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90The cultural evolution of emergent group-level traitsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (3): 243-254. 2014.Many of the most important properties of human groups – including properties that may give one group an evolutionary advantage over another – are properly defined only at the level of group organization. Yet at present, most work on the evolution of culture has focused solely on the transmission of individual-level traits. I propose a conceptual extension of the theory of cultural evolution, particularly related to the evolutionary competition between cultural groups. The key concept in this ext…Read more
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59Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidenceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 39 1-71. 2016.Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target arti…Read more
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36Invariants of human emotionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (3): 164-164. 2012.Because of the complexity of human emotional responses, invariants must be sought not in the responses themselves, but in their generating mechanisms. Lindquist et al. show that functional locationism is a theoretical dead end; their proposed mechanistic framework is a first step toward better models of emotional behavior. We caution, however, that emotions may still be quasi-natural perceptual types
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20Let the social sciences evolveBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (4): 437-437. 2014.We agree that evolutionary perspectives may help us organize many divergent realms of the science of human behavior. Nevertheless, an imperative to unite all social science under an evolutionary framework risks turning off researchers who have their own theoretical perspectives that can be informed by evolutionary theory without being exclusively defined by it. We propose a few considerations for scholars interested in joining the evolutionary and social sciences.
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13Not even wrong: Imprecision perpetuates the illusion of understanding at the cost of actual understandingBehavioral and Brain Sciences 39. 2016.
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Johns Hopkins UniversityPost-doctoral fellow
Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America