the back of a number of spurious correlations with which readers of Replicated Typo will be familiar. Here are the results! … Continue reading “Having more children affects your basic word order”
Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters. We’ll be positing a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see. If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot. Sean Roberts & James Winters Constructing … Continue reading “Evolang Previews: The nomothetic approach to language evolution”
Levinson & Gray (2012) demonstrate how tools from evolutionary biology can help refine the way we look at human language and human cognition. Phylogenetic techniques allow researchers to properly control for the fact that languages are related by descent. More importantly, these tools allow the study of the full variation of linguistic structures, rather than … Continue reading “Using tools from evolutionary biology in cultural evolution”
Me and James are presenting a poster at Digital HSS’s Digital Scholarship conference on the nomothetic approach. Here’s a sneaky peek at the current draft of the poster, although who knows how much it’ll change by the time I print it tomorrow! Some of the themes are referenced in this post. We’ll also be giving … Continue reading “Proving anything is possible: Poster at Digital Scholarship event”
