Been pretty busy around here. But I want to point out that our old friend Armand Leroi, author of Mutants and The Lagoon, is out with a new paper, The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010. It’s open access, and has gotten a lot of press already, but I do think it’s an important result to ruminate upon. I give a lot of thought to theoretical models of cultural evolution derived from evolutionary theory, but it’s obviously important to bridge these with empirical patterns as well.

In other news, a few people in the comments below are asking about my post in regards to Julia Galef’s comment about Dawkins. One thing some readers may not know is that I’m personally pretty well acquainted with many of the “rationalist” crowd who live around Berkeley. As in, they are my personal friends more or less. That should give you some sense how open minded these people are to heterodox ideas. It’s hard to escape the bounds of group conformity, but my experience is that for various reasons (often innate) these are people who are generally bound less to that tendency than is the norm in the broader culture. Take that how you want to take it.

Finally, any interesting papers and books would be appreciated. This is an open thread, but it seems that unless I make an explicit call people don’t think to contribute.