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
History A meme. A medieval meme. 25 Feb 200818 Sep 2017 … a female deer. Oops, sorry, wrong thread. Anyway, a medievalist, goblinpaladin, has tagged me with a meme. Now I don’t’ get tagged a lot with memes, possibly because folk know I have published on them, both for and more recently against, but you can’t deny the buggers on the… Read More
Evolution Ruse on Hull: a memoir 13 Aug 2010 The following memoir of David Hull is from Michael Ruse, who has graciously given permission to post it on this blog: DAVID HULL (1935–2010) I first met David Hull in the fall of 1968, at the first meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, being held in Pittsburgh. He was… Read More
Biology A current list of species concepts 18 Nov 201718 Nov 2017 As part of my book, I have updated the list of species concepts. Thought you lot might like this: Species conceptions Basic Convention Taxonomic species [TSC] Diagnostic Morphospecies [MSC] Genealogy Evolutionary species [ESC] [Monophyly] Phylospecies [PSC] Gene-based Genetic species [GSC] Reproductive reach Biospecies [BSC] Ecological niche Ecospecies [EcSC] Replacement concepts… 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.