I’ve moved …

… to The Netherlands! I’m now at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, as part of a new research group called Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture.  The academic blog-urge has dwindled this last year; it seems to take a focussed person* to keep a blog going for more than 18 months or … Read more

The recreational habits of (life) scientists

[This post has been lurking about since, oops, May, so I thought I better put it out there!] I’m sure everyone has favourite inductive hypotheses about the world that they mull over as potential research questions–if only they weren’t so utterly trivial. Besides, I usually only notice the confirmatory evidence for mine. The co-incidence of … Read more

simon says … hooray!

My friend and colleague Simon Greenhill handed in his PhD thesis today. Having read bits of it, seen the results of other bits of it, and generally parasitised off his hard work in creating and maintaining the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database, I feel quite certain it’ll be a bestseller. But seriously: congratulations, Simon, bloody great job!

JPS online!

That’s the Journal of the Polynesian Society, if you were wondering. It’s been a sad wrench for me at UCL, browsing the e-journals list of our library and always feeling a little empty spot in my heart right here: The Society is only up to the 1930s, but seeing as the really good ethnographic stuff … Read more

Darwin married his cousin: a lesson on cultural diversity

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 … Read more

Job opportunity

Nine month teaching fellowship in Biological Anthropology at the University of Bristol. The position is in a joint Archaeology/Anthropology department and will provide sabbatical cover for Dr Mhairi Gibson. Deadline for applications May 16th. Apply through the link above.

science and design are both about communication

Mike Dickison’s blog Pictures of Numbers is fab. It’s all about clear, simple, effective data visualisation for scientists. Three posts that I thought were particularly useful were: Better Axes: improving readability, increasing the information content and decreasing the clutter in your graphs. Fixing Excel’s Charts: Surgery for the annoying defaults that Excel has, and how … Read more

on sex and suicide bombing

Please note this post was edited (below) on 23 May 2011

David Lawson, Kesson Magid and I have just published On Sex and Suicide Bombing: An evaluation of Kanazawa’s ‘Evolutionary Psychological Imagination’. This is a critique of Satoshi Kanazawa’s 2007 paper: “The Evolutionary Psychological Imagination: Why You Can’t Get a Date on a Saturday Night and Why Most Suicide Bombers are Muslim.”

Many objections to evolutionary psychology are ideological or political. This is not the case in our paper: nothing makes me (and my co-authors) froth at the mouth more than bad science. We say:

The beauty of the scientific method is that it allows us to ask, and sometimes answer, tough questions.
Addressing the tough questions without the transparency afforded by the scientific method is not brave: it is simply cavalier.

Kanazawa’s paper is full of bad science. We are not the first to criticise him on such grounds, but it bears repeating that when there are controversial and sensitive issues at stake, we beholden to demand a high standard of scholarship and science.

EDIT 23 May 2011

In the light of another piece of “science” by Kanazawa, reported on his blog, I have decided to add to this post a list of the published academic responses to Kanazawa’s work. It really saddens me that someone who pushes an agenda to carry out controversial investigations cannot pair that agenda with quality science. As said above, with academic freedom comes responsibility.

This list was compiled with the help of colleagues. Please let me know of any additions or corrections. At last count, the 20 listed papers involved 56 separate authors.

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too many ideas, not enough blog

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 … Read more