E. O Wilson on the evolutionary explanation of human "tribes" (Spanish and English)

En abril de este año salió publicado un artículo en Newsweek Argentina con un análisis de un trabajo de E. O. Wilson sobre una explicación evolucionista de las "tribus" humanas publicado en Newsweek USA.  En el mismo, sale mi opinión sobre algunas de estas ideas (sólo tomaron un par de frases). Aquí les dejo el link a la nota (en castellano): http://diagonales.infonews.com/nota-178156-Homotribu.html

Y aquí también les dejo el link al artículo original de Wilson en la Newsweek de USA (en inglés):  http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/01/biologist-e-o-wilson-on-why-humans-like-ants-need-a-tribe.html

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In April this year, an article in Newsweek Argentina was published discussing the work of E. O. Wilson on an evolutionary explanation of the human “tribes”. My opinion appears in it (only a couple of sentences).Here ´s the link to the article (in Spanish): http://diagonales.infonews.com/nota-178156-Homotribu.html

 And also here is the link to the original article by Wilson in Newsweek USA (in English): http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/01/biologist-e-o-wilson-on-why-humans-like-ants-need-a-tribe.html

Curso "Introducción a la Teoría de los Juegos en las Ciencias Sociales" dictado por el Dr. Diego Ríos

La Fundación Instituto David Hume - Centro de Investigaciones en Evolución Normativa e Institucional y ESEADE organizaron el curso "Introducción a la Teoría de los Juegos en las Ciencias Sociales" que dictará el Dr. Diego Ríos a partir del miércoles 14 de marzo en ESEADE.

El objetivo de este curso es presentar de manera concisa la teoría de los juegos clásica, sin presuponer conocimientos previos sobre el tema por parte del alumno. El curso buscará esclarecer las ideas principales de la teoría de los juegos, proveyendo un cuadro teórico general que permita ahondar posteriormente, más detenidamente, en los detalles por aquellos estudiantes que así lo deseen. Con el objetivo de hacer el tratamiento y el aprendizaje más intuitivo, se proveerán ejemplos de distintos campos de aplicación – el derecho, la economía, la teoría política y la teoría de la evolución – mostrando, así, la amplia gama de cuestiones que pueden ser tratadas y esclarecidas utilizando los útiles de la teoría de los juegos. Se prestará cierta atención a la teoría evolutiva de los juegos.

  Diego Ríos es doctor en Filosofía (King’s College London), doctor en Sociología (Universidad de la Sorbona), y magíster en ciencias cognitivas (École Polytechnique, Francia). Asimismo, ha sido Visiting Scholar en la Universidad de Brown (USA) e investigador en la Academia de Finlandia y la Universidad de Helsinki. Se ha desempeñado como docente en Universidad de Versalles (Francia), en la Universidad de Hertfordshire (Inglaterra), en la Universidad de Colonia (Alemania), en la Universidad de Dusseldorf (Alemania) y en la Universidad Witten Herdecke (Alemania), donde ha recibido su Habilitación académica. Diego Ríos ha publicado en diversas revistas internacionales sobre temas que están en la confluencia de las ciencias sociales, la filosofía, las ciencias cognitivas, y la teoría de los juegos.

Duración del curso: 5 clases.
Comienza el Miércoles 14 de Marzo de 2012
Horario: Miércoles 19 – 21 hs

Costo: 600 $
Consultar por becas Comunidad ESEADE

Consultas e Inscripciones: Manuela Trujillo: mtrujillo@eseade.edu.ar

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex | Video on TED.com

I strongly recommend this video, a Ted Talk of Matt Ridley on "When Ideas have Sex".
A very good blend of a great explanation of capitalism and the division of labour and the evolutionary emergence of ideas that make our life easier.
Enjoy it!

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex | Video on TED.com

International Conference "Evolution, Cooperation and Rationality. Philosophical Perspectives"

The International Conference "Evolution, Cooperation and Rationality. Philosophical Perspectives"  is organised by a research group working on these subjects in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol and directed by Professor Ken Binmore and Professor Samir Okasha.

Ken Binmore

The conference will take place on June 27th- 29th 2011 and will have as keynote speakers well-known professors -in adittion to Binmore and Okasha-such as David Papineau, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Elliot Sober and many others. Here is the link to the Conference Website.

I am very happy to get a paper accepted to be read in this International Conference. I will talk about "Evolutionary accounts of normative orders: Rationality and the homo economicus/homo sociologicus debate". Here is the link to the conference timetable (where my presentation is also announced!)

During the conference, I will be posting new, anecdotes and my impressions about it!

Cheers!

EMS

Hayek on Evolution and Spontaneous Orders

I found this video of Friedrich A. Hayek speaking at the 33rd Meeting of Nobel Laureates at Lindau in 1983. It is a good summary of his own ideas on Evolution and Spontaneous Orders. There are several points that could be discussed nowadays (such as his vision of group selection) but I think it´s worth watching.  By the way, today is Hayek´s Birthday!

Evolutionary Psychology

In June 2005 I had the opportunity to attend the Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students at the University of Virginia, a summer seminar organized by the Institute for Humane Studies (George Mason University). In that occasion, I could be introduced to Evolutionary Psychology (EP) and its applications to Social Sciences by Leda Cosmides and Todd Zywicki´s lectures.  

Despite the fact that there are certain controversial points, I think that EP point of view could be interesting and worthy of consideration. I am posting here the basic principles of this theory, so as to start discussing it. These points are extracted from “Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer” by Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, published by the Center for Evolutionary Psychology of the University of California Santa Barbara.

In this paper Cosmides & Tooby state that the “goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the design of the human mind”. From their viewpoint, the mind is “a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.”

The EP confronts what they called the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) For Cosmides and Tooby the SSSM proposes a vision of the mind as a blind slate. For SSSM: “The social world organizes and injects meaning into individual minds, but our universal human psychological architecture has no distinctive structure and organizes the social world or imbues it with characteristic meanings.”

On the other hand, EP tries to understand what are the brains, how brains process information and how the brain’s information-processing programs generate behavior. So they states five principles, derived from biology:

Principle 1: The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

Principle 2: Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species´ evolutionary history.

Principle 3: Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg: most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler that it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve – they require very complicated neural circuitry.

Principle 4: Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.

Principle 5: Our modern Skulls house a stone age mind.

Of course, each of these principles requires more explanation and discussion, but I leave this post here, looking forward your first impressions: Do you think that EP could be an interesting research program? It is compatible with what we called Classic Evolutionism (please see the first post)? We will continue posting about EP and its critics…

EMS

Complex Phenomena and the Social Sciences

       One idea propounded by Hayek is central for the understanding of the Social Sciences: the notion of complex phenomena. This notion was originally introduced in his paper “The theory of the complex phenomena” published in Studies in 1967.
      In that paper, Hayek propounds that the degree of complexity of a phenomenon depends upon “the minimum number of elements of which an instance of the pattern must consist in order to exhibit all the characteristic attributes of the class of pattern in question…” In this sense, almost all the phenomena studied by the Social Sciences are complex phenomena, since the number of interdependent variables that should be represented in their models is so large that only some of them could be observed and studied. Moreover, it would be impossible to test all the combination of elements and then, to make predictions with complete information. In conclusion, the only kind of predictions that we would be able to produce in Social Sciences is pattern predictions, that is, predictions about when or under which circumstances certain kind of regularity could emerge.
      In relation to this, it is interesting to see the relation proposed by Hayek between the notions of “order” and that of “complex phenomena”. In fact, he states in the first paragraphs of the chapter on “Cosmos and Taxis” (Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 1, Chap. 2, p.35): “Order is an indispensable concept for the discussion of all complex phenomena, in which it must largely play the role the concept of law plays in the analysis of simpler phenomena” And then he introduces a footnote with the citation of his own paper on complex phenomena. Can this be understood as if he is subsuming the study of the spontaneous orders to the study of the complex phenomena? I will return on this point later, but meanwhile I am looking forward to your comments!