Who "Invented" Comedy? The Ancient Candidates for the Origins of Comedy and the Visual Evidence
The formal beginning of comedy is firmly dated to the Dionysia of 486 B.C.E.1 For what preceded it there were at least three ancient candidates: phallic processions, Doric comedy and Susarion. Each is supported by visual evidence of the sixth century B.C.E., each explains certain features of Old Comedy, but all have some anomalies as well. Striking is how many forms of performance attested in the sixth century contained comic elements. All these other forms ceased with the introduction of comedies to the Dionysia in 486 B.C.E., which coincides with the ascendancy of the demos; yet it was not until forty years later that comedy becomes unabashedly political.
Cultural evolution in the Age of Athens: drift and selection in Greek figure-painted pottery
Variation in Greek figure-painted pottery has previously been unsystematically described 
as the result of social, political and art historical influences. In this study we propose that 
variation arises from the process of copying itself. The neutral model states that if there 
are no other forces at work, at time t the frequency of a variant in a population of 
variants will be in proportion to its frequency at time t-1, modified by the probability that 
new variants might be invented and old ones might fail to be copied each time there is a 
copying event, a process known as drift. We test the degree to which variation in figure- 
painted pottery can be explained by this model using evolutionary approaches to 
archaeology and culture change (Neiman 1995, Bentley et. al. 2004, Bentley et. al. 
2007). We develop and expand these approaches through computer simulation. 
Using data from the Beazley archive, we created a new database containing a sample of 
38,707 Attic figure-painted vases dating from 650 to 300 BC. Within this sample we 
explore the diversity, distribution and turnover rate of motifs over time, between shapes 
and across different decorative techniques. We also explore correlations between shape 
and motif, and examin the variant frequencies underlying the emergence of the red- 
figured technique. We show that much of the variation in motifs on figure-painted 
pottery can be explained as being the result of random copying. Where the neutral model 
is not sufficient as an explanation of observed variation, we show whether selection is 
due to bias towards novelty or conformity. These results show that an evolutionary 
approach to cultural change provides us with a powerful tool for assessing previous 
research and allows us to identify areas in which further research is required.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.