A few years back, I heard a brilliant talk by a graduate student named Rob Kurzban. The fellow was working with Leda Cosmides at UCSB, and given the guy’s age, barely out of his teens, he struck me as surprisingly self-confident, you might even call it arrogant. Since then, a few years have passed, and I’ve come to appreciate that Kurzban’s self-confidence is well justified. The guy is deeply thoughtful, quick-witted, and amazingly well-read on a broad range of fascinating topics. He can be very direct in expressing his opinions, but I find it easy to take, because he seems to be right most of the time, and he’s funny (in that New York semi-sarcastic sort of manner that people from Minnesota don't always appreciate).
Kurzban, who is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is a coauthor of one of my favorite Very Serious Papers in Psychology (an eloquent Psych Review paper with UCLA's Clark Barrett that clears up much of the confusion about mental modularity). Kurzban also occasionally blogs for Psychology Today, and is the Uberblogger for Evolutionary Psychology. Just this morning, I was perusing his postings there, and was struck with his ability to combine a grabby title with serious and thoughtful commentary about serious topics. Kurzban has the ability to talk about these very Serious Ideas in that breezy way that is only possible for a small intellectually elite subset (which includes his brilliant graduate school mentors Leda Cosmides and John Tooby).
To be honest, I was reading his blog while nervously checking amazon.com to see whether anyone had yet bought any copies of a recently released book of mine. I was relieved to find that the answer was yes, and that whoever was the second of the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" Kurzban’s recently published book: Everyone (else) is a hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind. I have yet to read the book, but after I finish this, I’m going to head over to my local bookstore and pick up a copy, partly because Nature magazine says Kurzban uses “humour and anecdotes” to reveal “how conflict between the modules of the mind leads to contradictory beliefs, vacillating behaviours, broken moral boundaries and inflated egos.” But the other part of it is that in taking a serious gander at Kurzban’s blog, it becomes clear that the verbal abilities I’ve observed in his conference presentations translate to his use of the written word (and that, sad to say, is most often NOT the case among Serious Highbrow Intellectual types). A key part of Kurzban's skill is an ability to use his wit to spray a hoseful of excitement onto an otherwise dry topic.
A great tit on a beautiful shoulder
For example, check out a few of his blog titles (and follow the links for some seriously interesting discussion):
Great tits: The evolutionary advantages. Kurzban notes that he is talking here about “the birds, not the other things.” (if you've never had the pleasure, that's a great tit on Venus de Milo in the picture). But don’t turn your TV dial yet! As someone who has seen Great Tits through his binoculars, I can say that they are as beautiful as “the other things,” and that this story deals with one of those features of adaptive design that is equally worthy of attention.
What the decision letter should have said. In this clever blog, Kurzban re-reviews a paper that was accepted, and published. The paper was a critique of Clark and Hatfield’s classic study in which experimenters approached members of the opposite sex with the line “I’ve seen you around campus, and I find you attractive. Would you like to sleep with me?” Clark and Hatfield found enormous sex differences, but the critique argues men and women aren’t really different. Kurzban takes some fun pokes at the shaky logic underlying the critiquer’s arguments.
If pee, then Stroop. According to Kurzban: “There are, sadly, so few opportunities to discuss research on urinating, I thought I should take advantage of this one” (about a [serious] recent paper in Psych. Science).
Modularity, my dear Watson. Here Kurzban asks the question: “What makes IBM’s Watson so smart?”
Note: There are those who might question the merits of using a sensationalistic headline involving “Great Tits” when one wants to begin a discussion of a serious topic like avian evolution and adaptationism. For some, the use of sexual innuendo or a reference to urinating might itself be slightly offensive, and they'd see such talk as tainting a serious scientific discussion. But I’d argue otherwise. Putting aside the (serious) question of why any allusion to attractive breasts is considered inappropriate in the first place, I think it’s quite OK to exploit the name of a European songbird to draw people’s otherwise overloaded attention to a serious question. And there’s a big difference between Howard Stern’s use of sexual innuendo as an end in itself and a little word play among intellectual nerds. But whaddu I know, I’m from New Yawk, where the line between appropriate and inappropriate is set somewhere just west of the visible horizon.
If you prefer your high end discussions of important scientific issues with no jokes, though, check out:
Barrett, H.C., & Kurzban, R. (2006). Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate. Psychological Review, 113,
