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Zach Urbina
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Jessica Paré - New York Magazine by Zachary Scott, May 2012
Paré laughs easily and often, despite a case of extreme jet lag. Bali is fifteen hours...
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“MARLBORO” by:Dylan Silva on Flickr
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breadfast: the world’s coolest future toaster.
Tag Results
3 posts tagged evolutionary biology
Don’t Know Why I Love You
“ It is tempting to dismiss music as a purely cultural phenomenon and rock as an aberration of 20th-century culture. That is pretty much the explanation musicologists and cultural theorists have favoured as they dissect the arcane details of who-copied-what-from-whom, interpreting the history of popular music in a mumbo-jumbo of postmodern critique.
By contrast, an evolutionary biologist starts from the assumption that things don’t happen by themselves, especially things that dramatically increase your risk of dying, as rocking out certainly does. Anything as popular, exciting, sexy, deadly and - most of all - as difficult to do well, needs an explanation. But we need to ask the right questions.
Asking how making and listening to music affects the reproductive fitness of individual musicians and audience members can only tell us part of the story. We also need to consider other evolutionary processes that have operated on individuals and their genes that might predispose something as sexy and dangerous as rock to shake, rattle and revolutionise the modern world.
No sane person would argue that rock is not cultural: it is well known that rock arose in the 1950s out of existing musical traditions including rhythm and blues, folk, blues, jazz and country. It spread through learning and imitation, assisted by a special blend of social and economic circumstances that arose soon after World War II and the spread of technologies like commercial radio, record players and television. But even though rock is a quintessentially cultural phenomenon, it grew in the soil of our evolved biology. That is what makes it so utterly compelling, and why, a decade into the 21st century, it is still going so strong.” continue reading | Cosmos Magazine
[title: Mick Jagger][image: Iori Tomita]
“He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.” - Bertolt Brecht
“ Males that stray from the nest for adulterous adventures may leave an opening for their mates to cheat, new research on great tit birds suggests.
“If a male has a bold personality score, he has more extra-pair young — more of his paternity will come from outside of his own nest than from within,” study researcher Samantha Patrick, of the Center for Biological Studies Chizé, in France, told LiveScience. “Because the male is absent, his female is unprotected.”
Great tit birds are socially monogamous, which means they stick with one partner for life. Based on previous work, though, the researchers knew that the bolder, more adventurous of the species tend to cheat on their partner. The researchers weren’t sure if this actually gave the bold males more offspring, since it lets their mates cheat as well.
For three years, the researchers studied a wild group of great tits (Parus major), a small common European and Asian bird, nesting in boxes near Oxford University. The researchers captured wild birds from the area and studied how they reacted to a new environment in the lab. The “bold” birds were more adventurous and inquisitive in the new environment, exploring the nooks and flying from perch to perch. continue reading | LiveScience
[title:source]
Do you have any idea who I think I am?
“ Believing you’re better than you are may help you succeed, a new study says.
For years, psychologists have observed that people routinely overestimate their abilities, said study leader Dominic Johnson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Some experts have suggested that overconfidence can be a good thing, perhaps by boosting ambition, resolve, and other traits, creating self-fulfilling prophecies.
But positive self-delusion can also lead to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions, according to the study—making it a mystery why overconfidence remains a key human trait despite thousands of years of natural selection, which typically weeds out harmful traits over generations.
Now, new computer simulations show that a false sense of optimism, whether when deciding to go to war or investing in a new stock, can often improve your chances of winning.
“There hasn’t been a good explanation for why we are overconfident, and this new model offers a kind of evolutionary logic for that,” Johnson said.
“It’s unlikely to be an accident—we’re perhaps overconfident for a good reason.”” continue reading | National Geographic
