Discussion meeting organized by Andrew Whiten, Robert Hinde, Christopher Stringer and Kevin Laland as part of a wider Festival of Science to celebrate the Royal Society's 350th anniversary. The meeting will take place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall,...

This is the first post in a series of two installments by Pierre Jacob, dwelling on Gergely and Csibra's work on human communication. According to Csibra and Gergely’s (2009) so-called “natural pedagogical” approach to the psychological bases...

Statistician and polymath blogger Cosma Shalizi is preparing a paper on social contagion, basically dwelling on the fact that the transmission of behaviours through social influence ('contagion') is very hard to distinguish from the fact that similar...

Relativity in culinary matters and in taste is a big issue - our tastes (or distastes) for things are indeed shaped by what we are used to eat and see eaten, as well as other factors, genetics being one. Now they combine with less strictly sensorial...

To what extent does the use of language involve a language-specific ability, to what extent is it subserved by a more general symbolic or semiotic system? This is an old and ongoing controversy to which an article pre-published online in PNAS on Nov....