Elements of Evolutionary Anthropology

Blog entries

• Two Zombie Papers in Human Behavioral Ecology (2024-2-9). There are two papers which have been published often enough now that they deserve special consideration.
• The Third Edition, the Dotted Half Note of Editions (2024-1-2). Franco of Cologne was a 13th century music theorist. He was also a head of the Catholic crusader order the Knights Hospitaller, the sister order of the better known Knights Templar favored in conspiracy theories. Franco himself held a conspiracy about threes.
• None of the Above (2023-7-17). Yeah p-values suck. But replacing them with another metric is no solution. The problem lies deeper.
• Some Dumpster Fires For Your Consideration (2023-6-14). It’s getting hot in here.
• Science and the Dumpster Fire (2023-6-13). It makes little sense to invest in ambitious research projects when a typical researcher has no ability to define a non-null model of a phenomenon, to explore the implications of such a model, and to evaluate those implications with evidence.
• The Problem With Cultural Evolution (2023-9-19). I will now roast myself and my scientific field. This is therapy designed to elicit self-criticism in myself and in my colleagues. The themes are real though.
• The Quality of Quantitative Analysis (2022-9-13). I was asked by a colleague here in Leipzig to participate in a panel discussion of “What unites quantitative and qualitative research approaches?” I don’t have well-formed opinions on this topic, and I’ve never written about it. So naturally I immediately agreed to participate.
• There Are No Magic Outcome Variables (2022-9-2). There are lots of constructed outcome variables in the wilds of the sciences. And people often use them in this way: As a kind of back-alley adjustment strategy. This is rarely a good idea.
• Never Too Early To Talk About Missing Data (2022-1-6). So what we have is a situation in which professional statisticians have a strong consensus opinion about a very common problem in data analysis (don’t replace missing data with zeros) but are failing to teach it to their primary audience.
• Regression, Fire and Dangerous Things (3 of 3) (2021-6-29). Thinking Like a Probability Distribution.
• Regression, Fire and Dangerous Things (2 of 3) (2021-6-29). Thinking Like a Graph.
• Regression, Fire and Dangerous Things (1 of 3) (2021-6-29). Thinking Like a Regression.
• Golden Eggs And Better Telescopes (2018-9-2). Not all anthropologists are going to lay golden eggs. But in the current system, none of them will.
• Why Walk When You Can Flow? (2017-9-28). In 1989, Depeche Mode was popular, the first version of Microsoft Office was released, large demonstrations brought down the wall separating East and West Germany, and a group of statisticians in the United Kingdom dreamed of Markov chains on the desktop.

Statistical Rethinking Materials

If you are looking for code etc related to my book Statistical Rethinking, look here.

Incomplete Theoretical Human Evolutionary Ecology Textbook

I am slowly writing an open textbook on formal methods in evolutionary anthropology and ecology. It covers basic evolutionary theory through advanced topics like life history theory. Why write such a book? Because researchers in evolutionary anthropology typically know very little actual evolutonary theory. Instead they know sloppy verbal corruptions of evolutionary theory, and these are worse than useless for a progressive research program. It’s not that everyone needs to be a theorist. But people who want to test theory must know theory too.

Elements of Evolutionary Anthropology (book)