El Gentraso

Curious parallels

Thursday, November 17, 2011

PWT on KPCC

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Today, I'll be talking about People Will Talk on AirTalk with Larry Mantle, KPCC 89.3. It's an NPR station broadcasting to Pasaden...
Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Nooooooooooo

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I haven't even got copies of People Will Talk yet, and I've found a mistake. In the last chapter, I talk about reputation on the lar...
1 comment:
Monday, November 14, 2011

People Will Talk in the NY Post

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Yesterday's New York Post has an article extracted/adapted from People Will Talk. It's mostly about gossip, the subject of two of ...

Steering clear of the magic kingdom

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In his stylish and thought-provoking book Frozen Desire : An Enquiry into the Meaning of Money, James Buchan argues that one of money's...
Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Itetem ta humgopak...Altogether now!...

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If you read the paper on musical diversity within and between cultures in todays Proc R Soc, you will search in vain for any idea of what t...
Monday, November 07, 2011

Eric B and Rakim explain social learning

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OK, People Will Talk is creeping onto the shelves (and whatever the electronic equivalent of a shelf is) and we can begin the task of exam...
Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Do not trust this post

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We've always judged each other by the company we keep, but now, when you meet a stranger via Facebook or Twitter, you can see their soci...
Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Extinction and taxes

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There's not actually very much evolution in Robert Frank 's The Darwin Economy . Frank takes a big idea from Darwin: the insight tha...
2 comments:
Thursday, September 15, 2011

How reputation can (help, in a small way, to) save the world

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Nature Climate Change has just published a comment piece by me looking at the role reputation can play in achieving some sort of action on ...
Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Bruce Chatwin's evolutionary biology

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I started reading The Songlines in the belief that it was a travel book. And it is, and for a while that's all it is — Bruce Chatwin ...
Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Good deeds and big cities

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A few months ago, the network researchers Sam Arbesman and Nicholas Christakis published a paper looking at how the frequency of good dee...
Thursday, August 18, 2011

The ecology of babygrows

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Spread among young families there is an ocean of baby clothes. When you’re expecting, you toss in a bucket and haul some out. When your chil...
Thursday, July 14, 2011

Mental obsolescence

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The paper in this week's Science about how people outsourcie their memories to Google made me think of a piece I wrote for the FT weeke...
Tuesday, June 28, 2011

The biology and economics of home advantage

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Every few years, the Fotherington-Thomases at the London Review of Books give David Runciman a break from writing about the sorry state of...
Monday, June 13, 2011

Recommend a blog, win a book

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When you write a book, the publisher sends you a questionnaire asking about promotional opportunities, on which you write down all your big-...
1 comment:
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John Whitfield
I am a London-based science writer, with a particular interest in evolution, ecology and whatever you call the place where the social and natural sciences meet.

My new book: People Will Talk: The Surprising Science of Reputation looks at how much of our time, energy and biology we (and other species) devote to building and protecting our own reputations, even when we don't realize we're doing it. And I show that how a society works, for good or ill, has a lot to do with how people use reputation.

My first book 'In the Beat of a Heart: Life, Energy and the Unity of Nature' was published in autumn 2006.

(A gentraso is an ecological survey technique, named after the late Al Gentry.)
View my complete profile
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