Response to Gordon 2016

Rejoinder to Gordon Tullock

Scientific evidence versus outdated beliefs: A response to Brewin (2016).

We find Brewin's (2016) critiques of the narratives, power, and coherence measures in Rubin et al. (2016) without merit; his suggestions for a "revised formulation" (p. 1015) of coherence are contradicted by data readily available in the target article but ignored. We place Brewin's commentary in a historical context and show that it reiterates views of trauma memory fragmentation that are unsu...

What's in a frame? Response to Kanngiesser & Woike (2016).

We recently reported a study [1] where chimpanzees and bonobos faced decisions between a 'framed' option that provided either one or two pieces of fruit, and an alternative option that always provided a constant number of peanuts. We found that apes (especially males) chose the framed option more when it was presented as a gain—apes initially saw one piece of fruit, but sometimes got two after ...

Suicides as a response to adverse market sentiment (1980-2016)

Financial crises inflict significant human as well as economic hardship. This paper focuses on the human fallout of capital market stress. Financial stress-induced behavioral changes can manifest in higher suicide and murder-suicide rates. We find that these rates also correlate with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate (negatively associated; a -0.25% drop [in the rate of change in ann...

Response to Smith et al. 18 February 2016

In a recent Evolutionary Applications paper, Haig et al. (2016) presented an idea for the formation of a National Center for Small Population Biology. The paper was invited as part of a special issue dedicated to women in science (Wellenreuther and Otto 2016) where authors were asked to add a section to their papers that explored the idea of ‘what would you do now in your career if you could do...