Database of Global Cultural Evolution [Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences] – By Bahrami-rad, Duman, Anke Becker, and Joseph Henrich 

“Database of Global Cultural Evolution

Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

By Bahrami-rad, Duman, Anke Becker, and Joseph Henrich 

http://dgce.fas.harvard.edu/

About

The Database of Global Cultural Evolution links historical data on cultural practices to contemporary populations around the world.

The historical data come from the Ethnographic Atlas (EA), a database containing ethnographic information on 1,291 pre-industrial societies around the world. The Ethnographic Atlas contains coded variables on subsistence economy, social and political organization, marriage and kinship patterns, inheritance, etc.

Contemporary populations in our database are defined based on living languages of the world.

The match between historical data and contemporary populations is based on language. The Ethnographic Atlas includes information on languages of pre-industrial societies. Using this information, we link the pre-industrial data from the Ethnographic Atlas to all contemporary languages using language trees of the Glottolog, a comprehensive catalogue that organizes the world’s languages, language families and dialects via a genealogical classification. To define values of each variable in the EA for all languages spoken by contemporary populations, genealogical trees of the Glottolog are used to match every contemporary language to one of the 1,291 societies from the Ethnographic Atlas. For each variable, every contemporary language is matched to the linguistically closest pre-industrial society which contains an observation for that variable.

Then, geographic information about the global distribution of contemporary languages is used to map the geographic distribution of each variable. Geographic data for living languages come from the Ethnologue, a comprehensive database of world languages.

Finally, the map and data produced for each historical variable (from the Ethnographic Atlas) are displayed for all 7,651 contemporary languages listed in the Ethnologue.

How do I cite the database?

Research that uses the Database of Global Cultural Evolution should cite the following paper:

Bahrami-rad, Duman, Anke Becker, and Joseph Henrich. “Tabulated nonsense? Testing the validity of the Ethnographic Atlas and the persistence of culture.” Working paper.”

“What Makes Injections Hard to Swallow?” By Monica L. Smith [Sapiens]

“What Makes Injections Hard to Swallow?

An anthropological assessment of the differences between pills and injections may shed some light on vaccine hesitancy.

By Monica L. Smith
is a professor of archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/history-injections

My work has led me to think about the human relationship with different mechanisms of medical delivery, particularly the pill and the injection. They differ in so many important ways: our level of independence in taking them, our level of comfort, and, importantly, the intended purpose of the drug for healing in the pressing present or protecting against a faraway future.

The human eagerness to take pills but a reluctance by some to be vaccinated surely has a lot to do with modern politics and social factors. But it also has roots deep in our ancestral past.

(…)

While the practice of eating medicinal substances has likely been around for millions of years (even nonhuman primates self-medicate), injections are comparatively new. Projectiles such as spears and bullets have a long history of piercing the skin—but for purposes of harm.

Even after people developed invasive techniques to help rather than hurt, including acupuncture, amputation, and trepanation, there was still little experience of using violence to insert a compound into a person’s body with the counterintuitive goal of improving their health. Tattooing is one example: There is some evidence that millennia-old Indigenous tattoo practices were done in part to introduce therapeutic compounds. The idea of inoculating someone with traces of a disease to protect them seems to go back to before the 1500s in the Ottoman Empire. In Europe, the first vaccine was developed against smallpox in 1796. The first hypodermic syringe only dates to the 1850s.

Fear of needles may be as old as needles themselves and remains a problem even for those who require regular self-administered injections for their health, as with people who have diabetes.

(…)

A vaccine, counterintuitively, is taken when you’re well. You accept a physical pain (a pinch in the arm followed by side effects that can range from mild to severe) against an unknown future gain (a large statistical likelihood of protection against a deadly disease). This tradeoff means that vaccines join other things that are good for us that we don’t enjoy and often don’t do, like flossing or saving for retirement.

Indeed, the challenges of imagining future benefits may be a critical part of the human story. Human cognitive misgivings surrounding pay-now/play-later activities are at the heart of many of our contemporary conundrums about health, economics, education, and climate change.

A final important distinction among medical applications is the notion of autonomy. Whether it’s swallowing a tablet, drinking a potion, or slapping a patch on your arm, the do-it-yourself approach seems to be popular: Hospital studies show that patients prefer to be in charge of their own medication.

By contrast, injections usually are given to you by a professional “other” who has special equipment and training; they are invasive procedures, done in commercial or institutional settings that may feel clinical and cold rather than comforting. It’s notable that when it comes to female hormonal birth control, pills are more popular than injections, even though the latter last longer and could enable people to avoid having to remember a daily pill.

(…)

Taste, visuals, and reformulated delivery mechanisms might be key elements to explore to make medicinal treatment more acceptable to deep-rooted human psychology. Small things can make a difference. The visual encouragement of vaccines, for example, is subtly encoded into Apple’s recently announced redesign of the syringe emoji to remove the potentially intimidating drops of blood that were part of the image.

(…)

No doubt future medical treatments will continue to address our desire for autonomy in preventative and curative medicine, just as we cherish self-determination in other physical activities such as exercise, nutrition, and sex. With a little extra anthropological thought, we may well see a time when injections are part of the archaeology of medicine, with needles consigned to the dustbin of history.”

“Bias Is a Big Problem. But So Is ‘Noise.’” By Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein [The New York Times]

“Bias Is a Big Problem. But So Is ‘Noise.’

May 15, 2021

By Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/opinion/noise-bias-kahneman.html

Daniel Kahneman is an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton and a recipient of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Olivier Sibony is a professor of strategy at the HEC Paris business school.

Cass R. Sunstein is a law professor at Harvard. They are the authors of the forthcoming book “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment,” on which this essay is based.

(…)

Society has devoted a lot of attention to the problem of bias — and rightly so. But when it comes to mistaken judgments and unfortunate decisions, there is another type of error that attracts far less attention: noise.

To see the difference between bias and noise, consider your bathroom scale. If on average the readings it gives are too high (or too low), the scale is biased. If it shows different readings when you step on it several times in quick succession, the scale is noisy. (Cheap scales are likely to be both biased and noisy.) While bias is the average of errors, noise is their variability.

Although it is often ignored, noise is a large source of malfunction in society. In a 1981 study, for example, 208 federal judges were asked to determine the appropriate sentences for the same 16 cases. The cases were described by the characteristics of the offense (robbery or fraud, violent or not) and of the defendant (young or old, repeat or first-time offender, accomplice or principal). You might have expected judges to agree closely about such vignettes, which were stripped of distracting details and contained only relevant information.

But the judges did not agree. The average difference between the sentences that two randomly chosen judges gave for the same crime was more than 3.5 years. Considering that the mean sentence was seven years, that was a disconcerting amount of noise.

Noise in real courtrooms is surely only worse, as actual cases are more complex and difficult to judge than stylized vignettes. It is hard to escape the conclusion that sentencing is in part a lottery, because the punishment can vary by many years depending on which judge is assigned to the case and on the judge’s state of mind on that day. The judicial system is unacceptably noisy.

(…)

Where does noise come from? There is much evidence that irrelevant circumstances can affect judgments. In the case of criminal sentencing, for instance, a judge’s mood, fatigue and even the weather can all have modest but detectable effects on judicial decisions.

Another source of noise is that people can have different general tendencies. Judges often vary in the severity of the sentences they mete out: There are “hanging” judges and lenient ones.

A third source of noise is less intuitive, although it is usually the largest: People can have not only different general tendencies (say, whether they are harsh or lenient) but also different patterns of assessment (say, which types of cases they believe merit being harsh or lenient about). Underwriters differ in their views of what is risky, and doctors in their views of which ailments require treatment. We celebrate the uniqueness of individuals, but we tend to forget that, when we expect consistency, uniqueness becomes a liability.

(…)

No noise-reduction techniques will be deployed, however, if we do not first recognize the existence of noise. Noise is too often neglected. But it is a serious issue that results in frequent error and rampant injustice. Organizations and institutions, public and private, will make better decisions if they take noise seriously.”

“Why my theory that humans can only maintain 150 friendships has withstood 30 years of scrutiny” By Robin Dunbar [The Conversation/Phys.org]

“Why my theory that humans can only maintain 150 friendships has withstood 30 years of scrutiny

by Robin Dunbar, The Conversation

https://phys.org/news/2021-05-theory-humans-friendships-withstood-years.html

(…)

Despite the growing evidence, the same critiques reappear with suspiciously religious zeal. The most common claim is that human behavior is culturally determined and so cannot be subject to the same biological rules as primate behavior. Another variant on this claim is that networking platforms such as LinkedIn have made it possible for us to maintain more extensive social networks.

Most of these claims fail to recognize that Dunbar’s number applies to quality relationships, not to acquaintances—which account for the more casual outer layers of our social networks, beyond our 150 meaningful friendships.

However, a more recent challenge by researchers at Stockholm University claims to have finally debunked Dunbar’s number by showing that the social brain equation underpredicts human social group sizes. Alas, the study used flawed statistical methods and fails to account for the body of evidence we now have to support Dunbar’s number.

(…)

Evidence from neuroscience

We’ve also filled in many of the behavioral and neurocognitive details that underlie the social brain hypothesis. More than a dozen neuroimaging studies have shown that, in both humans and monkeys, the size of an individual’s social network correlates with the size of their default mode neural network—the large brain circuit that manages social relationships.

Similarly, the touch-based bonding mechanism that holds these groups together—a mechanism that exploits the brain’s endorphin system—is common to both humans and primates. This is why hugging and physical touch is so important in our relationships.”

“Extraverts and Conservatives are More Likely to Get COVID” By Glenn Geher [Darwin’s Subterranean World]

“Extraverts and Conservatives are More Likely to Get COVID

The pandemic is largely the result of our evolved social psychology.

Glenn Geher
Darwin’s Subterranean World

Posted May 15, 2021

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/202105/extraverts-and-conservatives-are-more-likely-get-covid
 
***

Personality Correlates of COVID-19 Infection Proclivity: Extraversion Kills

Vania Rolona, Glenn Geherb, Jennifer Linkb, Alexander Mackielb

Personality and Individual Differences

Available online 14 May 2021

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.110994

***

“In light of the human behavioral element of COVID, my research team (a subset of The New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab ) conducted a study to help us better understand the behavioral factors that underlie the spread of this virus—a virus that has turned all of our worlds upside down in so many ways.

Our study, recently published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences , explored various dispositional traits that might ultimately underlie whether people are prone toward getting the virus. The two main variables we focused on were extraversion and political conservatism.

(…)

An additional evolutionary perspective as to why and how extraversion might relate to COVID infection proclivity pertains the behavioral-system hijacking hypothesis (see Reiber et al., 2010). This idea, which is admittedly beyond the scope of our data, suggests that the coronavirus, which has known effects on the nervous system, may actually hijack behavior and temporarily make people relatively sociable so as to increase its spread across an increased number of human hosts.

(…)

Gollwitzer et al. (2020) found that people who live in relatively conservative areas (based on voting patterns) have been less likely to follow social-distancing guidelines relative to those living in areas where people are more likely to vote for liberal political candidates.

In light of this basic reasoning, we predicted that people who self-identify as conservative would be more likely to wind up becoming infected with the virus relative to those who self-identify as liberal.”

“Will science survive politics?” By Tom Chivers [UnHerd]

“Will science survive politics?

Whether something is politically convenient or not doesn’t affect whether it’s true

By Tom Chivers

May 11, 2021

https://unherd.com/2021/05/will-science-survive-politics/

(…)

No one really cares about creationists any more. Instead, the row is over whether Darwin – and his theory, or its implications – is racist, or sexist. And the people passionately defending him are often right-wingers, while his critics are on the Left.

The latest incarnation is a by-the-numbers fighting-the-culture-war piece in the Telegraph about a guide to “Applying a decolonial framework to teaching and research in ecology and evolution” published by some plant scientists in the University of Sheffield. In the guide, science lecturers are told to contextualise Darwin by making it clear how his worldview was shaped by colonialism and racism.

(…)

I also rather wish that the Sheffield academics had mentioned whether or not they think Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true or not. There’s an awful lot of talk about power imbalances, Eurocentric viewpoints, and the legacy of colonialism, and how science “cannot be objective and apolitical” – but regardless of whether or not Darwin was racist, was he right? Maybe that’s taken for granted.

(…)

The sad, forgotten creationists aside, most of us gladly accept that dragonflies’ wings and wombats’ toenails or whatever have evolved; that those ancestors which had versions of those organs more suited to their environment tended to have more offspring.

But when Darwin’s idea gets applied to behaviour, it becomes more controversial. The field of science that tries to do this is called sociobiology; it was controversial enough when it arose in the Seventies, pioneered by EO Wilson. It caused a furore – protesters poured water over Wilson’s head during a conference talk, chanting “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” Wilson’s work was mainly about ants.

When Darwinian ideas are applied to the human brain, and human behaviour, it is called evolutionary psychology, and that is more controversial still.

Which, on the face of it, is strange. Evolutionary psychology is, at its heart, the idea that the brain (and therefore the mind, and human behaviour and psychology in general) is the product of evolution, just like every other animal organ. As Richard Dawkins wrote in the 2005 foreword to The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, that is so obviously true as to be almost not worth saying: “The central claim [of evolutionary psychology] is not an extraordinary one,” he wrote. “It amounts to the exceedingly modest claim that minds are on the same footing as bodies where Darwinian natural selection is concerned. Given that feet, livers, ears, wings, shells, eyes, crests, ligaments, antennae, hearts and feathers are shaped by natural selection … why on earth should the same not be true of brains[?]”

(…)

The idea that the mind is evolved goes back to Darwin himself, but it was Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, a wife-and-husband team of academics, who really developed the field in The Adapted Mind, a book of essays they edited in 1992.

(…)

Charles Darwin, the historical figure, is interesting to study, and it’s worth remembering that he was a man of his time. But Darwinism, the great insight of evolution by natural selection, is separate. It is true (or false) regardless of Darwin’s own views, and so are the many insights which have followed it. We can go back and forth over whether he was a racist, but the more interesting question is: was he right?”

“When Men Behave Badly” by Rob Henderson | A Review of When Men Behave Badly by David M. Buss

“When Men Behave Badly—A Review

written by Rob Henderson

Published on April 30, 2021

A review of When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault by David M. Buss, Little, Brown Spark, 336 pages (April 2021)

https://quillette.com/2021/04/30/when-men-behave-badly-a-review/

(…)

These differences in reproductive biology have given rise to differences in sexual psychology that are comparable to sex differences in height, weight, and upper-body muscle mass. However, Buss is careful to note, such differences always carry the qualifier “on average.” Some women are taller than some men—but on average men are taller. Likewise, some women prefer to have more sex partners than some men—but on average men prefer more. These evolved differences are a key source of conflict.

One goal of the book is to highlight situations in which sexual conflict is diminished or amplified to prevent victimization and reduce harm.

(…)

Because of the increased risk women carry, they tend to be choosier about their partners. In contrast, men are less discerning. Studies of online dating, for example, find that most men find most women to be at least somewhat attractive. In contrast, women, on average, view 80 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. Another study found that on the dating app Tinder, men “liked” more than 60 percent of the female profiles they viewed, while women “liked” only 4.5 percent of male profiles.

(…)

Deception is often prevalent in the mating market. And deception involves an understanding of what the opposite sex desires. For instance, on dating websites, men exaggerate their income by roughly 20 percent on average and round up their height by about two inches. Similarly, women on dating websites round their weight down by about 15 pounds.

(…)

… as Buss stresses throughout the book, “adaptive” does not mean “morally good.” Often, cultures create moral norms to suppress certain behaviors that might be beneficial for the individual but bad for the community (e.g., stealing).

(…)

Throughout the book, Buss is careful to note that just because a behavior is adaptive or “natural” does not mean it is morally good or desirable. Diseases are “natural,” yet modern science has developed vaccines and medical procedures to eliminate these ailments. Likewise, people can implement personal, social, and legal instruments to curtail the darker facets of male psychology.

(…)

What kind of men? As mentioned above, Dark Triad traits predict sexual aggression. Perhaps more surprisingly, research indicates that high-status men are particularly likely to commit sexual assault. Buss writes, “men with money, status, popularity, and power are more likely to be sexual predators.” These results parallel the disconcerting finding that men who use sexual coercion have more partners than men who do not. A popular idea is that men who are desperate or deprived of chances for sex will be more likely to use coercion. This is known as the “mate deprivation hypothesis.” However, studies suggest the opposite is the case. Men who have more partners report higher levels of sexual aggression compared to men with fewer partners. Furthermore, men who predict that their future earnings will be high also report greater levels of sexual aggression relative to men who predict that their future earnings will be low.”