Presentation

Michael Alvard: Texas A&M University Department of AnthropologyThe human ability to form large, coordinated groups is among our most impressive social adaptation. Larger groups facilitate synergistic economies of scale for cooperative breeding, economic tasks like group hunting, and success in conflict with other groups. In many organisms, genetic relationships provide the structure for sociality to […]

Dominic Johnson: University of Edinburgh Reader in Politics & International RelationsA recent explosion of work suggests a key role for human physiology and evolutionary psychology in understanding political behaviour, from genes to hormones to cognition. However, the entire notion of an evolutionary basis for human behavior meets a traditional skepticism in the social sciences, and […]

Parry Clarke: UC Davis Department of AnthropologyClassic sexual selection theory, exemplified by the work of Bateman and Trivers, has played and continues to play a central role in the study of primate mating systems. As a result, most theorizing within the field is premised on the assumption that males have been selected to maximize competitive […]

Jennifer Smith: UCLA Center for Society & Genetics and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyCooperation is pervasive in the societies of humans and other animals, yet the current body of evolutionary theory often fails to fully explain its persistence. Because spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) live in complex societies, this species provides an interesting opportunity to […]

Christophe Boesch: Director of the Department of Primatology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary AnthropologyFieldwork studies have revealed with much detail the sophisticated levels of cooperation and altruism in the social domain seen in many animal species. Now, recently some psychologists and economists are loudly claiming that cooperation and altruism are uniquely human abilities. […]

Moshe Hoffman: UCSD Rady School of ManagementWe review the evidence regarding a biological basis for sex differences in risk aversion and competitiveness. We present the relevant literature in evolutionary theory, and animal behavior, endocrinology and neuroscience, as well as the literature relating human risk aversion and competitiveness to handedness, 2D:4D (a proxy of prenatal testosterone […]

Bruce Winterhalder: UC Davis Anthropology & Graduate Group in EcologyMy topic is the evolution of despotism and oligarchies in prehistoric societies. I begin by covering ground that is theoretically well understood, the novelty rests in the empirical analysis and methods. Prehistoric settlement of the Northern Channel Islands (Santa Barbara) follows a pattern predicted by the […]

Jason A. Clark: University of Osnabrueck Institute for Cognitive ScienceWithin emotion theory, it is common for theorists to order emotions along phylogenetic and developmental scales. 'Basic emotions' (such as fear and joy) are seen as having a longer evolutionary history that we share with other animals, and as emerging earlier in development. Higher-cognitive emotions (such […]

Sarah Mathew: UCLA Department of AnthropologyKnowledge of the nature and scale of cooperation in acephalous societies is important for understanding the evolution of human sociality. I will present data showing that the Turkana, an acephalous pastoral society in East Africa, sustain costly large scale cooperation in warfare through informal sanctions against free riders, and that […]

Derek E. Lyons: Post-Doctoral Scholar; UC Irvine Department of InformaticsChildren are generally masterful imitators, both rational and flexible in their acquisition of knowledge from the observation of others. A phenomenon that we have termed overimitation (Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007), however, initially seems a curious exception to this rule. After observing an adult intentionally operating […]