<Emphasis Type="Italic">Special Topic:</Emphasis> Confucian and Christian Conceptions of Creativity

In this article the concept of God as creativity (rather than as “the Creator”) is explored. Though creativity is a profound mystery to us humans, it is a plausible concept today because of its interconnectedness with the belief that our cosmos is evolutionary: new orders of reality come into being in the course of time. Three modalities of creativity are explored here: the initial coming into being of the universe (the Big Bang); the creativity manifest in evolutionary processes; the human creation of culture. It is suggested that this creativity itself should be thought of as God: God is creativity. Thus God-talk is given a referent that is specifiable in terms of today’s understandings of the world and the human. God remains a profound mystery here, but one with a significant place in our modern understanding of the world and human life. This article includes text and ideas taken from my book, In the beginning…Creativity (Kaufman 2004).     

IMPROVING EVOLUTION ADVOCACY: TRANSLATING VACCINE INTERVENTIONS TO THE EVOLUTION WARS

When considering the persuasive characteristics and prospective influences of Darwin-skeptic mass media, uncertainties remain about how to reciprocally promote evolutionary theory to skeptical audiences. This study aims to improve evolution advocacy by translating some of the most successful methods of science endorsement to Evolution Wars contexts. In particular, strategies used to address vaccine hesitancies and enhance immunization uptake policies are reinterpreted for those seeking to improve pro-evolution communications to religious publics. What results are three recommendation categories described as General Guiding Principles, Proximate Interventions, and Auxiliary Interventions.     

Sexual promiscuity & self-control: A behavior genetic explanation to an evolutionary question

Within separate academic disciplines there exist two consistent findings that have emerged. Behavior geneticists, on one hand, continue to uncover moderate to high heritability estimates for virtually every human trait measurable. Evolutionary psychologists, on the other hand, have thoroughly documented species-wide universality in various human traits, suggesting that natural (or sexual) selection may have directly favored such outcomes. The goal of the current study, then, is to explore ways in which these lines of inquiry can be united via the use of behavior genetic methodologies coupled with evolutionary thought. Additionally, we attempt to unite our findings in a framework that can both account for the existence of heritable individual differences, while also understanding the importance of species-wide characteristics.     

Animal foraging and the evolution of goal-directed cognition

Foraging- and feeding-related behaviors across eumetazoans share similar molecular mechanisms, suggesting the early evolution of an optimal foraging behavior called area-restricted search (ARS), involving mechanisms of dopamine and glutamate in the modulation of behavioral focus. Similar mechanisms in the vertebrate basal ganglia control motor behavior and cognition and reveal an evolutionary progression toward increasing internal connections between prefrontal cortex and striatum in moving from amphibian to primate. The basal ganglia in higher vertebrates show the ability to transfer dopaminergic activity from unconditioned stimuli to conditioned stimuli. The evolutionary role of dopamine in the modulation of goal-directed behavior and cognition is further supported by pathologies of human goal-directed cognition, which have motor and cognitive dysfunction and organize themselves, with respect to dopaminergic activity, along the gradient described by ARS, from perseverative to unfocused. The evidence strongly supports the evolution of goal-directed cognition out of mechanisms initially in control of spatial foraging but, through increasing cortical connections, eventually used to forage for information.     

微生物与人类进化

根据现代分子生物学知识和微生物知识,认为基因重组方式可能是人类进化的一种主要方式;并认为微生物能通过基因重组有效介导自身基因和各种生物基因流向人类;从原核生物到真核生物中广泛存在的转座作用可能是微生物介导的基因重组的一种重要方式;高等生物是由低等生物进化而来的,而微生物是进化上最早最低级的生命体。据此,认为微生物可能在人类进化和物种进化中起到了极其重要的作用,甚至可能是一种源泉的作用。其可能方式是     

从"政治型思想家"到"思想型学者":梁启超1920年的身份嬗变

以1920年为界,梁启超的文化身份有着“政治型思想家”与“思想型学者”的显著区别。要具体了解这一身份嬗变的文化内涵,就须走进《清代学术概论》的文本世界。从“政治型思想家”到“思想型学者”这一身份嬗变,使得梁启超在生命的最后十个年头成了一位伟大的国学大师。     

Language structure: psychological and social constraints

In this article we discuss the notion of a linguistic universal, and possible sources of such invariant properties of natural languages. In the first part, we explore the conceptual issues that arise. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the explanatory potential of horizontal evolution. We particularly focus on two case studies, concerning Zipf’s Law and universal properties of color terms, respectively. We show how computer simulations can be employed to study the large scale, emergent, consequences of psychologically and psychologically motivated assumptions about the working of horizontal language transmission.     

Mental representation of symbols as revealed by vocabulary errors in two bonobos (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pan paniscus</Emphasis>)

Error analysis has been used in humans to detect implicit representations and categories in language use. The present study utilizes the same technique to report on mental representations and categories in symbol use from two bonobos (Pan paniscus). These bonobos have been shown in published reports to comprehend English at the level of a two-and-a-half year old child and to use a keyboard with over 200 visuographic symbols (lexigrams). In this study, vocabulary test errors from over 10 years of data revealed auditory, visual, and spatio-temporal generalizations (errors were more likely items that looked like sounded like, or were frequently associated with the sample item in space or in time), as well as hierarchical and conceptual categorizations. These error data, like those of humans, are a result of spontaneous responding rather than specific training and do not solely depend upon the sample mode (e.g. auditory similarity errors are not universally more frequent with an English sample, nor were visual similarity errors universally more frequent with a photograph sample). However, unlike humans, these bonobos do not make errors based on syntactical confusions (e.g. confusing semantically unrelated nouns), suggesting that they may not separate syntactical and semantic information. These data suggest that apes spontaneously create a complex, hierarchical, web of representations when exposed to a symbol system. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Nonhuman primates prefer slow tempos but dislike music overall

Human adults generally find fast tempos more arousing than slow tempos, with tempo frequently manipulated in music to alter tension and emotion. We used a previously published method [McDermott, J., & Hauser, M. (2004). Are consonant intervals music to their ears? Spontaneous acoustic preferences in a nonhuman primate. Cognition, 94(2), B11-B21] to test cotton-top tamarins and common marmosets, two new-World primates, for their spontaneous responses to stimuli that varied systematically with respect to tempo. Across several experiments, we found that both tamarins and marmosets preferred slow tempos to fast. It is possible that the observed preferences were due to arousal, and that this effect is homologous to the human response to tempo. In other respects, however, these two monkey species showed striking differences compared to humans. Specifically, when presented with a choice between slow tempo musical stimuli, including lullabies, and silence, tamarins and marmosets preferred silence whereas humans, when similarly tested, preferred music. Thus despite the possibility of homologous mechanisms for tempo perception in human and nonhuman primates, there appear to be motivational ties to music that are uniquely human.