Nelson Ting - Primate Extinction in the Anthropocene and the Tail of Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus
2024-05-20 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 352 Haines Hall
Primate Extinction in the Anthropocene and the Tail of Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus
Nelson Ting
Professor, Department of Anthropology & Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Oregon
There have been five mass extinction events in the history of Earth, and it is thought we are in the midst of a sixth. The consequences of this current event are far reaching, from losses in biodiversity and ecosystem services to damages in human food systems and global health security. Thus far, only one primate is thought to have recently gone extinct – Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey. A dried tail procured from a hunter 25 years ago may provide clues as to how primates fit into this sixth extinction. Using results from whole genome sequencing from this specimen, I attempt to piece together the factors that drove this animal to extinction and discuss the implications for current conservation policy for primates. Based on these results and other lines of evidence, I argue that red colobus monkeys may play an important role in the conservation of tropical forests in Africa, and that holistic approaches to the protection of these animals will benefit both biodiversity and human livelihoods. Finally, to this end, I highlight recent activities my colleagues and I have undertaken as we implement recommendations from the IUCN Red Colobus Conservation Action Plan.

Kyle Wiley - Embodiment of Stress and Trauma in the Perinatal Period
2024-06-03 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Embodiment of Stress and Trauma in the Perinatal Period
Kyle Wiley
Recent UCLA post-doctoral researcher
The associations between adverse social experiences and poor health outcomes are well-documented and consistent across societies. My work interrogates intergenerational patterns of health disparities by combining methods and perspectives across biological anthropology, human biology, psychoneuroendocrinology and -immunology, and public health. In this talk, I will use data from several projects in the United States and Brazil to discuss how stress and trauma impact maternal and infant health and development in the perinatal period. Using a biosocial perspective, I will present evidence of 1) the intergenerational consequences of trauma exposure; 2) a novel adaptive immune biomarker of psychological distress during pregnancy; and 3) the influence of early caregiving environments on the infant gastrointestinal microbiome.

Peter M. Todd - How people forage in space and mind
2024-09-30 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
How people forage in space and mind
Peter M. Todd
Provost Professor of Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Informatics
Indiana University, Bloomington
How do we decide when to search for something better and when to stick with what we’ve got? People and other organisms must adaptively trade off between exploring and exploiting their environment to obtain the resources they need. This applies to whatever space they are searching, including external spatial environments, looking for patches of food, and internal information environments, seeking concepts in memory. Similar evolved underlying mechanisms may be used to address the explore/exploit tradeoff in each domain and lead people to behave as predicted by theories of foraging. In this talk, I will describe how we are studying connections between spatial search and cognitive search in a range of spaces and a range of intelligent agents.

Chimp Empire - A Screening and Panel Discussion with the Filmmakers [RSVP required; Note special time and location]
2024-10-07 18:00 - 21:00 | CNSI
Chimp Empire – A Screening and Panel Discussion with the Filmmakers
Featuring
Sara Edelson
Manager of Original Documentary Programming, Netflix
James Reed
Director, Chimp Empire
John Mitani
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Michigan
moderated by
Clark Barrett
Professor, UCLA Department of Anthropology and
Director, UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture
and
Abigail Bigham
Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Anthropology
Vice Chair for Undergraduate Studies

Reception to follow
This event is open to the public, RSVP required. Please RSVP at: https://eventsrsvp.ucla.edu/ChimpEmpire/logon.aspx?NoID=Y

Gary Brase - How to incite a scientific revolution: A practical framework of converging evidence for behavioral sciences integration [Note special time and location]
2024-10-10 12:00 - 13:30 | Haines 332 (Discourse Lab)
How to incite a scientific revolution: A practical framework of converging evidence for behavioral sciences integration
Gary Brase
Kansas State University
If science is about the pursuit of truth, why do so many scientists disagree? Everyone should agree, at least on most things, according to the idea that there is a consistency of sciences. Others point out that science instead has repeated revolutions, in which one worldview is overthrown for a new worldview. The aim of this work is to outline a way to move behavioral sciences towards greater unity with an integrated framework (possibly inciting revolutions in the process). This is a more practical rather than philosophical approach, that is designed for researchers and others to use as a framework for better evaluating and advancing their chosen research topics. This work integrates previous frameworks (Marr’s computational framework, Tinbergen’s four questions, Schmitt & Pilcher’s converging evidence model) to be more comprehensive, complete, and specifically for the behavioral sciences. The goal is to help behavioral scientists, and other people who pay attention to and evaluate science, with a framework for thinking about topics. We will talk about the advantages and issues of this integrated framework, and examples of using the framework for specific topics.
Note: This event will be held on a Thursday, at the Discourse Lab in Haines Hall, which has limited space (15 people max). Arrive early to get a seat. Also, lunch will not be served for this event.

Irene Godoy - Kinship as constraint: Social aging in kin-structured groups
2024-10-21 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Kinship as constraint: Social aging in kin-structured groups
Irene Godoy
Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour (CRAB), University of Exeter
The dramatic increase in human life expectancy poses new challenges for health care systems. Among those challenges is that social isolation and loneliness as risk factors for mortality are highest among the elderly. We know that the social networks of adults tend to decrease in size with advancing age. However, what factors influence the rate at which an individual’s social network decreases? The answers to this question are critical to inform interventions aimed at improving late-life outcomes. In my talk, I will discuss comparative research in free-ranging, long-lived species to address age-related declines in human social integration. I will focus on non-human primates because of their close evolutionary link to humans and their long lifespans. Research in non-human primates has demonstrated similar age-related declines in sociality, though the drivers of these patterns are not well-understood. Group-living primates typically show strong kin biases in their association patterns. One key factor that may thus contribute to individual differences in social aging is kinship dynamics, as the type and number of close kin available changes across an individual’s lifespan. Drawing on data from a wild capuchin population, I will present results showing that both males and females show declines in their rates of spatial association as they age. Interestingly, age-related declines vary depending on the kinship relationship with social partners, and these effects are sex dependent. I will discuss how these (and other) results shed light on some of the myriad ways in which kinship dynamics may place constraints on how ‘social’ individuals can remain across development.

Cody Moser - Models of Collective Problem Solving: Bringing the Individual into Collective Intelligence
2024-11-04 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Models of Collective Problem Solving: Bringing the Individual into Collective Intelligence
Cody Moser
Cognitive and Information Sciences, UC Merced
The field of collective intelligence focuses on how group communication, interaction, and organization shape collective outcomes. Computational models of collective systems have been instrumental in identifying which structures promote optimal group performance. While these models often converge on common theories and principles, they typically do so at an epiphenomenal level, overlooking the causal mechanisms that drive group-level success. A significant challenge in developing a formal theory of collective intelligence lies in accounting for the role of individuals within the group. In this talk, I will discuss ongoing work aimed at addressing this gap, exploring how individual contributions influence group performance and collective problem-solving abilities.

Andreas Wilke - The adaptivity of children’s search processes
2024-11-18 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
The adaptivity of children’s search processes
Andreas Wilke
Clarkson University, Department of Psychology
Humans and other organisms must search effectively for the resources they need, whether these are physical (e.g., food or shelter) or informational (e.g., patterns in the world, or concepts stored in memory). Most human search studies have focused on brief (static) laboratory tasks, but being effective in realistic search settings requires adapting to changing environments over both short and long terms, and to changing individual abilities developmentally. In this talk, I will report on two ongoing projects that investigate how young children grow to understand searchable patterns as clusters and sequences.
A tendency to perceive illusory streaks or clumps in random sequences of data—the hot hand phenomenon—has been identified as a human universal tied to our evolutionary history of foraging for clumpy resources. In the first project, we investigated how this misperception of randomness and ecologically relevant statistical thinking broadly develops ontogenetically. Based on our work with adults, we developed three iPad-based decision-making tasks that assess how 3- to 10-year-old children decide that sequential events will continue in a streak or not, their understanding of randomness, and their ability to reason in spatially dependent terms. In a second project, we assessed more specifically to what extent children can differentiate among objective alternation probabilities of various kinds, specifically when they are non-random and do indeed contain statistical regularities. The distributions that were used included clumpy ones (where a hit is more likely to predict another hit nearby or vice versa) and dispersed ones (where a hit is more likely to predict a miss nearby or vice versa). Our project collected data at research sites in the United States and in Germany. Our analyses suggest that children, indeed, hold strong expectations of clumpy resources when they search through and reason with various statistical distributions.

David Pietraszewski - The evolutionary psychology of psychology
2024-12-02 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
The evolutionary psychology of psychology
David Pietraszewski
Psychological and Brain Sciences, UCSB
Sciences progress when the perspective-dependence of their inquiry is taken into account and corrected for. This happened in astronomy, physics, and chemistry, but it has not yet happened in the psychological and behavioral sciences. Because human beings have no choice but to use their mind to understand the mind, the mental mechanisms brought to bear on that endevour—the evolutionary psychology of psychology—constitute psychology’s perspective-dependence. In this talk, I will show how thinking about the psychology underlying the study of the mind explains (1) the problem of free will and (2) broad assumption(s) about mental processes that are perennially re-discovered and then later shown to be insufficient. Accounting for the structure of our evolved cognitive mechanisms is a necessary meta-scientific endeavour that clears away mysteries and highlights problems that need to be solved, allowing us to side-step prejudices of the mind.

Nicholas Grebe - Snark Hunting and Non-Traditional Models for the Biology of Monogamy
2025-01-06 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Snark Hunting and Non-Traditional Models for the Biology of Monogamy
Nicholas Grebe
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Occidental College
Since the 1950s, the field of organismal biology has warned against a single-minded focus on common, easy-to-study animal models—the lab rat being the canonical example—that comes at the expense of understanding both diversity and commonality in the mechanisms of behavior. Historically, research on the biology of monogamy has been dominated by rodent models, and in primates, by callitrichids (marmosets and tamarins). A large body of often elegant research in these animals has proven foundational to contemporary theories in organismal biology. At the same time, looking beyond these popular models has revealed a diversity of behavior under the umbrella of ‘monogamy’, and in many cases, a corresponding diversity in underlying physiological mechanisms. This talk will cover research on the biology and evolution of monogamy in two non-traditional primate models—lemurs and mountain gorillas—and will discuss what can be gained from studying the social worlds of non-model organisms.

Justin Lund - Storytelling, sovereignty, and STEM
2025-01-27 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Storytelling, sovereignty, and STEM
Justin Lund
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology
OSU Center for Health Sciences
Inclusive and engaged research and education are essential for fostering equity and mutual respect. Yet, academic approaches to culturally appropriate knowledge production and community engagement vary widely. Indigenous communities have long been a focus of research, often emphasizing their ways of living, biologies, and narratives—frequently without equitable collaboration. To move toward more just engagement, educators and researchers must embrace decolonization practices that prioritize Tribal sovereignty and self-determination. While “decolonization” is often invoked as a buzzword, its practical application can be deeply transformative. In this talk, Dr. Lund will share insights from education and research initiatives co-created with Indigenous communities and students. These efforts aim to honor Tribal sovereignty and cultivate a new generation of Indigenous scientists, setting a model for equitable and impactful collaborations.

Ryan Nichols - Lineage Fitness Theory and the Lineage Manipulation and Mutualism Mechanism: Bridging Evolutionary Social Sciences & Cultural Evolution
2025-02-10 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Lineage Fitness Theory and the Lineage Manipulation and Mutualism Mechanism: Bridging Evolutionary Social Sciences & Cultural Evolution
Ryan Nichols
Department of Philosophy, California State University Fullerton
Lineage fitness theory aims to improve integration of cultural evolution with evolutionary psychological and social sciences by explaining the onset and maintenance of key traditions as products of gene-culture co-evolutionary selection of a mechanism. The lineage fitness hypothesis is deduced from inclusive fitness theory, corresponding middle-level evolutionary hypotheses, and stated assumptions pertaining to cumulative culture. The lineage manipulation and mutualism mechanism refers to the causal processes by which ancestors exploited intra-lineage cumulative cultural traditions to marginally raise their fitness by partially controlling inputs to evolved psychological modules of descendants. This caused increases in rates of co-descendant survival, in welfare tradeoff ratio amongst distant co-descendants, and led to manipulation of mating preferences and behaviors of co-descendants. Unique predictions of this theory that are not entailed by kin selection theory are identified. The posterior probability of this theory is raised by attention to studies demonstrating effects of cultural traditions on patrilineal investment, and by a case study of Han Chinese culture and genomics. A Bayesian argument noting several limitations concludes the discussion by affirming (only) that the lineage fitness hypothesis merits further investigation by experts.

Mike Frank - Bridging the data gap between children and AI models
2025-02-24 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Bridging the data gap between children and AI models
Mike Frank

Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology, Stanford University

Large language and language-vision models show intriguing emergent behaviors, yet they receive at least three to four – and sometimes as much as six – orders of magnitude more language data than human children. What accounts for this vast difference in sample efficiency? I will describe steps towards a paradigm in which we can address this question. In particular, I’ll discuss the use of child language and egocentric video data for model training, and the use of developmental data for model evaluation. This paradigm provides a model-based framework for exploring the nature of children’s early language learning.

Daniel L. Bowling - Music and Health: Biological Foundations and Applications *Rescheduled from 1/13/25*
2025-03-03 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Music and Health: Biological Foundations and Applications
Daniel L. Bowling
Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA)
Every day, hundreds of millions of people turn to music to regulate their mood, take pleasure, and socialize. These effects apply directly to core dimensions of mental health, including affect, reward, and social functioning. This correspondence is attracting attention from public and private investors (e.g., the National Institutes of Health and Universal Music Group). The evidence at hand includes hundreds of controlled trials examining music therapies, meta-analyses of which show clinically significant effects across a broad range of major functional disorders (e.g., of mood, anxiety, sociality, psychosis, and dementia). Building on this success, a variety of new and developing music-based treatments are being sold and tested in support of health and wellness. In this talk, I will present our growing understanding of music’s underlying biology alongside recent work to combine music neuroscience, therapy, composition, and technology towards new applications designed to increase treatment access and biomedical integration.

Tage Rai - Incentivized punishers and moralistic offenders destabilize cooperation
2025-03-10 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Incentivized punishers and moralistic offenders destabilize cooperation
Tage Rai
Assistant Professor
Rady School of Management
University of California, San Diego
Punishment is classically theorized to be essential for the evolution of cooperation in human societies and is the primary means by which states attempt to directly reduce crime. Yet, empirically, punishment is often ineffective at bringing about its desired changes in behavior. In this talk, I describe a series of papers from my lab that investigate moral motivation and signaling dynamics between punishers and offenders that reduce the effectiveness of punishment and destabilize cooperation. These studies draw on economic games, secondary analyses of crime, and vignette study methods, and are conducted with participants from general and criminalized populations. I then revisit the question of why we punish, whether it ever makes sense, and what our alternatives are.

Hillard Kaplan - An evolutionary-physiological model of human energy management and the emergence of novel non-communicable diseases
2025-03-31 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
An evolutionary-physiological model of human energy management and the emergence of novel non-communicable diseases
Hillard Kaplan
Professor, Anthropology, University of New Mexico
Research Affiliate, Economic Science Institute, Chapman University
This talk presents recent findings obtained with Tsimane and Moseten Native South Americans showing that they 1) engage in high levels of physical activity, and have a high burden of infectious disease and high fertility rates; 2) have a very low prevalence of heart disease and dementia; 3) have slower rates of brain volume loss with age than U.S. and European populations; and 4) evidence a curvilinear relationship of BMI and non-HDL cholesterol with brain volume. Based on those results, I propose a theoretical model of the evolved human energy management system, focusing on the regulation and use of macronutrients in supporting physical activity, brain function, immunity, and reproduction. This is followed by a quantitative model that examines how natural selection would act on exogenous changes in energy supply and expenditure. The final part of the talk utilizes the model to explore how recent rapid changes in energy supply, physical activity, pathogen burden and reproduction result in increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, dementia, and cancer.

Ny Vasil - Generic generalizations within and across contexts
2025-04-14 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Generic generalizations within and across contexts
Ny Vasil
Assistant Professor
Psychology Department, California State University East Bay
Generic generalizations about natural and social kinds (e.g., “Raccoons have rabies”; “Trader Joe’s cashiers are friendly”) shape how agents learn, explain and intervene on their environment. Yet, there’s no consensus about what underwrites people’s endorsement of generic generalizations. This talk brings together ideas from psychology, philosophy and linguistics to argue that stability of the described relationship – the extent to which it holds across various contexts, real or hypothetical – plays an important role in people’s endorsement of generic generalizations about natural and social kinds, and about causal relationships in these domains. In a series of empirical studies, we explore how agents navigate the world composed of both broad and narrow patterns, how the search for robust non-accidental regularities is flexibly adapted to handle “sociocultural bubbles” and other exceptions to universality, and how this capacity develops. In conclusion, I will discuss how the proposed account coheres with the psychological functions of generalizations.

Katrine Whiteson - May the Fiber Be with You: Gut Microbiomes from a remote Amazon village to the undergraduate lab
2025-04-28 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
May the Fiber Be with You: Gut Microbiomes from a remote Amazon village to the undergraduate lab
Katrine Whiteson
University of California Irvine School of Biological Sciences, co-Director, UCI Microbiome Center
Bacterial and viral colonization of the human body has profound implications for human health, yet our understanding of what constitutes a “healthy microbiome” remains incomplete—especially in the context of industrialization. Over the past century, global diets have shifted dramatically, with increased consumption of processed foods and a steep decline in dietary fiber intake. These changes have left our colons depleted of critical substrates that fuel gut microbial communities, with potential consequences for immune function, metabolic health, and chronic disease risk.
To explore what a less industrialized microbiome might look like, we studied the gut, oral, and fermented food microbiomes of women and children from 28 households in Conambo, a remote Indigenous community along the Conambo River in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This community is largely isolated from urban infrastructure, with minimal exposure to processed foods or modern medical care. Microbiome profiles from Conambo participants revealed high diversity and a dominance of microbial taxa such as Prevotellaceae.
We also analyzed chicha, a traditional fermented manioc beverage prepared by mastication of boiled cassava tubers. Our findings revealed microbial succession during fermentation and close taxonomic overlaps with oral and gut microbiota—underscoring the intimate links between diet, tradition, and microbial transmission. Within Conambo, household co-residence emerged as a strong driver of microbiome similarity across fecal, saliva, and chicha samples.
Finally, we contextualized the Conambo microbiomes by comparing them to global reference datasets, including UC Irvine undergraduates participating in dietary fiber intervention studies. Together, these datasets reveal how environmental exposure, diet, and social structure shape the human microbiome—and offer a lens into both human microbial history and the future of microbiome-informed health.

Annie E. Wertz - How infants learn to eat plants (and why they may not want to)
2025-05-12 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
How infants learn to eat plants (and why they may not want to)
Annie E. Wertz
Assistant Professor, Psychological & Brain Sciences
University of California, Santa Barbara
Life is mostly plants. Plants constitute an estimated 80% of the biomass on Earth and are concentrated in terrestrial environments. Millions of animal species rely on plants to survive and the organismic design of plants and animals have been tightly interwoven in intricate ways over evolutionary time. Humans are no exception. Plants have been a foundational component of human diets across evolutionary time, yet many plants can be toxic or even fatal if ingested. In this talk, I will present research exploring the cognitive adaptations human infants use to negotiate this paradox and safely learn which plants they can eat.

Erin Riley - Roadside primates: Balancing risks and rewards in anthropogenic environments
2025-06-02 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Roadside primates: Balancing risks and rewards in anthropogenic environments
Erin Riley
Professor, Anthropology, San Diego State University
In the contemporary era it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a primate population that has not experienced some form of anthropogenic influence. Primates living in anthropogenic spaces may benefit from access to novel food resources, such as agricultural crops or provisioned foods, but they also must deal with potential negative outcomes from the presence of humans and their activities. The complexity of these human-primate interfaces necessitates the use of interdisciplinary approaches that draw from both the natural and social sciences. In this talk, I will discuss my research on the human-macaque interface in Sulawesi, Indonesia, highlighting the mixed methods approaches my colleagues and I are using to examine how macaques and people are co-adapting to ever-expanding shared landscapes.
