I argue that bureaucracies, as described by Max Weber, have essential characteristics that clash with basic educational values. On the one hand, bureaucracies, because of their divisions of labor, inevitably narrow all those who participate. Bureaucracies also, because of the need for impartiality, inevitably dehumanize all who participate. On the other hand, education aims to broaden and humanize those who participate in it. This tension between bureaucracy and education makes bureaucracy an unsuitable mechanism for delivering an education. Bureaucracies are often (...) the best ways to accomplish large tasks involving many people; however, the task of educating all humanity is not one of those tasks. Problems in education can only be exacerbated by “fixing” the bureaucracy, because efficiency, the greatest bureaucratic virtue, is harmful to education. While I offer no solution, I share some thoughts about how a humanizing, broadening, and suitably inefficient education might look. (shrink)

Whenever we make a claim about a fictional entity, we seem to embroil ourselves in familiar problems of reference. This appearance is misleading, because what a sentence is about bears a greater resemblance to a Fregean sense than to a reference. All previous attempts to define 'about' consist of two approaches: "metalinguistic" theories of 'about', proposed by Ryle and Carnap, which fail to counterexamples wherein transparent contexts generate paradoxical consequences; and "semantic" theories of 'about' proposed by Putnam and by Goodman, (...) which fail to counterexamples wherein no term refers to that which the sentence is about. ;An untried alternative is to replace 'S is about k ' with 'S is about k for person p '. Clearly, such a definition need not confine itself to sentences, but may apply to works of art as well. A detailed examination of how one actually goes about arguing to an audience that some work of art W is about some topic, yields a definition that approximates normal usage, yet avoids many problematic notions, such as 'beliefs', 'ideas', and 'intentional states'. Necessary and sufficient truth conditions for 'W is about k for p at time T' turn out to include as major elements a causal chain leading from W to a set of "explicit thoughts" and dispositions, and the lack of an "aesthetic environment" which excludes W. (shrink)

For whatever reasons, students seem more resistant than ever before to reading. Educators have catered to this trend, introducing learning activities other than reading. I argue that, in philosophy at least, nothing can substitute for reading and discussion. I further argue that the best readings are famous, intellectually challenging, and substantial enough to reward the student with a memorable philosophical experience. I have noticed that students appreciate meaty, classical, philosophical works that challenge them, but are bored by dumbed-down textbooks or (...) summaries. After considering some obvious objections, I relate two successful techniques I have used to raise the level of student engagement in class. (shrink)

Despite the apparent aptness of the spatial model for Internet concepts, I will try to show that the paradigm is in fact very misleading and unnatural First, I argue that Cyberspace lacks the central features that constitute a space. Then I show that the metaphor creates a poor conceptual model that yields false or misleading conclusions about how Cyberspace functions.

What of value can we philosophers of the contemporary world possibly learn from studying ancient philosophy? Of course, we often lecture about ancient writings in our classes. The Greeks blazed many trails through an uncharted philosophical wilderness, and their first steps still guide the first steps of today’s tenderfoot thinkers. What better guide than Socrates to conduct our students through the brambles of definition? What better companion than Aristotle to help those considering virtues and vices for the first time? What (...) better introduction to the existential condition than Epictetus? But the question I raise is not what of value we can impart to our students, but what of value can ancient philosophers impart... (shrink)

Four years ago, I tried assigning blogs as homework to ensure that students came to class prepared for seminar discussions. From the start, it was clear that blogging was having a good effect, but I needed to make many refinements before I was satisfied that I was squeezing the greatest benefit from this device. In this paper, I summarize and explain the fully developed method on which I eventually settled. I first explain what I’m hoping will happen to students over (...) the semester. Then, I list some guiding principles that have pushed me in certain directions as I refined the method. Next, I give a step-by-step account of how the method works, from the syllabus to the classroom. Finally, I consider drawbacks, advantages, and an important objection. (shrink)

Proposals for how health care ought to be allocated and delivered in the United States have been debated for at least the last 80 years. The last major effort at expanding health-care coverage in the US was the Affordable Care Act, which went into law in 2010. The ACA increased the number of Americans who have medical insurance, but it has nonetheless fallen short of providing universal coverage, and as of 2017, 8.8% of Americans, or 28.5 million, were uninsured. So (...) far, Republican efforts to fully repeal the ACA have failed, but Republican lawmakers have whittled away at crucial elements of the Act (including, importantly, the individual mandate that compels individuals to obtain insurance or... (shrink)

In the last 60,000 years humans have expanded across the globe and now occupy a wider range than any other terrestrial species. Our ability to successfully adapt to such a diverse range of habitats is often explained in terms of our cognitive ability. Humans have relatively bigger brains and more computing power than other animals and this allows us to figure out how to live in a wide range of environments. Here we argue that humans may be smarter than other (...) creatures, but none of us is nearly smart enough to acquire all of the information necessary to survive in any single habitat. In even the simplest foraging societies, people depend on a vast array of tools, detailed bodies of local knowledge, and complex social arrangements, and often do not understand why these tools, beliefs, and behaviors are adaptive. We owe our success to our uniquely-developed ability to learn from others. This capacity enables humans to gradually accumulate information across generations, and develop well-adapted tools, beliefs, and practices that are too complex for any single individual to invent during their lifetime. (shrink)

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Formal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive processes combine with social interaction to generate the distributions and dynamics of ‘representations.’ Recently, cognitive anthropologists have criticized such models. They make three points: mental representations are non-discrete, cultural transmission is highly inaccurate, and mental representations are not replicated, but rather are ‘reconstructed’ through an inferential process that is strongly affected by cognitive ‘attractors.’ They argue that it follows from these three claims that: 1) models that assume replication or replicators are inappropriate, (...) 2) selective cultural learning cannot account for stable traditions, and 3) selective cultural learning cannot generate cumulative adaptation. Here we use three formal models to show that even if the premises of this critique are correct, the deductions that have been drawn from them are false. In the rst model, we assume continuously varying representations under the in uence of weak selective transmission and strong attractors. We show that if the attractors are suf ciently strong relative to selective forces, the continuous representation model reduces to the standard.. (shrink)

Group beneficial norms are common in human societies. The persistence of such norms is consistent with evolutionary game theory, but existing models do not provide a plausible explanation for why they are common. We show that when a model of imitation used to derive replicator dynamics in isolated populations is generalized to allow for population structure, group beneficial norms can spread rapidly under plausible conditions. We also show that this mechanism allows recombination of different group beneficial norms arising in..

It is often argued that culture is adaptive because it allows people to acquire useful information without costly learning. In a recent paper Rogers analyzed a simple mathematical model that showed that this argument is wrong. Here we show that Rogers ' result is robust. As long as the only benefit of social learning is that imitators avoid learning costs, social learning does not increase average fitness. However, we also show that social learning can be adaptive if it makes individual (...) learning more accurate or less costly. (shrink)

Human societies are based on cooperation among large numbers of genetically unrelated individuals. This behavior is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Because cooperators are..

Over the past several decades, we have argued that cultural evolution can facilitate the evolution of largescale cooperation because it often leads to more rapid adaptation than genetic evolution, and, when multiple stable equilibria exist, rapid adaptation leads to variation among groups. Recently, Lehmann, Feldman, and colleagues have published several papers questioning this argument. They analyze models showing that cultural evolution can actually reduce the range of conditions under which cooperation can evolve and interpret these models as indicating that we (...) were wrong to conclude that culture facilitated the evolution of human cooperation. In the main, their models assume that rates of cultural adaption are not.. (shrink)

Most human populations are subdivided into ethnic groups which have self-ascribed membership and are marked by seemingly arbitrary traits such as distinctive styles of dress or speech. Existing explanations of ethnicity do not adequately explain the origin and maintenance of group marking. Here we develop a mathematical model which shows that groups distinguished by both differences in social norms and in arbitrary markers can emerge and remain stable despite significant mixing between them, if (1) people preferentially interact in mutually beneficial (...) social interaction with people who have the same marker as they do, and (2) they acquire their markers and social behaviors by imitating successful individuals. We also show that the propensity to interact with people with markers like oneself may be favored by natural selection under plausible conditions. (shrink)

Social institutions are the laws, informal rules, and conventions that give durable structure to social interactions within a population. Such institutions are typically not designed consciously, are heritable at the population level, are frequently but not always group benefi cial, and are often symbolically marked. Conceptualizing social institutions as one of multiple possible stable cultural equilibrium allows a straightforward explanation of their properties. The evolution of institutions is partly driven by both the deliberate and intuitive decisions of individuals and collectivities. (...) The innate components of human psychology coevolved in response to a culturally evolved, institutional environment and refl ect a prosocial tendency of choices we make about institutional forms. (shrink)

Understanding cooperation and punishment in small-scale societies is crucial for explaining the origins of human cooperation. We studied warfare among the Turkana, a politically uncentralized, egalitarian, nomadic pastoral society in East Africa. Based on a representative sample of 88 recent raids, we show that the Turkana sustain costly cooperation in combat at a remarkably large scale, at least in part, through punishment of free-riders. Raiding parties comprised several hundred warriors and participants are not kin or day-to-day interactants. Warriors incur substantial (...) risk of death and produce collective benefits. Cowardice and desertions occur. (shrink)

Anthropologists believe that human behavior is governed by culturally transmitted norms, and that such norms contain accumulated wisdom that allows people to behave sensibly even though they do not understand why they do what they do. Economists and other rational choice theorists have been skeptical about functionalist claims because anthropologists have not provided any plausible mechanism which could explain why norms have this property. Here, we outline two such mechanisms. We show that occasional learning when coupled with cultural transmission and (...) a tendency to conform can lead to the spread of sensible norms even though very few people understand why they are sensible. We also show that norms that help solve problems of selfcontrol that arise from time-inconsistent preferences can spread if individuals tend to imitate successful people and are occasionally influenced by members of other groups with different norms. (shrink)

Recent investigations have uncovered large, consistent deviations from the predictions of the textbook representation of Homo economicus (Roth et al, 1992, Fehr and Gächter, 2000, Camerer 2001). One problem appears to lie in economists’ canonical assumption that individuals are entirely self-interested: in addition to their own material payoffs, many experimental subjects appear to care about fairness and reciprocity, are willing to change the distribution of material outcomes at personal cost, and reward those who act in a cooperative manner while punishing (...) those who do not even when these actions are costly to the individual. These deviations from what we will term the canonical model have important consequences for a wide range of economic phenomena, including the optimal design of institutions and contracts, the allocation of property rights, the conditions for successful collective action, the analysis of incomplete contracts, and the persistence of noncompetitive wage premia. Fundamental questions remain unanswered. Are the deviations from the canonical model evidence of universal patterns of behavior, or do the individual’s economic and social environments shape behavior? If the latter, which economic and social conditions are involved? Is reciprocal behavior better explained statistically by individuals’ attributes such as their sex, age, or relative wealth, or by the attributes of the group to which the individuals belong? Are there cultures that approximate the canonical account of self-regarding behavior? Existing research cannot answer such questions because virtually all subjects have been university students, and while there are cultural differences among student populations throughout the world, these differences are small compared to the range of all social and cultural environments. To address the above questions, we and our collaborators undertook a large cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public good, and dictator games.. (shrink)

The application of phylogenetic methods to cultural variation raises questions about how cultural adaption works and how it is coupled to cultural transmission. Cultural group selection is of particular interest in this context because it depends on the same kinds of mechanisms that lead to tree-like patterns of cultural variation. Here, we review ideas about cultural group selection relevant to cultural phylogenetics. We discuss why group selection among multiple equilibria is not subject to the usual criticisms directed at group selection, (...) why multiple equilibria are a common phenomena, and why selection among multiple equilibria is not likely to be an important force in genetic evolution. We also discuss three forms of group competition and the processes that cause populations to shift from one equilibrium to another and create a mutation-like process at the group level. (shrink)

Indirect reciprocity occurs when the cooperative behavior between two individuals is contingent on their previous behavior toward others. Previous theoretical analysis indicates that indirect reciprocity can evolve if individuals use an image-scoring strategy. In this paper, we show that, when errors are added, indirect reciprocity cannot be based on an image-scoring strategy. However, if individuals use a standing strategy, then cooperation through indirect reciprocity is evolutionarily stable. These two strategies differ with respect to the information to which they attend. While (...) image-scoring strategies only need attend to the actions of others, standing strategies also require information about intent. We speculate that this difference may shed light on the evolvability of indirect reciprocity. Additionally, we show that systems of indirect reciprocity are highly sensitive to the availability of information. Finally, we present a model which shows that if indirect reciprocity were to evolve, selection should also favor trusting behavior in relations between strangers. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Acknowledgments 1. Culture Is Essential 2. Culture Exists 3. Culture Evolves 4. Culture Is an Adaptation 5. Culture Is Maladaptive 6. Culture and Genes Coevolve 7. Nothing about Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution.

Biology and the social sciences share an interest in phylogeny. Biologists know that living species are descended from past species, and use the pattern of similarities among living species to reconstruct the history of phylogenetic branching. Social scientists know that the beliefs, values, practices, and artifacts that characterize contemporary societies are descended from past societies, and some social science disciplines, linguistics and cross cultural anthropology for example, have made use of observed similarities to reconstruct cultural histories. Darwin appreciated that his (...) theory of descent with modification had many similarities of pattern and process to the already well developed field of historical linguistics. In many other areas of social science, however, phylogenetic reconstruction has not played a central role. (shrink)

It is almost 30 years since the sociobiology controversy burst into full bloom. The modern theory of the evolution of animal behavior was born in the mid 1960’s with Bill Hamilton’s seminal papers on inclusive fitness and George William’s book Adaptation and Natural Selection. The following decade saw an avalanche of important ideas on the evolution of sex ratio, animal conflicts, parental investment, and reciprocity, setting off a revolution our understanding of animal societies, a revolution that is still going on (...) today. By the mid-1970’s, Richard Alexander, E. O. Wilson, Napoleon Chagnon, Bill Irons, and Don Symons among others began applying these ideas to understand human behavior. Humans are evolved creatures, and quite plausibly the same evolutionary forces that shaped the behavior of other animals also molded our behavior. Moreover, the new theory of animal behavior—especially, kin selection, parental investment, and optimal foraging theory—seemed fit the data on human societies fairly well. (shrink)

Version 4.4 October, 1994 Introduction When explaining human behavior, anthropologists frequently distinguish the things that people do of their own free will from the things they do because they have to. In much of anthropology, and most American archaeology, this is the difference between style and function. Functional behaviors are the things people are constrained to do; stylistic behaviors are the things people do when unconstrained. Where necessity stops and free choice begins is, of course, a classic problem of social (...) science theory, but wherever the boundary is placed, it is generally implied that the domains thus divided are not of equal importance (Bettinger 1991:49-50). Few straddle this fence: Materialists emphasize function and downplay style; structuralists and postmodernists do the opposite. Recent attempts to apply neo- Darwinian concepts to the archaeological record predictably side with materialist tradition, repeating the premise that it is most important to explain functional behavior; stylistic behavior is interesting only for localizing social units in time and space. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 73-79 [Access article in PDF] Does Film Weaken Spectator Consciousness? R.D. Boyd and S.K. Wertz The role of spectator is crucial for an actor, for there are "no actors without spectators." 1 At times the success of the actor depends upon the role taken by the spectator. Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" depends upon an active,creative, involved audience. Other artists expect their (...) audience to be passive,almost unconscious. Whether the medium of creativity is film or the printedpage, examples of both dependencies abound. The focus of this essay is ona classic piece in the literature about film. In the Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer provides us with a mesmerizing printed discussion of film. 2 In this essay we wish to examine his reasoning that is in a self-contained argument by analogy. Since Kracauer does not use or mention the argument thereafter, we feel that we can isolate the argument from its context and deal with it as it stands. After an extended analysis of the argument, we will relate some of the points to the literature on film. The following analogical argument is our focus. Films...tend to weaken the spectator's consciousness. Its withdrawal from the scene may be furthered by the darkness in moviehouses. Darkness automatically reduces our contacts with actuality, depriving us of many environmental data needed for adequate judgments and other mental activities. It lulls the mind....Devotees of film and its opponents alike have compared the medium to a sort of drug and have drawn attention to its stupefying effects....Doping creates dope addicts. It would seem a sound proposition that the cinema has its habitues who frequent it out of an all but physiological urge. They are not prompted by a desire to look at a specific film or to be pleasantly entertained; what they really crave is for once to be released from the grip of consciousness, lose their identity in the dark, and let sink in, [End Page 73] with their senses ready to absorb them, the images as they happen to follow each other on the screen. 3To support his main point, "Films...tend to weaken the spectator's consciousness," Kracauer develops three intermediate arguments (IA's), which support his major argument (MA). If each sentence in the above passage were numbered one through nine, with the last full sentence being broken into two sentences at the semicolon, the following schema emerges. In English the chain of reasoning is: IA-1 Some habitues of film are not prompted by a desire to look at a specific film or to be pleasantly entertained. What they really crave is release fromthe grip of consciousness, to lose their identity in the dark, and let sink in, with their senses ready to absorb them, the images as they happen to follow each other on the screen. Therefore, the cinema has its habitues who frequent it out of an all but physiological urge.IA-2 Some habitues of film frequent it out of an all but physiological urge. Doping creates dope addicts. Therefore, devotees of film and its opponents alike have compared the medium to a sort of drug and have drawn attention to its stupefying effects.IA-3 Darkness automatically reduces our contacts with actuality, depriving us of many environmental data needed for adequate judgments and other mental activities. Darkness lulls the mind. Therefore, consciousness withdrawal from the scene may be furthered by the darkness in moviehouses.MA Devotees of film and its opponents alike have compared the medium to a sort of drug and have drawn attention to its stupefying effects. Consciousness withdrawal from the scene may be furthered by the darkness in moviehouses. Therefore, films...tend to weaken the spectator's consciousness. The above chain of arguments influences us, the spectators, to embrace his main point. However, before we are lulled into accepting his reasoning, it will be helpful to examine and evaluate each link. [End Page 74]IA-1 Some habitues of film are not prompted by a desire to... (shrink)

Altruistic punishment has been shown to invade when rare if individuals are allowed to opt out of cooperative ventures. Individuals that opt out do not contribute to the common enterprise or derive benefits from it. This result is potentially significant because it offers an explanation for the origin of large-scale cooperation in oneshot interactions among unrelated individuals. Here, we show that this result is not a general consequence of optional participation in cooperative activities, but depends on special assumptions about cooperative (...) pay-offs. We extend the pay-off structure of optional participation models to consider the effects of economies and diseconomies of scale in public-goods production, rival and non-rival consumption of goods, and different orderings of the pay-offs of freeriding and opting out. This more general model highlights the kinds of pay-offs for which optional participation favours cooperation, and those in which it does not. (shrink)

What motives underlie the ways humans interact socially? Are these the same for all societies? Are these part of our nature, or influenced by our environments?Over the last decade, research in experimental economics has emphatically falsified the textbook representation of Homo economicus. Literally hundreds of experiments suggest that people care not only about their own material payoffs, but also about such things as fairness, equity and reciprocity. However, this research left fundamental questions unanswered: Are such social preferences stable components of (...) human nature; or, are they modulated by economic, social and cultural environments? Until now, experimental research could not address this question because virtually all subjects had been university students, and while there are cultural differences among student populations throughout the world, these differences are small compared to the full range of human social and cultural environments. A vast amount of ethnographic and historical research suggests that people's motives are influenced by economic, social, and cultural environments, yet such methods can only yield circumstantial evidence about human motives. Combining ethnographic and experimental approaches to fill this gap, this book breaks new ground in reporting the results of a large cross-cultural study aimed at determining the sources of social preferences that underlie the diversity of human sociality. The same experiments which provided evidence for social preferences among university students were performed in fifteen small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of social, economic and cultural conditions by experienced field researchers who had also done long-term ethnographic field work in these societies. The findings of these experiments demonstrated that no society in which experimental behaviour is consistent with the canonical model of self-interest. Indeed, results showed that the variation in behaviour is far greater than previously thought, and that the differences between societies in market integration and the importance of cooperation explain a substantial portion of this variation, which individual-level economic and demographic variables could not. Finally, the extent to which experimental play mirrors patterns of interaction found in everyday life is traced.The book starts with a succinct but substantive introduction to the use of game theory as an analytical tool and its use in the social sciences for the rigorous testing of hypotheses about fundamental aspects of social behaviour outside artificially constructed laboratories. The results of the fifteen case studies are summarized in a suggestive chapter about the scope of the project. (shrink)

V. 1. Philosophically thinking about world religions -- v. 2. An evangelical theology of religions.

Humans hunt and kill many different species of animals, but whales are our biggest prey. In the North Atlantic, a male long-fi nned pilot whale (Globiceph- ala melaena), a large relative of the dolphins, can grow as large as 6.5 meters and weigh as much as 2.5 tons. As whales go, these are not particularly large, but there are more than 750,000 pilot whales in the North Atlantic, traveling in groups, “pods,” that range from just a few individuals to a (...) thousand or more. Each pod is led by an individual known as the “pilot,” who appears to set the course of travel for the rest of the group. This pilot is both an asset and a weakness to the pod. The average pilot whale will yield about a half ton of meat and blubber, and North Atlantic societies including Ireland, Iceland, and the Shetlands used to manipulate the pilot to drive the entire pod ashore. In the Faroe Islands, a group of 18 grassy rocks due north of Scotland, pilot whale hunts have continued for the last 1200 years, at least. The permanent residents of these islands, the Faroese, previously killed an average of 900 whales each year, yielding about 500 tons of meat and fat that was consumed by local residents. Hunts have declined in recent years. From 2001 to 2005, about 3400 whales were killed, yielding about 890 metric tons of blubber and 990 metric tons of meat. The whale kill, or grindadráp in the Faroese language, begins when a fi shing boat spots a pod close enough to a suitable shore, on a suitably clear day. A single boat, or even a small group of fi shermen, is not suffi cient to trap a.. (shrink)

This online appendix has five main sections. 1) Simulation 2) Derivation of model a. Success biases b. Migration c. Five equilibrium solutions d. Why economic interactions () between groups is likely not near zero e. Derivation of total payoffs 3) Discussion of the limitation of time-scales 4) An ethnographic example of occupational specialization, Swat Valley. 5) The evolution of the division of labor in other species..

Human migration is nonrandom. In small scale societies of the past, and in the modern world, people tend to move to wealthier, safer, and more just societies from poorer, more violent, less just societies. If immigrants are assimilated, such nonrandom migration can increase the occurrence of culturally transmitted beliefs, values, and institutions that cause societies to be attractive to immigrants. Here we describe and analyze a simple model of this process. This model suggests that long run outcomes depend on the (...) relative strength of migration and local adaptation. When local adaption is strong enough to preserve cultural variation among groups, cultural variants that make societies attractive always predominate, but never drive alternative variants to extinction. When migration predominates, outcomes depend both on the relative attractiveness of alError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapternative variants and on the initial sizes of societies that provide and receive immigrants. (shrink)

Reading is an amazing skill. As you read this review, meaning flows from the page (or for many readers, the screen) into your brain. This happens automatically—you can’t choose not to understand the written word any more than the spoken one. It’s also highly efficient. Most people can process text two or three times faster than speech. Of course, humans have many amazing skills. We also identify objects, decode speech, and understand complex social situations automatically and efficiently. However, the machinery (...) in the brain that gives us these abilities, and many more, was plausibly constructed by natural selection, and, if so, they are adaptations just like our peculiar pelvis and the thick enamel on our molars. Reading arose a few thousand years ago, and this means that machinery in the brain that allows us to read did not evolve for that purpose. Instead, a series of scribes, priests, and printers working over a few thousand years gradually devised the writing systems that give rise to this amazing skill. In this fascinating book, Stanislaus Dehaene details how cognitive abilities evolved for other purposes were co-opted for reading, how these abilities are instantiated in the brain, and how they constrain the cultural evolution of writing systems. Dehaene does an excellent job explaining how reading works at both the neurobiological and cognitive levels. He takes the reader seriously, laying out diverse kinds of evidence that bear on the problem. For example, when you read, visual information is shunted to a small region in the left hemisphere of your brain, the brain’s ‘‘letter box’’ where the text is decoded. The earliest evidence for this came from the autopsy of a 19th century French stroke victim who lost the ability to read, even though he could still recognize numerals. More recently, PET and fMRI imaging studies have pinned down the location. Amazingly, these results show that it doesn’t matter whether you read Italian or Chinese, the same part of the brain is involved. Electroencephalograms gave us a better temporal resolution, and single neuron recordings of patients undergoing surgery confirm that only some neurons respond to text while others respond to faces, tools.. (shrink)

The data were collected during 9.5 months of field work by Sarah Mathew from 2008– 2010. Participants were a representative sample of adult men reliant on nomadic pastoralism for their livelihood. We recruited them in a town close to the ethnic border frequented by nomadic Turkana who live in the surrounding 50 km radius. Recruitment was done with the help of trained local Turkana research assistants. The RA approached potential participants, briefly introduced them to the study, and then asked them (...) to participate. If they agreed, they were brought to the study site described below. We conducted the study in the town center because the risk of raids in the surrounding nomadic settlements was high. We did not recruit from the settled Turkana population in this town center as they are Turkana who have actively pursued schooling and professions outside the pastoral sector, or were forced out of subsistence pastoralism after droughts, epidemics or raids. Nomadic Turkana frequent the perimeter of the town center for a variety of reasons as it is an important trading center and is adjacent to dry season watering holes. Herders from surrounding nomadic settlements frequent the market to sell an animal and purchase tobacco, tea, sugar and flour. Turkana women come to sell milk and collect relief food. Nomadic Turkana periodically come to town to visit their settled relatives. A river runs along the perimeter of town. The wells dug in the dry bed of the river provide water for 1 surrounding nomadic settlements and so herdsmen frequently bring their livestock for watering to the perimeter of town from where we can recruit them.To ensure that our sample is representative of herders within the town perimeter on a given day, we aimed to recruit using the following procedure to the extent that circumstances allowed: First, we specified the age-group that the participant should belong to. Then the RA went to one of the locations where nomadic herders visiting town are found.. (shrink)

The authors identify and discuss the many complexities involved in the translation of scientific information in the social sciences into forms usable for solving problems of practice in education. As a means of appropriately handling these complexities and the issues that arise, they prescribe a series of stages to be followed from the advent of a practitioner's situational problem to the design of a response to it. They assert that unless the process of translation is conducted with the prescribed level (...) of understanding, appreciation, and rigor, the application of knowledge will be inaccurate. (shrink)

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of (...) small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life. Key Words: altruism; cooperation; cross-cultural research; experimental economics; game theory; ultimatum game; public goods game; self-interest. (shrink)