"Great Tits" can be a Serious Topic

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 brilliant, thoughtful, and well-read. 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 east coast sometimes sarcastic kinda way).

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 clearly up much of the confusion about what is called "mental modularity"). He 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 topics 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, who are eminent evolutionary psychologists).

To be honest, I only went there because in 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 my second customer had "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 he 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 intellectual types). A key part of his skill is an ability to use his wit to spray a hoseful of excitement onto an otherwise dry topic.

For example, check out a few of his blog titles: