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
Biology Tautology 3: The problem spreads 25 Aug 2009 This post will look at two different aspects of the tautology problem: 1. The public aspect, as it becomes a widely used counterargument to “Darwinism”, and the rebuttals of some public “Darwinists”; and 2. How it played out in the biological and philosophical literature. Read More
Education Darwinism, Philosophy and Society 7 Jul 2010 I’m teaching, for the first time, this subject in the final semester for this year (we have a three semester structure in defiance of all etymology), and as you might expect I’m pretty au fait with it all, except for one: Darwinism and literature. Now, we’re using the Appleman volume… Read More
Administrative Happenings 21 Jan 2008 So, I just found out that I’m teaching this semester, which is a comfort (money will come in, and we can eat) and a pain (I am going to Arizona in March, so we will have to sort out some guest lectures or something). The subject is philosophy of 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.