Some Links #11: Linguistic Diversity or Homogeneity?
Linguistic Diversity = Poverty. Razib Khan basically argues, correctly in my opinion, that linguistic homogeneity is good for economic development and general prosperity. From the perspective of a...
View ArticleWhat Makes Humans Unique? (I): The Evolution of the Human Brain
Hello! This is my first post here at Replicated Typo and I thought I’d start with reposting a slightly modified version of a three-part series on the evolution of the human mind that I did last year...
View ArticleWhat Makes Humans Unique? (II): Six Candidates for What Makes Human Cognition...
What makes humans unique? This never-ending debate has sparked a long list of proposals and counter-arguments and, to quote from a recent article on this topic, “a similar fate most likely awaits some...
View ArticleTime Travel, Dreams and The Origin of Knowledge
I’ve been attending a weekly seminar on the Metaphysics of Time Travel, given by Alasdair Richmond. Yesterday, he was talking about the way knowledge arises in causal chains. Popper (1972 and various...
View ArticleMarc Hauser investigated for scientific misconduct
The Boston Globe reported today that Marc Hauser is on leave due to scientific misconduct . The Great Beyond summarises the article as follows: The trouble centers on a 2002 paper published in the...
View ArticleThe 20th Anniversary of Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom: Natural Language and...
The day before yesterday Wintz mentioned two important birthdays in the field of language evolution (see here): First, Babel’s Dawn turned four, and second, as both Edmund Blair Bolles and Wintz...
View ArticleAnimal Signalling Theory 101 – The Handicap Principle
One of the most important concepts in animal signalling theory, proposed by Amotz Zahavi in a seminal 1975 paper and in later works (Zahavi 1977; Zahavi & Zahavi 1997), is the handicap principle. A...
View ArticleThe Interrogative Mood: A Novel?
Just a quick post in case folks haven’t heard about this already, I got a copy for Christmas. ‘The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?’ by Padgett Powell – A book composed entirely of interrogative sentences,...
View ArticleLinguistic diversity and traffic accidents
I was thinking about Daniel Nettle’s model of linguistic diversity which showed that linguistic variation tends to decline even with a small amount of migration between communities. I wondered if...
View ArticleThe USA: Most linguistically diverse country on the planet?
When asked to name a linguistically diverse place, I would have said Papua New Guinea, and if asked to name a stereotypically monolingual country, I would have named the USA. However, this recent...
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