Thursday Links

More like this

Two posts for your consideration. On the Less Wrong weblog, Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych. I am not one to make blanket dismissals of "evolutionary psychology." But, there are structural problems with the strong incentives toward generating hypotheses at the equipoise of novelty and…
I wish I knew what it was about the appeal of evolutionary psychology that makes otherwise intelligent people promote outright silliness in its defense, but here comes Jerry Coyne again in a poorly thought-out piece. He disagrees with the anti-EP piece I linked to yesterday, which is fine, but I…
Dear Reader Tom Stinnett alerted me to a really doom-laden article about Sweden in yesterday's Guardian. Says Ruben Andersson (apparently a Swedish expat and anthropologist), Sweden's conservative coalition government has stood still as the financial crisis has engulfed the country. Jobs, social…
At last! Here is the much delayed Carnival of Evolution 48! I must begin by apologizing for my tardiness, especially since John Wilkins managed to post the last one on time. I was traveling in the 2½ weeks preceding the deadline for CoE, and the combination of spotty internet access, extreme…

Göbekli Tepe is a fascinating mystery, but I think that Klaus Schmidt is assuming too much in what Newsweek quoted (misquoted?). Religion probably played a major role in whatever was going on at/around Göbekli Tepe, but his whole argument is based on assumptions about the carvings, the implausible lack of local settlements, and the motives/worldview of neolithic people whose society is much less well understood than nearly any other known human society.

By Prof.Pedant (not verified) on 25 Feb 2010 #permalink