I recently was sent a link to this really wonderful video about birds of paradise. Watch the video, you won’t regret it. The birds of paradise are out of this world: (from Australian Geographic image source) (image source) But beautiful coloration and weird mating rituals are fo

I was another participant at the Rules as Genotype workshop held at Indiana University recently.  Unlike Peter Turchin, however, I came away with a very different perspective on the usefulness of the metaphor.  I am undoubtedly somewhat biased since some of my own research explores th

A week ago I was at a workshop Rules as Genotypes in Cultural Evolution (check out the Focus Article by Elinor Ostrom that set the stage for the meeting). One major topic of discussion was what might be the cultural analog of genotype. In biology phenotype is the observable traits and