This via Mind Hacks – Seed Magazine have published a piece by Joe Kloc, in which he looks at the relationship between humans and life-like robots, with regard to the so-called ‘uncanny valley’ effect, described here at Wikipedia:
(Masahiro) Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Discipline’
November 19, 2009
Into the Uncanny Valley – Seed Magazine
November 16, 2009
The FOXP2 Molecular Network Begins Taking Shape – Babel’s Dawn
Here’s a link to a brief article by Edmund Blair Bolles regarding the current research into FOXP2, from which this is the introduction:
A letter to the current issue of Nature has caused a stir among those interested in the evolution of language. It looks at the FOXP2 gene in more detail than any paper has [...]
November 13, 2009
Online Papers by Wolpoff, Hawks and Caspari
Thanks to Carl at A Hot Cup of Joe for passing this along – if you navigate to the CV page of Milford H. Wolpoff, you’ll find a number of freely accessible (PDF) papers, many or indeed all of which should be of interest to readers here. They span a time frame of more than [...]
November 12, 2009
David Eagleman: Heaven, Hell and Synaesthesia
Following on from a recent post which linked to the Neuroanthropology website, I want to give brief mention to a neuroscientist by the name of David Eagleman, his research into synaesthesia and an excellent book he published earlier this year, ‘Sum – Forty Tales from the Afterlives’, a pocket-sized tome bristling with a glittering array [...]
November 11, 2009
Thinking through Claude Lévi-Strauss @ Neuroanthropology
Here’s a link to a post at Neuroanthropology which should really have been included in the recent and 79th edition of Four Stone Hearth, which was somehow overlooked by me at the time. The linked essay was constructed by Greg Downey, in which he considers amongst much else, traditional structuralism, its origins and cycle of [...]
November 6, 2009
Current Anthropology – New Edition, First 50 Years Issue
Current Anthropology, December 2009, Volume 50 number 6 is now out, which as will be apparent from the headline, marks no less than 50 years in the field, and there are a number of essays contained therein which reflect on the past, present and future of this publication. Here’s part of editor Mark Aldenderfer’s introduction [...]
November 4, 2009
Long Toes & Short Ankles Help Sprinters Accelerate Faster
The Journal of Experimental Biology has published an interesting paper about some unique features in sprinters: longer toes and shorter ankle joints. The only one flaw is that their sample size is limited, they only compared 12 collegiate sprinters with 12 non-athletes of the same height. Regardless, from a physical anthropological point of view, this [...]
November 3, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss Has Died
Claude Lévi-Strauss died two days ago. He was 100 years old.
I shouldn’t have to write about his impact to the field of anthropology, in summary it was profound. He authored many texts. He set forth structuralism, a mode of thought by which we can compare relationships between social systems. His contributions to studying cultures and [...]
November 1, 2009
Robin McKie Of The Observer Reviews 3 Books On Human Evolution
Ciarán Brewster, a.k.a. adhominin, just tweeted about three book reviews. The reviews, written by Robin McKie of The Observer, cover recent books on cooking and human evolution which were written by some pretty big names in anthropology:
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
Wrangham’s thesis is that the advent of cooking reduced [...]
October 30, 2009
A Cave Shut by Closed Minds? La Carihuela Neanderthals vs. the Junta
Back in August of this year, two words I frequently encountered when trying to visit sites of interest in Andalucía, southern Spain, were“Cerrado” (closed) and “No”, which as a tourist you take in your stride, leg it to the nearest hostelry and reconsider the rest of the day from the perspective of its slightly less [...]
