New paper accepted at Human Nature w/ Ed Hagen on supernatural explanations: psyarxiv.com/2uvjm/ We take on the question: why did humans evolve to explain the world with ideas that seem "supernatural," such as spirits & teleological thinking? /1

Lost highway... #aphantasia #drawingsofaphantasia #DavidLynch

"belief that other people can have magical powers, trained or innately, is largely missing from the evo & cog sci lit despite being a common theme in the ethnographic lit... these beliefs do not seem to be declining—in fact, they may even be increasing" link.springer.com/article/10.100…

This is a great thread and a set of very good points from Tadeg Quillien (whom you should all follow). I appreciate the friendly pushback. Here is my response.

Interested in examining culture, cultural models, and what people think, know, and believe? New book from RCC’s BG Purzycki coming soon as part of Sage Methods’ “Little Green Book” series! collegepublishing.sagepub.com/products/ethno…

Happy Darwin Day! #DarwinDay #evolution #culturalevolution #drawingsofaphantasia #aphantasia

There hasn’t been nearly enough appreciation for this amazing paper by Clark Barrett and Rebecca Saxe Anthropologists have observed people in certain cultures blaming agents for behavior without regard to mental states (intent, knowledge, etc.). Why does this happen?

Razib Khan 🧬 ✍️ I don't know Atran's critique but much of contemporary cultural anthropology is opposed to systematizing like this. These databases are not something most are even aware of. They are more typically used by scholars at the interface of cultural evolution and anthropology.

we think this has big implications: ✔️ Culture isn’t just about copying—individual-level, non-social, forces are (more) important (than what sometimes thought) to explain culture

The idea of Ubuntu is widespread also in native Amazonia under a different native terms. Is conceptualised in Amazonian ethnography under the notion of commensality.

Przypominam Zgromadzonym na Radzie Bezpieczeństwa słowa mojego wielkiego poprzednika, prof. Władysława Bartoszewskiego: “warto być przyzwoitym”.

Job offer! 3-year PDRA studying archaeological content on social media from a cultural evolution perspective. Based at Edinburgh, supervised by Chiara Bonacchi and myself. Please share! jobs.ac.uk/job/DLZ921/pos…

People's creativity hinges on the collective brain into which they are enmeshed. It's about the population size, interconnectedness and cognitive diversity. E.g., we've shown how the low innovation rates in the U.S. South arise (in part) from a lack of cultural diversity.

1. Does research by Cara Ocobock Agustín Fuentes & others, widely reported in SciAm & elsewhere, finally dispel hunter-gatherer myths that have persisted since the 60's? In a preprint led by Vivek V. Venkataraman The Meanings&Dividends of Man the Hunter osf.io/preprints/osf/… we respond🧵

This tweet provoked useful debate so here are some followup thoughts. Of course there is sometimes enormous value in purely observational social science research. But if that’s a main part of your research program, or your field in general, then it’s going to lead to work like

AnthroTools 2.0 is live! Nine new functions that propagate, plot, and summarize uncertainty around item and cultural salience values.

Today is publication day for my book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. To celebrate, here are some of my striking clips of shamanic rituals that I came across while working on the book:

📢 Please join us on June 12th & 13th at a webinar on Deconstructing the Universal Mind. The event features global experts discussing cross-disciplinary approaches to universality & variability in the behavioral, neural, & cognitive sciences. Website: cps-vo.org/group/cise-sbe…

stopreturnfascism.org

Women only fully choose their mates in 8% of human societies. Men only in 31%. One side effect of human sexual selection research being conducted by “WEIRD” researchers is that we tend to overemphasize personal mate preferences and underemphasize family mate preferences.