Blackwell's, the Oxford bookshop, used to have a separate music shop. They had rotating window themes, representing different genres. So for "Baroque" they'd have a flouncy display and portraits and things like "Too hot to Handel" t-shirts. For "Minimalism" they had one single Philip Glass CD.

"Evolutionary" "psychology" is full of stuff like this, and I can only assume that people who do this have missed the really good bit of behaviour - the importing of useful (or fun) observed behaviour. It doesn't need to be heritable when you can see it and copy it.

You don't need to find a common ancestor between humans and birds to explain why the parrot in the pub uses foul language.

Cultural things are transmitted near enough immediately and laterally, so more like Lamarckian inheritance than evolution by natural selection. 'Evolution' of cultural things is interesting, and is what Dawkins called a 'meme', but it's not the same as proper evolution.

That's a great explanation for upright walking, for opposable thumbs and for gills. It's a very poor explanation for anything cultural, which the authors say is what kissing is.

This assumes that the behaviour of kissing is somehow hereditary. So there's an ancestor that started kissing, and that conferred some advantage that made it more likely for their kissing-friendly genes to be passed on.

From article: "To estimate the likelihood that various ancestral species also engaged in kissing, Brindle and her colleagues mapped out this information in a family tree of primates and ran a statistical approach called Bayesian modelling 10 million times to simulate different evolution scenarios"

I'll wait to see if I get more citations before grabbing the pitchfork 🧠

I enjoy a bit of Eliot every so often, but it does make me wonder if every great poet should have a Pet Period when they write about dogs or goldfish or something.

Mate. I'm sorry. Thinking of you x

The state of Utah is entirely run by Moomins.

I mean, the whole thing sucks. But I'm glad you're doing okay considering x

How are you doing? Is recovery going okay?

Ha! I think for the UK it would make sense, but you do you!

Yes that's right. I think I'm more likely to know the lab than the head of the lab. The model is different in the UK.

I think it's literally the opposite in the UK, where we don't have labs named after people. If you say you worked at "the Jones lab" we'd be all 🤷‍♀️