I am a 27 year old PhD student in the department of Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced. I generally prefer not to be anonymous, but given the precarious position that non-tenured academics (and especially grad students) are in, I have decided to temporarily operate under an alias. It shouldn’t be difficult to figure out who I am, though. Littlefoot is the name of one of my cats. You can see him in a picture below.
As an anthropologist, I have a broad curiosity in the nature of human behavior which can be summed up in my three disparate interests:
- Research in the fields of cultural evolution and, more sparingly, evolutionary biology on the evolution of evolvability, otherwise known as “radical innovation,” in cultural systems. I approach these questions from a modeling and cliodynamic standpoint asking primarily what are the causes of radical innovations or the warning signs they are approaching?
- Research in evolutionary psychology and primatology from the approach of the perceptual sciences and bioacoustics. I have taken an integrative approach between neuroscience, philosophy, and cross-cultural anthropology in addressing my primary research questions which span ecology, experimental archaeology, and linguistics.
- Finally, I have a broader interest in narrowing down the concept of “modularity” as it pertains to human mental adaptations, especially as it pertains to its use (and disuse) in evolutionary psychology which I address using traditional philosophical methods along with modeling of network structures.
Cody Moser's Culturologies 