Virtual Interviewing and Diversity Among Psychiatry Residents.

Objective: Psychiatry residency program directors were surveyed regarding their impression of the impact virtual interviewing had on the perceived and actual diversity of individuals selected for interviews and residency training.

Methods: A link to an anonymous survey was sent to 299 psychiatry residencies. Psychiatry program directors provided information about their programs and rated their perception of the impact of virtual interviewing on candidates they interviewed and matched.

Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages.

Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their grammatical markers.

Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss.

While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available.

Pathways to social inequality.

Social inequality is ubiquitous in contemporary human societies, and has deleterious social and ecological impacts. However, the factors that shape the emergence and maintenance of inequality remain widely debated. Here we conduct a global analysis of pathways to inequality by comparing 408 non-industrial societies in the anthropological record (described largely between 1860 and 1960) that vary in degree of inequality.

Cultural transmission and ecological opportunity jointly shaped global patterns of reliance on agriculture.

The evolution of agriculture improved food security and enabled significant increases in the size and complexity of human groups. Despite these positive effects, some societies never adopted these practices, became only partially reliant on them, or even reverted to foraging after temporarily adopting them. Given the critical importance of climate and biotic interactions for modern agriculture, it seems likely that ecological conditions could have played a major role in determining the degree to which different societies adopted farming.

Hindcasting global population densities reveals forces enabling the origin of agriculture.

The development and spread of agriculture changed fundamental characteristics of human societies. However, the degree to which environmental and social conditions enabled the origins of agriculture remains contested. We test three hypothesized links between the environment, population density and the origins of plant and animal domestication, a prerequisite for agriculture: (1) domestication arose as environmental conditions improved and population densities increased (surplus hypothesis); (2) populations needed domestication to overcome deteriorating environmental conditions (necessity hypothesis); (3) factors promoting domestication were distinct in each location (regional uniqueness hypothesis).

Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity.

Although many hypotheses have been proposed to explain why humans speak so many languages and why languages are unevenly distributed across the globe, the factors that shape geographical patterns of cultural and linguistic diversity remain poorly understood. Prior research has tended to focus on identifying universal predictors of language diversity, without accounting for how local factors and multiple predictors interact. Here, we use a unique combination of path analysis, mechanistic simulation modelling, and geographically weighted regression to investigate the broadly described, but poorly understood, spatial pattern of language diversity in North America.

The global geography of human subsistence.

How humans obtain food has dramatically reshaped ecosystems and altered both the trajectory of human history and the characteristics of human societies. Our species' subsistence varies widely, from predominantly foraging strategies, to plant-based agriculture and animal husbandry. The extent to which environmental, social and historical factors have driven such variation is currently unclear.

Phylogenetic approach to the evolution of color term systems.

The naming of colors has long been a topic of interest in the study of human culture and cognition. Color term research has asked diverse questions about thought and communication, but no previous research has used an evolutionary framework. We show that there is broad support for the most influential theory of color term development (that most strongly represented by Berlin and Kay [Berlin B, Kay P (1969) (Univ of California Press, Berkeley, CA)]); however, we find extensive evidence for the loss (as well as gain) of color terms.

Sound symbolism in the languages of Australia.

The notion that linguistic forms and meanings are related only by convention and not by any direct relationship between sounds and semantic concepts is a foundational principle of modern linguistics. Though the principle generally holds across the lexicon, systematic exceptions have been identified. These "sound symbolic" forms have been identified in lexical items and linguistic processes in many individual languages.