Lynn Fairbanks: UCLAThere has been considerable interest in gestational and neonatal influences on developmental trajectories in humans and other mammals in recent years. This presentation reviews results from the Vervet Research Colony demonstrating effects of maternal condition, diet and weight loss on maternal and infant behavior. To understand the impact of variation in maternal investment […]
Barry Hewlett: Washington State University, VancouverCultural anthropologists Margaret Mead, David Lancy, and Barbara Rogoff indicate that teaching does not exist or is rare in small-scale cultures. By contrast, recent research by cognitive neuroscientists Gyorgy Gergely and Gergely Csibra indicate that one type of teaching, called natural pedagogy, is a human universal, part of human nature, […]
Montserrat Soler: University of California, Santa BarbaraIn the last ten years, there has been a surge of work dedicated to the study of religion from the point of view of evolutionary studies and cognitive science. These accounts of religion are divided into two main areas: one views religious concepts as by-products of other cognitive capacities, […]
Michelle Kline: The University of California, Los AngelesHumans are heavily reliant on cultural adaptation, and have coevolved with culture for millennia. Teaching enhances the fidelity of cultural transmission and should be common in such a culture-dependent species. However, existing data present a puzzle concerning the role of teaching in human evolution. While biologists have documented […]
Lucia Jacobs: University of Caliornia, BerkeleyThe chemical senses of vertebrates present some of the most enduring mysteries of brain evolution. First, it is not clear why are there two olfactory systems: the main system (MOS), detecting odorants on the olfactory epithelium and projecting to the olfactory bulb, and the accessory system (AOS), detecting odorants in […]
Rich Connor: University of Massachusetts DartmouthFor over 25 years we have documented a multi-level alliance structure among male bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia. Males cooperate in pairs and trios, ‘1st-order alliances,’ to form temporary consortships with individual females. First-order alliance partners are drawn from a male’s second-order alliance. Second-order alliances have 4-14 males […]
Nancy Segal: California State University, FullertonAn overview of the origins, methods, findings, implications and controversies from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart is provided. This study, which took place between 1979 and 1999 at the University of Minnesota, accumulated a wealth of behavioral, physical and medical data on 137 reared apart twin pairs, 81 […]
Paul Heggarty: 4:00 PM Cotsen Institute Room A222From the Tower of Babel to the tales of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, we have long sought to account for our baffling multiplicity of tongues. Linguistic science itself was born out of this curiosity — and by now can look to our language diversity no longer as just an […]
Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook: University of California, Los AngelesPostpartum depression poses an evolutionary puzzle: it is extremely common, yet significantly reduces the reproductive fitness of both mothers and children. Why has natural selection failed to remove this trait? I will consider the hypothesis that postpartum depression represents a “disease of modern civilization” – that is, a byproduct […]
Bailey House: University of California, Los AngelesOne explanation for the diversity in cooperative behavior across human social groups is that our prosociality is motivated in part by learned cultural beliefs that vary substantially across societies, and which extend adaptations for cooperation between genetic kin and reciprocal partners. Reframing this idea as a developmental question about […]
