Thom Scott-Phillips

So here's a bit more info about me, and some answers to the questions that Dave Feldman has sent us:

1. What topics do you have some expertise in and would you be willing to help others learn them?

Behavioural ecology, especially adaptation. Social evolution theory, especially honest signalling. The origins and evolution of language. Some linguistics, especially pragmatics. Evolutionary psychology, in its various guises.

(As all that may indicate, my PhD. is broadly about the origins and evolution of language, and more specifically on the behavioural ecology of human communication.)

2. What do you want to learn at the CSSS?

Any useful methodologies, but in particular I would like to relearn my maths - my first degree was in maths but that was 10 years ago now, and I haven't used it since.

3. Do you have any projects or research interests that would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach?

Yes - the evolution of language is inherently interdisciplinary. It's difficult to even meaningfully approach the problem with a single perspective.

4. Do you have any ideas for what sort of project you would like to do work on with other CSSS students this summer?

Yes. If possible, I'd like to develop a mathematical model of honest signalling games which allow for reputational effects. This would take inspiration from and combine the work on the evolution of cooperation by the likes by Fehr, Fischbacher, Milinski, Boyd and others, and on honest signalling theory by Lachmann and colleagues. I can give more details to anybody who's interested, but it's not much more thought out than this so far.

5. Suppose you could travel one-hundred years in the future and ask researchers any three questions. What would those questions be?

That is a tough question, but...

i. I recently read about a paper that talked about the "inevitable naturalising of the social sciences". E. O. Wilson has said much the same, in Consilience and elsewhere, so I'd like to know how far that project has gone. Do we have accurate and robust scientific accounts of human social behaviour and our institutions?

ii. What have been the major paradigm shifts of the last 100 years? In particular, has anything superceeded Darwinism (I would guess no), and have the social sciences, especially psychology and linguistics, come fully under the Darwinian banner (I would guess yes)?

iii. What do we now know about how language and the language faculty evolved in our species?

Now, about me. Here's a (very) short bio:

1994-1998, MMath at the University of Sussex

1998-2004, split between teaching English as a Foreign Language (in Bolivia, Italy and the UK) and a short career in e-learning, designing and writing online business training courses

2004-2005, MSc. in the Evolution of Language and Cognition, University of Edinburgh

2005-present, PhD. in the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, University of Edinburgh; thesis title something like "The behavioural ecology of human communication"

Outside of academia much of my time is taken up by swing dancing, which I teach in Edinburgh. I'll be going dancing while in Beijing, and I'd be happy to introduce people to swing if they so wish.

My flickr site is here. Thom: Your mystery flower is a Lavatera.