Fellow blogger, Simon Greenhill of HENRY, and co-authors published a cool paper evaluating language evolution that just came out in today’s issue of Science. The premise behind the paper, “Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts,” is simple to follow. By comparing related versions, or homologs, of common words between the following language families: Indo-European, Bantu, and [...]
January 31, 2008
Gorillas with Weapons and Mirror Neurons & Macaques
If you don’t follow my other blog but are interested in tool use, I just blogged about gorillas who have been seen using clumps of grass and branches as weapons as well as the new research which links macaque tool use and mirror neurons at Primatology.net.
John Hawks also covered the macaque & mirror neuron linkage [...]
January 31, 2008
The adaptive strategies behind music and violence
I’ve got a couple pseudo-science, evolutionary psychological news bits to share with you. The first is coverage of Alan Harvey music evolutionary theory that he presented at the Annual Australian Neuroscience Meeting. From the article,
“[Alan Harvey] says music is not just a pretty sound, but also a way of communicating that is just as important [...]
