Coalitional instincts Conversation with John Tooby
Genic selection and adaptationism: Are we moving forward or back? Tooby commentary on Pinker’s The False Allure of Group Selection
Edge Annual Question
Every year, Edge.org poses an Annual Question…and usually John Tooby answers.
2009 What will change everything?
The great pivot: artificial intelligences, native intelligences, and the bridge between
2010 How is the internet changing how you think?
2011 What scientific concept would improve everyone’s cognitive toolkit?
Nexus causality, moral warfare, and misattribution arbitrage
2012 What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?
Falling into place: Entropy, Galileo’s rrames of reference, and the desperate ingenuity of life
2013 What should we be worried about?
2014 What scientific ideas are ready for retirement?
2015 What do you think about machines that think?
2016 What do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news? What makes it important?
2017 What term or concept ought to be more widely known?
Book reviews
The Greatest Englishman Since Newton: Review of Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin, vol 2. The New York Times (Sunday Edition): Vol. CVII (#40): 12. October 6, 2002.
On the Napoleon Chagnon controversy
Jungle Fever: Did two U.S. scientists start a genocidal epidemic in the Amazon, or was The New Yorker duped? by John Tooby, Slate Oct. 24, 2000
Witch-hunting among the Anthropologists: Patrick Tierny and the Yanamamo, by John Tooby
For much more, see The Critical Eye
Slate Dialogue: How to Deal with Fringe Academics
Judith Shulevitz of Slate Magazine, Alex Star, editor of Lingua Franca, and John Tooby, Co-Director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, debate and discuss how to deal with fringe academics: denounce them, refute them, or ignore them? And who is more dangerous, little known scholars with noxious views supported by shaky science, or well known academics who self-servingly depict their own fringe ideas as central? Accessing the full debate online is now difficult, but it starts here on Feb 2 2000, and can be accessed, in order, here. For closing letters to Slate from Tooby and Pinker, plus a copy of Tooby’s responses to Judith and Alex, click here).
