Hanna Kokko - Males exist. Does it matter? -- Special Time -- 9:00am
2014-11-17 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Hanna Kokko: Australian National UniversityA lot of evolutionary theory involves the concept of populations climbing towards peaks of higher fitness. Such theory has been written without taking into account that in most species there are two distinct classes of individuals — males and females — that influence the evolutionary process in a distinctly different way. I will talk about this, and try to shed some light on two quite broad questions: why do males exist, and what determines how they behave?

Nancy Dess - A Pan-Mammalian Tongue-Microbiome-Gut-Brain Axis? Implications for Health and Culture
2014-11-24 00:00
Nancy Dess: Occidental CollegeIn a 2002 BEC talk, I described the working hypothesis that bittersweet taste is a marker for sensitivity to metabolic equanimity, manifested in ways ranging from responsiveness to energy balance to emotional reactivity and stress vulnerability; data from rats selectively bred on a saccharin phenotype and, to a lesser extent, humans, were presented in support of the hypothesis. This talk provides an update on our research program, including social behavior and evidence of an association between the taste phenotype and the gut microbiome. I will draw on others’ recent research with nonhuman primates (taste polymorphisms and behavioral ecology) and humans (embodied cognition) to advocate for refinement and testing of multilevel integrative models that link individual-level taste to processes at lower (gut-brain axis) and higher (sociality, culture) levels of organization.

Larry Cahill - Title: Sex Influences on Brain and Memory: The Burden of Proof has Shifted
2014-12-01 00:00
Larry Cahill: UC IrvineAbstract: Historically, neuroscience paid little if any attention to sex
influences outside a limited area of reproductive functions. But all that
is changing, and ever rapidly, with a flurry of discoveries the past 10
years in particular about sex influences on brain function down to the
molecular level. My area of emotional memory is no exception. This talk
will examine these developments, and detail how they are apparently
irreversibly, and fundamentally, altering how the NIH funds not just
neuroscience, but all of biological science.

Simone Schnall - Social and Physiological Resources and the Perception of Space
2014-12-08 00:00
Simone Schnall: University of CambridgeTraditional theories of perception have assumed that visual processing is not influenced by top-down cognitive processes and is thus driven entirely by physical properties of the environment (Pylyshyn, 1984). For example, how a person sees stimuli such as a cup of coffee or a steep hill was thought to be only determined by factors such as the roughness of their surface and the amount of light entering the eye. However, recent research has shown that perception of space is also influenced by different bodily and experiential factors. I will review our recent work to suggest that perceptual processes take into account social and physiological resources, and that therefore perception of the world is a reflection of the extent to which one can act in it.

Thom Scott-Phillips - The Evolution of Human Communication and Language
2015-01-05 00:00
Thom Scott-Phillips: Durham UniversityLanguage is arguably humanity’s most distinctive characteristic. What, exactly, is language, and why are we the only species that has it? In this talk, based upon my recent book*, I will argue that the differences between human communication and the communication systems of all other species is probably not a difference of degree, but rather one of kind. Language is a system made possible by mechanisms of metapsychology, and expressively powerful by mechanisms of association. Non-human primate communication is most likely the opposite: made possible by mechanisms of association, and expressively powerful by mechanisms of metapsychology. This conclusion suggests that human communication, and hence language, evolved as a by-product of increased social intelligence. As such, human communication may be best seen, from an evolutionary perspective, as a particularly sophisticated form of social cognition: mutually-assisted mindreading and mental manipulation.

Gregory Clark - Nature versus Nurture in the Inheritance of Social Status
2015-01-12 00:00
Gregory Clark: UC DavisMost work studying the inheritance of aspects of social status across societies suggests two things. The first is that this inheritance is weak. Most social status for people is not determined by inheritance from parents. The second is that the strength of inheritance of status varies markedly across societies, so that status inheritance must be largely socially determined. In recent work using surnames as a means of measuring status inheritance across as many as twenty generations we show that in practice status inheritance is very strong, and that it varies surprisingly little across the societies and social systems. In this talk I propose that these surname results are compatible with genetics being the principle determinant of social status in most societies.

Henrike Moll - Social Motivation and Cognition in Toddlers: Their Demands of Reciprocity and Affective Anticipations of Others’ Misguided Actions
2015-01-26 00:00
Henrike Moll: USCHumans are an extraordinarily social species. Their unique way of relating to one another becomes evident very early in ontogeny. In this talk, I will present two lines of experiments, both of which exemplify toddlers’ attunement to other persons and their awareness of others’ perceptual and epistemic states. In one line of experiments, we found that toddlers negate another person’s visibility when her eyes are occluded. Toddlers’ willingness to deny the other’s visibility was positively correlated with their knowledge of the pronoun ‘each other’—suggesting that children who reliably distinguish between reciprocal and individual acts are particularly demanding of reciprocity. In the second line of experiments, we approached the problem of false belief understanding in a novel way by assessing children’s facial expressions. We found that by the age of 2.5 years, toddlers affectively express suspense when observing how an agent acts on misguided assumptions. Both lines of experiments demonstrate impressive social motivational and social cognitive facts: Toddlers demand reciprocal perception in face-to-face encounters, and they are touched and moved when others actions are misguided. The results will be interpreted with a theoretical framework that is inspired by Vygotsky.

David Funder - The World at Seven: Comparing Situations Across 19 Countries with Riverside Situational Q-sort
2015-02-02 00:00
David Funder: UC RiversideBehavior is a function of the person and the situation, and understanding the “personality triad” of persons, situations and behaviors requires assessment instruments for all three. However, until recently tools for assessing situations were not available. The Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ) was developed to fill this gap, and has been applied in the study of cross-situational consistency in behavior, and also used to operationalize and test implications of situational types posited by evolutionary theory. Most recently, The International Situations Project was begun as the first attempt to quantitatively compare everyday situational experience across cultures. Collaborators from 19 cultures directed college student participants (total N = 3,287) to a website (www.internationalsituationsproject.com) where, using the 89 items of the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ), they described the situation they experienced the previous evening at 7 pm. The average situational Q-sort profile for each culture was compared with all others. The most similar cultures were USA/Canada, and the least similar cultures were Korea/Denmark, Korea/Estonia, and Estonia/Australia. The culture with the most similar situational experience to the others, overall, was Canada; the most distinctive was South Korea. The RSQ item that varied the most across cultures was “People are disagreeing about something” (Czech Republic highest; Japan lowest); the second least varying item was “Members of the opposite sex are present.” In general, the items that varied the most across cultures described negative aspects of situational experience; the least varying items were more positive. The RSQ is shown to be versatile tool for assessing situations in diverse research contexts.

Federico Rossano - The Emergence of Property Concerns in Ontogeny and Phylogeny
2015-02-09 00:00
Federico Rossano: Max Plank InstituteSocial theorists as diverse as Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Marx have suggested that without the institution of property modern civil society would not exist. All human societies care about ownership of at least some kinds of things (Brown, 1991; Hann, 1998), yet young children struggle to understand property and come only gradually to an understanding of ownership and how it may be legitimately transferred. Little is known about non-human primates understanding of property, in that they appear to have a sense of possession and will fight to protect the food that is in their physical control (Kummer & Cords, 1991; Sigg & Falett, 1985), but there is currently no evidence that they have any sense of ownership (i.e., they would respect others’ property even when they are absent) (Brosnan, 2011). In this talk I present a series of studies on preschoolers investigating their understanding of (i) under which conditions who owns what (call them ‘‘conditions of ownership’’ rules), and (ii) what implications (rights, commitments, entitlements, etc.) owning which objects carries under which conditions (call them ‘‘implications of ownership’’ rules). I will then present some additional studies investigating the role played by communication and cooperation in the sustainability of property as a social institution. I will finally compare the behavior of preschoolers and non-human primates in situations testing their tendency to respect other individuals’ properties and to protest when their property is violated.

Corina Logan - How New Caledonian Crows Learn About and Solve Foraging Problems
2015-02-23 00:00
Corina Logan: UCSBNew Caledonian crows are one of the few species that make and use tools in the wild. Tool types differ across their range in an overlapping pattern, suggesting that tool designs are copied with a high fidelity and may be transmitted across generations, thus allowing for cumulative changes to occur to the lineage of each tool type over time (cumulative technological culture hypothesis). However, little is known about how these crows learn to make such tools, how this information is transmitted to others, or what they know about the problems they solve. I present results from two experiments on wild-caught New Caledonian crows examining what information observers attend to, how social information is transmitted among juveniles and adults, and whether they attend to causal information when solving foraging problems.

Ben Trumble - Surviving the Flood: Risk Management, Resilience, and the Endocrine and Health Impacts of Natural Disaster in a Subsistence Population
2015-03-02 00:00
Ben Trumble: UCSBIn February 2014, catastrophic flooding impacted the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia. Flooding decimated the subsistence lifestyle and more than two-thirds of villages were flooded (completely destroying crops and washing away most possessions); thousands fled to the nearby market town of San Borja. Widespread food insecurity and disease followed. This project examines the immediate impacts of catastrophic flooding on a subsistence population with limited support from formal institutions (e.g. government, NGO’s, insurance firms) characteristic of Industrial populations. In a sample of more than 400 families this study examines acute effects of disaster and crop/material losses on behavior, psychosocial stress, endocrine physiology, and health. We find a 2.6 fold increase in anemia and 2.4 fold increase in high white blood cell counts following the flood, as well as a nearly a one unit decrease in body mass index (BMI). Individuals with higher levels of crop loss were more present oriented in a time discounting task, and family illness predicted whether individuals moved the locations of their homes and fields homes following the flood. Natural disasters impact all populations, yet rural, indigenous populations are particularly vulnerable. Understanding factors promoting resilience in a population with limited schooling, material wealth, or access to modern healthcare is an important goal, as much of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty.

Eduardo Fernandez-Duque - The Importance of Food, Jealousy, and Paternal Care in the Evolution of Owl Monkey Monogamy
2015-03-04 00:00
Eduardo Fernandez-Duque: Yale UniversityI will discuss published and new data from a population of monogamous owl monkeys in the Argentinean Chaco that we have been studying for almost 20 years to examine the hypothesis that social monogamy is a default social system imposed upon males because the spatial and/or temporal distribution of resources and females makes it difficult for a single male to defend access to more than one mate. Over the years we have tested predictions on ranging patterns, use of space, population density and the abundance and distribution of food. We have also examined the extent to which the ranging and ecological data allow us to predict demographic and life-history parameters as proxies for reproductive success.

John Tooby - Political Epidemiology, History, and the Evolutionary Psychology of Outrage.
2015-03-09 00:00
John Tooby: UCSBDon’t shoot! Rodney King. Remember the Maine. The Reichstag Fire. Guernica. The War of Jenkins Ear. The murder of Emmet Till. Events in which one or more members of one group injure the welfare of one or more members of another group (“outrages”) typically provoke extraordinarily strong and frequently violent responses directed more or less indiscriminately at members of the group from which the offender or offenders came. Such events are treated entirely differently than parallel harms performed by individuals within groups. They unleash cultural processes in which accounts of harms rapidly spread through the group the victims came from. Generally, as news of the (sometimes fabricated) harm is transmitted from person to person, details are added to representations of the event so that the actions depicted seem harsher, more intentional, and more group-targeted. Many group members treat inflammatory portrayals of interactions and the rage they generate as a kind of precious group resource, becoming very resistant to contrary evidence, and passing these stylized narratives down generations. News of outrages strongly motivate the desire to join with others to act in a coordinated and aggressive fashion “against” the other group. A review of the historical and ethnographic record suggests that outrages play a central role in starting wars, provoking ethnic violence, and in mobilizing social movements and revolutions. The cross-culturally and cross-historically recurrent structure of these cultural and social phenomena can be understood by seeing how they naturally emerge from interactions between the evolved psychology of welfare tradeoffs, groups, adaptations for group coordination, and common knowledge. The key is that cross-group harms, if uncontested, are implicitly seen as proposing a common knowledge precedent for the degree of social domination or subordination. The psychology of outrages can be seen as a parallel and complementary adaptation to leadership—one way of solving the coordination problem of mobilizing group members to effectively act or bargain in conflicts with outgroups. Because it is normally difficult to get individuals to set aside competing agendas within groups, yet group power increases with coordination, outrages (real or fabricated) become a resource ingroup individuals strategically deploy to mobilize joint action they (as individuals) expect to benefit from.

Robert Provine - From Laughter to Speech Evolution: A Bipedal Perspective
2015-03-30 00:00
Robert Provine: University of MarylandAfter an introduction to the nature and use of laughter in daily life, discussion turns to the
evolution of laughter and its implications for the emergence of speech.
Contrasts between human and chimpanzee laughter reveal that laughter is the ritualized
signal of labored breathing of rough-and-tumble, with the vocalization representing
the playful context of its origin. Laughter is primate onomatopoeia that signals, “this
is play, I’m not attacking you.” The ancestral primate laugh as performed by extant
chimpanzees is a noisy, unvoiced “pant-pant” in which one vocalization is uttered per
inward and outward breath. Naïve human observers do not recognize this utterance as
laughter, volunteering that it sounds like panting, perhaps of a dog, or even sawing or
sanding. In contrast, humans laugh as they speak, by modulating (parsing) an exhalation
into voiced bursts of “ha-ha.” Chimpanzee laughter suggests why they cannot speak–
they are confined to one utterance per inward and outward breath. The breakthrough in
human respiratory control necessary for speech came with evolution of bipedal running.
Chimpanzees and other quadrupeds have a 1:1 ratio between stride and respiratory cycle,
a necessary adaptation for forelimb impacts during running. (Without inflated lungs,
the thorax is a floppy, air-filled bag.) An unappreciated consequence of the evolution
of bipedal human locomotion is the freeing the thorax of its support function during
running, and the associated uncoupling of respiration and locomotion. Unlike the 1:1
strides per breath ratio of quadrupeds, humans runners have highly variable ratios of
4:1, 3:1, 5:2, 2:1, 3:2, or 1:1, with 2:1 being most common. With the uncoupling of
respiration and locomotion during bipedal running, there is more voluntary control of
breathing and greater opportunity for the natural selection for longer and more complex
vocalizations, including human laughter and speech. This is the bipedal theory of speech
evolution.

No BEC This Week -
2015-04-06 00:00
No BEC This Week:

Meg Crofoot - Collective Decision-Making in Complex Societies: Lessons From Tracking Wild Baboons
2015-04-13 00:00
Meg Crofoot: UC DavisAnimals living in stable social groups may often disagree about where to go, but must reconcile their
differences to maintain cohesion and thus the benefits of group living. Although theory predicts that
shared (democratic) decision-making should be widespread in nature, in species that form long-term
social bonds, considerable asymmetries in dominance and social power often exist, and some have
proposed that these differences give high-ranking individuals increased influence over group decisions.
Determining how consensus is achieved in stratified societies remains a core challenge for
understanding the evolution of social complexity. To investigate how differentiated social relationships
shape the collective decision-making process, we captured simultaneous high-resolution GPS tracks
from 26 members of a wild olive baboon troop (Papio anubis; ~ 80% of adult and subadult members,
sampled at 1hz). We then used these data to explore the relative importance of individual relationships
vs. majority rule in driving group movement decisions in this highly structured society.

Rick Dale - Adaptiveness of Language: From Real-Time Processes to Linguistic Typology
2015-04-20 00:00
Rick Dale: UC MercedHuman language is a flexible behavioral repertoire that may be finely tuned to our cognitive processes and social circumstances. I present evidence from three timescales that language may be shaped by a number of social and cognitive variables. These timescales include (i) how language is used in real-time human interaction, (ii) how language use may relate to the structure of social groups, and (iii) how slower-changing aspects of language, such as grammatical structure, may relate to large-scale demographic variables. I will then examine whether these relationships at different timescales provide hints of selection processes operating over language, and end with a new study demonstrating that, indeed, we can detect “echoes of selection” in large-scale vocabulary data.

Emma Cohen - Social Bonding in Movement and Exercise
2015-04-27 00:00
Emma Cohen: University of OxfordIn this talk, I’ll present some ideas and preliminary data on the links between exercise and social bonding. Exercise, broadly construed, is a cultural universal – from ceremonial rituals to team sports, people everywhere get together to move together. Our research investigates whether and how such activities serve a social bonding function, as has been long claimed in the social scientific literature. Specifically, we explore the social bonding effects of behavioural coordination and exercise ‘highs’. We are also interested in the effects of social bonding on exercise ability and performance, particularly on pain perception and fatigue thresholds. The research attempts to reveal mechanisms underlying the links between coordinated movement, pleasure and pain, and bonding and wellbeing and thereby to contribute new data on a pervasive feature of everyday life that cross-cuts cultural domains as varied as religion, sport and play.

Lera Boroditsky - How the Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We Think
2015-05-04 00:00
Lera Boroditsky: UCSDHow do the languages we speak shape the ways we think? Do speakers of different languages think differently? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do bilinguals think differently when speaking different languages? Does language shape our thinking only when we’re speaking or does it shape our attentional and cognitive patterns more broadly? In this talk, I will describe several lines of research looking at cross-linguistic differences in thought.

Laurie Santos - The Evolution of Irrationality: Insights from Non-Human Primates.
2015-05-11 00:00
Laurie Santos: Yale UniversityI will explore the evolutionary roots of some of our species’ irrational decisions. I will start by reviewing some classic biases in the field of judgment and decision-making and will then turn to the question of how these biases came about in the first place by exploring some recent experiments in exploring similar biases in monkeys. I will then discuss new work suggesting ways that the human species is uniquely irrational.

Jacob Foster - The Unknown Known: Science, Social Learning, and Cultural Evolution
2015-05-18 00:00
Jacob Foster: UCLAScience is an incredibly successful instance of social learning. Its practices produce and subtly organize the attention, effort, and creativity of millions of scientists, leading to rapid and cumulative cultural evolution. In this talk, I outline the striking convergence between this view of science and the one developed in science studies. Using data from millions of scientific papers, I illustrate how scientists use social cues to select research problems and how these heuristics lead to more (and less) efficient discovery. I then argue that formal theories of learning and cultural evolution shine new light on old puzzles in the sociology of science–while the study of science provides provocative problems, parallels, and paradigms for theories of cultural evolution.

A.J. Figueredo and Michael Anthony Woodley - A Sequential Canonical Cascade Model of Social and Cognitive Biogeography
2015-06-01 00:00
A.J. Figueredo and Michael Anthony Woodley: University of Arizona, Free University of BrusselsA sequential canonical cascade model, detailing the hypothesized biogeography of human life history (LH) and intelligence (IQ), derives elevated levels of IQ through a series of causal steps, starting with the evolution of slower LH strategies based on both the physical ecology (climatological factors) and community ecology (population density and parasite burden). This model then examines the social ecology of slow LH strategy through the establishment of cooperative and mutualistic social systems with enhanced levels of social equality, within-group and between-group peace, and sexual equality. These social sequelae, in turn, lead to the strategic differentiation of resource allocation profiles among slower LH strategists (the SD-IE effect) that foster socioecological niche-splitting through intraspecific character displacement and produce mutual competitive release among individuals in saturated, resource-limited environments. By producing cooperative systems of specialists that each efficiently exploit different social micro-niches, the mutual exchange of resources so derived inevitably triggers the action of Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage, producing greater aggregate wealth through these emergent social properties than would otherwise be attainable to equal numbers of generalists. We track this hypothesized mediating mechanism through the relations among three major macroeconomic indicators at the national level of aggregation: higher Economic Complexity Indices, lower Gross Domestic Product Dissimilarity Indices, and lower Krugman Dissimilarity Indices. Finally, we explain how this combination of powerful macroeconomic forces inevitably produces massive increases in aggregate wealth that elevate the collective human capital of the entire society, enhances physical brain volume, and contributes to higher overall levels of human cognitive abilities.

Kristin Snopkowski - Reproductive Decision-Making in Transitional Contexts
2015-09-28 00:00
Kristin Snopkowski: Boise State UniversityOver the past two hundred years, most societies around the world have experienced fertility transitions, defined as a dramatic decline in reproductive rates through time. The conscious decision to reduce fertility to very low levels appears maladaptive and poses a theoretical challenge to human behavioral ecologists who expect humans to maximize long term fitness. I develop a theoretical model to explain currently low fertility rates that incorporates both cultural and economic hypotheses of fertility decline and test these using data from San Borja, Bolivia, a society currently undergoing a fertility transition. Results show that both economic and cultural information are important determinants of reproductive decisions. Kin are also an important influence on reproductive decision-making, possibly providing help to a reproducing couple or hindering reproduction by engaging in resource competition. I test these hypotheses using data from Thailand and Indonesia and show that couples who receive help from kin are more likely to reproduce in the future, providing evidence for the cooperative breeding hypothesis. Finally, I present some preliminary results from my recent field season in Huatasani, Peru exploring men’s reproductive decision making and discuss theoretical models of sexual conflicts over family size.http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/snopkowski-bec-talk.pdf

Dan Franks - The Evolution of a Long Post-Reproductive Lifespan in Killer Whales
2015-10-05 00:00
Dan Franks: University of YorkWhy females of some species cease ovulation before the end of their natural lifespan is a longstanding evolutionary puzzle. In humans as well as some natural populations of cetaceans and insects, reproductive aging occurs much faster than somatic aging and females exhibit prolonged post-reproductive lifespans (PRLSs). Determining the mechanisms and functions that underpin PRLSs has proved a significant challenge. Here we bring together both classic and modern hypotheses proposed to explain PRLSs and discuss their application with particular reference to our studies of killer whales. In doing so we highlight the need to consider multiple interacting explanations for the evolution of PRLSs.

Erik Gjesfjeld - Social and Technological Responses to Risk and Uncertainty: A Material Culture Approach
2015-10-12 00:00
Erik Gjesfjeld: UCLAIn both the past and present, human populations are consistently presented with unpredictable situations. Behavioral responses to these situations are often heavily mediated by our degree of knowledge (uncertainty) about the variability in outcomes (risk). Using social network analysis as well as a novel macro-evolutionary method for examining the mode and tempo of evolution, this research explores changes in material culture diversity in response to increased environmental and economic risk. Results from this research suggest that social networks can be an important mechanism for reducing hunter-gatherer uncertainty surrounding environmental fluctuations, but technological innovations do not tend to buffer economic risk, as is commonly thought. Overall, these findings help to highlight some of the misconceptions surrounding risk and support the continued analysis of risk-sensitive adaptations using material culture.

Tim Shields - The Demonstrability of What You Have Not Done (But Could Have) Matters In Trust-based Exchange
2015-10-19 00:00
Tim Shields: Chapman UniversityWe describe results of a study in trust-based exchange that supports the proposition that humans perceive intention not only through what others do but also through what others choose not to do. Crucial to this proposition is the notion that trust-based exchanges entail decision dilemmas where mutually exclusive goals are traded off and the forgone opportunities produce clues about our intent – affecting others’ reactions. To manipulate the availability of foregone opportunities, we used two versions of the trust game in a 1×2 between subjects design. In two experimental trust games, the action space governing trustors’ transfers was manipulated to examine the effects on trustors’ transfers and trustees’ returns. In the “all-or-nothing” game the trustor could transfer either $10 (all) or $0 (nothing), while in the “continuous” game the trustor could transfer any amount between $10 and $0. In both games, the trustee received the tripled transfer and then could return any amount (to trustor). Trustors transferred significantly more in the all-or-nothing game than in the continuous game. However, higher initial transfers in the all-or-nothing game did not lead to larger returns. To the contrary, conditional on $10 transfers, on average trustees returned significantly less in the all-or-nothing game than in the continuous game. Although the all-or-nothing action space results in greater wealth overall, trustors do not benefit from this increased wealth. These results suggest that the availability of alternative options is paramount in shaping social behaviors.

Debra Martin - CANCELLED -- Ancient Bones, Ancestral Bodies: Interpretive Approaches to Violence and Behavior
2015-10-26 00:00
Debra Martin: University of Nevada, Las VegasViolence (lethal and nonlethal) is often associated with social spheres of influence and power connected to daily life such as subsistence intensification, specialization, resources, climate, population density, territorial protection and presence of immigrants, to name just a few. By using fine-grained biocultural analyses that interrogate trauma data in particular places at particular times in reconstructed archaeological contexts, a more comprehensive view into the behaviors, histories and experiences of violence emerges. Moreover, identifying culturally-specific patterns related to age, sex, and social status provide an increasingly complex picture of early small-scale groups. Some forms of ritual violence have restorative and regenerative aspects that strengthen community identity. Other forms of social violence cause rupture and disintegration at the group level. Bioarchaeological data can shed light on the ways that violence becomes part of a given cultural landscape. Viewed in a biocultural context, evidence of osteological trauma provides rich insights into social relationships and the many ways that violence is embedded within those relationships.

Drew Rendall - Language Evolution and The (Ir)relevance of Primate Communication
2015-11-02 00:00
Drew Rendall: University of LethbridgeThe evolution of language is a longstanding problem that continues to invite study, analysis, and speculation from a variety of perspectives. One perspective has been to adopt a comparative stance and seek the rudiments of key elements of language in the communication systems of closely related nonhuman primates. While sensible enough, in principle, I’ll argue that this search has been focused in the wrong places (like the drunk fumbling in the dark searching the ground for his keys, not where they’re most likely to be but rather simply where the light is brightest) namely on high-level informational properties of language related to its intentionality, semantics and syntax. Several decades of such focused research now points to the conclusion that, in these respects, primate communication is largely irrelevant. So, despite their phylogenetic proximity to us, are other primates in fact not really relevant to the problem of language evolution? I’ll answer, no… and promise to disambiguate that answer. In the process, I’ll hope to make some broader points about the enterprise of theorizing, both in this field but also more generally, considering how the constructs we use, the explanatory metaphors we borrow, and (ironically?) the language we adopt can steer the phenomena we study and aim to explain, as much as the reverse, potentially leading us to mistake purely theoretical entities for real ones.

Elly Power - Signaling, Status, and Social Networks: Religious Practice in Rural South India
2015-11-09 00:00
Elly Power: Santa Fe InstituteDiscerning the intentions and character of others is a difficult task. In South India, religious practice is seen as particularly helpful in that process of discernment. There, the ritual acts undertaken are often quite dramatic: devotees walk across hot coals, pierce their skin with hooks and spears, walk barefoot to distant temples, and sacrifice animals to the divine. What is being communicated through these acts? Drawing on reputational and social support network data, I show that greater and costlier ritual participation corresponds to greater recognition not only for being devout, but also for holding a suite of prosocial traits. Perhaps more importantly, greater and costlier ritual participation also increases the likelihood of a supportive tie between individuals. These findings provide clear support for the costly signaling theory of religion. However, I will spend much of the talk complicating these simple relationships. Not everyone performs costly ritual acts, and the reputational benefits that accrue to those who do are not equally distributed. Much of this variation can be explained by the social risks entailed in these acts and the differential ability of villagers to take on those potential costs. To fully understand this signaling system, a broader understanding of cost, a wider range of actors, and a more complete inventory of signals (including not only the dramatic but also the subtle) must all be recognized and taken into account.

Joey Cheng - Getting to the Top: Pathways to Social Rank
2015-11-16 00:00
Joey Cheng: University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignThe pursuit of social rank is a recurrent and pervasive challenge faced by individuals across human societies. Yet, the precise means through which individuals compete for social standing remain unclear. This talk examines the dynamics of two fundamental avenues—fear and respect—to social rank. I will begin by highlighting how these strategies differ—in terms of their characteristic personality, emotional, verbal, and nonverbal patterns. I will then present evidence demonstrating the viability of fear and respect for effectively ascending the social hierarchy in both the lab and the field. Finally, I will discuss new research that examines the impact of fear- and respect-based leadership on group functioning and follower well-being. Taken together, this emerging line of research suggests that fear and respect represent two distinct pathways to social rank. Underpinned by a unique suite of cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes, these pathways shape the hierarchical order of individuals within groups and promote collective success, albeit under different circumstances.
