Do low status primates eat badly? 9 Jun 2008 A blog that I have just come across is Deric Bownds’ Mindblog. He covers issues of standard and evolutionary psychology and is well worth reading. One of his posts is this: Social heirarchy, stress, and diet, in which he presents recent evidence that stressed primates (in this case humans) eat lower quality, high sugar and high starch, food (crisps and M&Ms). Why? I can think of several reasons. One is that this gives immediate energy release to deal with the stressors. But what if you are constantly stressed, by, say, being of low status on the social dominance hierarchy? Then you might eat low quality food too much of the time, and your health would suffer. This may explain the famous Whitehall Study and subsequent experiments, that show that, controlling for all other factors, low status is a predictor of worse health. This is not restricted to human primates, either – Macaques and other monkeys, baboons and the great apes all show this effect. Evolution Species and systematics
Ecology and Biodiversity Konrad Lorenz – a lecture 24 Sep 2009 As I noted before, Paul Griffiths gave a lecture on Konrad Lorenz. The podcast is up now. Sydney Ideas Key Thinkers: Konrad Lorenz Professor Paul Griffiths delivers his 2009 Sydney Ideas Key Thinkers lecture on the remarkable life and legacy of Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), Austrian zoologist, animal psychologist, ornithologist, and… Read More
Evolution Other adaptive landscape papers 8 Aug 2008 Having blown my own trumpet, I should mention that there are a few other articles in the same edition of Biology and Philosophy (which I hadn’t seen until now) on Gavrilets’ view of adaptive landscapes now on Online First: Massimo Pigliucci has a very nice historical summary of Sewall Wright’s… Read More
Biology Natural classification 23 Jan 201423 Jan 2014 It occurs to me that I haven’t plugged my own book here. What a failure on my part! It was published in December, so it is really time I did so. In this book, Malte Ebach and I discuss a topic not often discussed in the philosophy of science: the… Read More
I actually know Dr. Bownds from the first few of what I hope to be many meetings with him for advice and guidance on my path to my PhD (I go to the University of Wisconsin – Madison; I’m an undergraduate and a neuroscience student, and may or may not go to grad school in my field at UW-Madison as well – I plan to get my PhD in neuroscience), and he’s got a whole wealth of posts on this, as well as a fairly massive repository of knowledge on biology of mind – he was the first chairman of my university’s neuroscience department, which I am an undergraduate member of, and wrote possibly the most well-known textbook on biology of mind and our university’s biology of mind course. And he’s a pretty darn good mentor and role model of sorts too, despite the fact that he’s a professor emeritus so I’m shit out of luck if I want to do any research with him. Consciousness and neuroethology is his thing. I’d check out the textbook for his course and his work in visual neuroscience – it’s good stuff.