Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture

Isabelle Laumer - Physical and social cognition in a parrot (Cacatua goffiniana) and ape model species (Pongo abelii)
2021-05-17 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Physical and social cognition in a parrot (Cacatua goffiniana) and ape model species (Pongo abelii)
Isabelle Laumer
Department of Anthropology, UCLA
The comparative approach is a powerful tool to deepen our understanding of the adaptive value of complex information processing. Modern approaches of comparative cognition are interested in how cognitive outputs are influenced on the basis of convergence (distantly related species facing similar demands) or on the basis of divergence (closely related species facing different cognitive challenges). Birds diverged from mammals around 280 million years ago resulting in highly characteristic brain structures (nuclear avian brain versus laminar mammalian brain). Since large-brained birds, such as corvids and parrots, often show similar skills in cognitive tasks as primates, it was suggested that these similarities result from a convergent evolutionary trend to cope with similar environmental and social demands. Therefore, comparing the performance of primates and birds on standardized cognitive tasks promises to be particularly telling.
In a series of experiments, I investigated the cognitive abilities of Goffin´s cockatoos and orangutans in the physical domain by the use of decision-making paradigms, novel test designs and by using tests that have previously been conducted in children. My studies use carefully controlled comparative procedures that provide first insights into similarities in tool-related problem solving and innovation between these two distantly related species. As both species tested are important model species for physical cognition and tool-use, aside from the comparative perspective my studies additionally provide important information within the subject of tool-related cognition, as within-species designs. Furthermore, I will present my findings on tool manufacture, memory and social cognition, inequity aversion and prosociality, in the Goffin´s cockatoo in light of recent findings in primate research.

Chris Krupenye - The social minds of humans and other apes
2021-05-19 12:00 - 13:30
The social minds of humans and other apes
Chris Krupenye
Department of Psychology, Durham University and Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University
Few traits characterise humans more profoundly than the complexity of our social lives, and the depth of our insights into the social and mental lives of others. To predict behaviour and make decisions in a dynamic and uncertain social world, we track others’ social relationships, evaluate others based on their behaviour or identity, and even attempt to infer their thoughts and emotions. That our potential social partners possess these skills, too, is precisely what makes the social world so complex. In turn, we must manage our reputation and relationships, adhere to the norms of our group, and strategically navigate manifold cooperative and competitive interactions. Cognition is at the heart of what makes social life so demanding and thus, to characterize the origins of human social complexity, we must understand the origins of our social cognition. I will present a series of comparative experiments with humans and our closest phylogenetic relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), aimed at identifying shared traits that were likely present 6-9 million years ago in our last common ancestor, as well as spotlighting unique features of the human mind. This work demonstrates that great apes, like humans, possess impressive knowledge of their social world: they remember social partners for decades, encode their dispositions and relationships, and even track their perspectives in surprisingly rich ways. Together, this body of research suggests that the roots of our social minds are discernible in the minds of our closest relatives, and extend deep into our evolutionary history.

Alyssa Crittenden - Microbiomania, rewilding, and the threat of bioprospecting: How anthropologists can help to set a more ethical research agenda in microbiome sciences
2021-05-24 12:00 - 13:30
Microbiomania, rewilding, and the threat of bioprospecting: How anthropologists can help to set a more ethical research agenda in microbiome sciences
Alyssa N. Crittenden
Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Scientific knowledge and commercial interest in the human microbiome are growing exponentially. As our understanding of the vital role of microbes increases, so does “microbiomania” – the fervor in which microbes are lauded in popular media and scientific press as capable of revolutionizing human health in the Global North. This wholescale shift from viewing bacterial species as primarily threatening to critical and endangered symbionts, has led to a reconsideration of the mismatch hypothesis and the urge to repopulate the gut microbiome to its “natural” state. This has meant that cross-cultural research on the microbiomes of small-scale communities is increasingly pursued by microbiologists and commercial biotech companies in an attempt to sequence “traditional” or “lost” microbes, prized commodities extoled as a potential panacea for many common ailments. Using a framework grounded in the political ecology of the body (sensu Guthman and Mansfield), I interrogate the “rewilding” movement and propose that it is based on scientific inaccuracies and is rooted in dangerous colonial perspectives that identify which bodies such “ancestral species” can be found on and in. I argue that this movement is the noble savage paradigm reimagined, where outmoded and persistent ideas are finding renewed expression across scientific domains. I reflect on my past research failures, my current community-based and community-inclusive approaches to human biological research, and call for the implementation of data collection and management practices (e.g. power sharing, profit sharing) that will mitigate human rights infractions and make for stronger science in the arena of human microbiome research.

Herman Pontzer - Evolution, Activity, and Aging in Human Energy Expenditure
2021-09-27 12:00 - 13:30
Evolution, Activity, and Aging in Human Energy Expenditure
Herman Pontzer
Duke University
Metabolic energy expenditure, the combined activity of our 37 trillion cells, and shapes our daily energy requirements and affects our health. Conventional wisdom, born largely from clinical studies in industrialized populations, has held that daily energy expenditures are similar for closely related species, increase at a constant rate with body size through growth and development, and are strongly affected by physical activity levels. Recent work, including research with small-scale societies around the globe, has challenged each of these views. In this talk, I discuss these new insights and their implications for understanding human energy expenditure.

James Holland Jones -- Cultural Evolutionary Dynamics Under Structural Uncertainty and the Consequences for Coupled Diffusion Processes
2021-10-04 12:00 - 13:30
Cultural Evolutionary Dynamics Under Structural Uncertainty and the Consequences for Coupled Diffusion Processes
James Holland Jones
Earth Systems Science, Stanford University
The COVID-19 Pandemic has laid bare the social vulnerabilities that make epidemics larger, more deadly, and more difficult to control, both within the US and internationally. Differential vulnerability by social attributes (e.g., race, socioeconomic status, gender) leaves the overall population at greater risk for severe outbreaks than would be the case in less unequal populations. While health researchers have noted the societal vulnerability brought about by structural inequality for years, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed other surprising sources of structural vulnerability that exacerbate transmission and complicate control. In particular, socio-political polarization has proven to be a pernicious problem for epidemic control. I will present results from a simple model that show how two social processes, homophily and out-group aversion, in a polarized population, can produce complex transmission dynamics that qualitatively resemble the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. I will then present a cultural-evolutionary framework for understanding why such polarization arises in the context of a pandemic. At the outset of a pandemic of a novel pathogen, people are suffused with uncertainty about the nature of the threat, its origin, the severity of disease, the effectiveness of control, timelines, etc. We hypothesize that uncertainty is a key variable underlying increased socio-political polarization on the one hand, and the response to crises such as pandemics on the other. Uncertainty is a fundamental feature not just of epidemics but of any existential crisis facing humanity more generally. Understanding how people respond to uncertainty, and crucially, what the aggregate effects of these responses are is therefore a critical need for research into existential threats. Conventional wisdom tells us that people employ social heuristics when faced with uncertainty. This is important since aggregation itself becomes a major source of structural uncertainty, as the behavior of ensembles of decision-makers is characterized by substantial nonlinearity, feedback, and often surprising threshold effects. I will present new work on modeling decision-making under uncertainty and the aggregate effects for “coupled-contagion” processes of social learning and pathogen diffusion.

Damian Caillaud - Behavioral ecology: an important tool to protect threatened gorilla populations
2021-10-11 12:00 - 13:30
Behavioral ecology: an important tool to protect threatened gorilla populations.
Damian Caillaud, UC Davis
Conservation measures are often based on survey data and demographic projections, rather than behavior ecology studies. However, animal behavior research often provides key information explaining why some populations are threatened with extinction. For example, aspects of the ranging behavior and social structure of mountain gorillas strongly reduce population growth, even in the absence of feeding competition. In other studies, we found that home range persistence hinders the recovery of low-density gorilla populations. Lastly, the impact of infectious disease on gorilla populations cannot be explained without taking into account gorilla social organization and social behavior. We hope these examples (and others) contribute to make behavioral ecology a more systematic conservation tool.

Idan Blank - The relationship between language and executive functions
2021-10-18 12:00 - 13:30
Idan Blank
UCLA Department of Psychology
Two cognitive capacities that “make us human” are our ability to communicate via language and our executive functions (working memory, cognitive control, inhibition, etc.), both unparalleled in the animal kingdom. Language comprehension is mainly carried out by specialized mechanisms that are language-specific and are not engaged in other high-level cognitive functions; in contrast, executive functions constitute a general resource that is shared across diverse cognitive domains. Are these two capacities related to one another? On the one hand, much research has found that comprehension, in addition to its reliance on domain-specific mechanisms, is critically supported by executive functions. On the other hand, those studies are overwhelmingly based on cleverly designed artificial tasks, which effectively turn language into an “IQ test” and do not mimic real-world comprehension “in the wild”. In this talk, I will describe studies that instead employ naturalistic paradigms in fMRI to test how executive functions contribute to comprehension. Through a combination of data-driven analyses, psycholinguistic constructs, and brain-behavior correlations, the findings challenge two decades of research about the role of executive resources in comprehension.

Sarah Hill - Cytokines as a mediator of condition-dependent behavioral strategies
2021-10-25 12:00 - 13:30
Sarah E. Hill
Department of Psychology, Texas Christian University
A growing body of research finds that the activities of the immune system – in addition to protecting the body from infection and injury – also influence how we think, feel, and behave. Although research on the relationship between the immune system and psychological and behavioral outcomes has most commonly focused on the experiences of those who are acutely ill (i.e., sickness behavior), theory and research in the evolutionary sciences suggests that the immune system may also play a key role in modulating condition-dependent behavioral strategies. In this presentation, I will go over recent research that suggests that inflammation – a key component of the immune response to pathogens and stressors – may play an important modulatory role in shaping emotions, motivation, cognition, and behavior, even among those without symptoms of acute illness. I close by discussing potential opportunities for integrating psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) into evolutionary approaches to human behavior.

Cody Ross - Social networks, network-structured economic games, and a toolbox for fine-scale, comparative research
2021-11-01 12:00 - 13:30
In this talk, I review challenges of collecting and analyzing human social network data. I first discuss trade-offs between the use of roster-based and name-generator-based tools for studying cooperative networks, and highlight the potential of roster-based, network-structured economic games (e.g., the RICH economic games introduced by Gervais 2017) to address anthropological questions. I then introduce the DieTryin R package, and illustrate its improved scalability over roster-based methods. In cases where network data are collected via self-reports, rather than via experimental games, reported ties may be seriously biased. Individuals may, for example, report making cooperative transfers that did not really occur, or forget to mention real transfers. Many network-level properties are exquisitely sensitive to these biases, and there remains a dearth of easily deployed statistical tools that account for them. To address this issue, I introduce a latent network model, and associated R package, STRAND, that allows one to jointly estimate parameters measuring reporting biases and a latent, underlying true social network. Finally, I present a case study in the use of these tools in a study investigating how inequality and perceptions of inequality influence expression of parochialism versus magnanimity in two mutli-ethnic Colombian communities.

David Raichlen - Evolutionary links between physical activity and brain health
2021-11-08 12:00 - 13:30
Recent work suggests physical activity can have important beneficial effects on the aging brain, however the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. An evolutionary-neuroscience approach may help us better understand these mechanisms and can provide a foundation for developing novel interventions to improve brain aging. Here, we suggest that, from an evolutionary perspective, physical activity mainly occurred during foraging, which combines aerobic activity with cognitively demanding tasks (e.g., spatial navigation and executive cognitive functions). Thus, mechanisms linked to neuroplasticity, including hippocampal neurogenesis, may be triggered by physical activity as a way to enhance cognitive needs during foraging tasks. If correct, simultaneous physical and cognitive challenges may lead to the strongest brain benefits. Using this evolutionary approach to brain health, we can form a foundation for novel interventions to improve brain aging today.

Melissa Emery Thompson - The Gray Ape: What Can Chimpanzees Tell Us About Human Aging?
2021-11-15 12:00
Melissa Emery Thompson
Evolutionary Anthropology, University of New Mexico
Given their close evolutionary relationship to humans and lifespans that can extend into their 60s, chimpanzees are a uniquely informative comparative model for the evolution of human aging. Here, I will review early findings of the first focused study of aging in wild chimpanzees. Chimpanzees share key similarities in physiological, physical, and social aging with humans, but they show a remarkable lack of evidence for aging pathologies. This evidence helps support and contextualize recent cross-cultural evidence from humans which suggests that common diseases of aging may be novel products of post-industrial environments.

Bernard Koch - White Supremacist Trees in An Academic Forest: Does Anybody Hear Them?
2021-11-22 12:00 - 13:30
Bernard Koch, UCLA Sociology
In this paper, we quantify the enduring legacy of scientific racism both within academia and online. Hereditarian arguments correlating race and IQ have been used to justify regressive social policies since the 1950s, and this literature remains active within academia today. We characterize a tight collaboration community of authors promoting these arguments within academia over decades, and show that they are diverse with respect to gender, age, race, and geography. Moreover, while their papers are cited at lower rates than similar psychology papers, we find that they have much broader public engagement, as measured through Google searches, Reddit, and other social media platforms. Possible interventions for academics to better contain influential pseudoscience are discussed.

Dominic Cram - Cooperation, health and ageing: lessons from weaver-birds, meerkats and honeyguides
2021-11-29 12:00 - 13:30
Cooperation in the natural world can, at first glance, appear puzzling: why should an animal cooperate when doing so is costly, and would benefit a competitor? In this talk, I will address this question by investigating links between cooperation and animal health using field studies of wild birds and mammals. I will first test whether cooperatively breeding societies (whereby ‘helpers’ forego breeding and instead assist raising others’ young) are maintained because cooperation lightens overall workloads, improves health, slows ageing, and extends lifespans. I will focus on my studies of white-browed sparrow weavers (Plocepasser mahali) and meerkats (Suricata suricatta) in the Kalahari Desert. I will then contrast these findings with inter-species cooperation in greater honeyguides (Indicator indicator) in the Mozambican wilderness. In a remarkable human-wildlife mutualism, these birds actively call to humans searching for honey and lead them to the location of bees’ nests in return for a beeswax meal. I will explore how this unique case of human- wildlife cooperation is resilient to cheating honeyguides that scrounge a free piece of wax, and whether honeyguide cooperation is related to variation in individual health. Overall, these results suggest that cooperation can influence, and be driven by, variation in animal health, but that these effects must be viewed in the light of other ecological and social factors.

Daniel Sznycer - Value Computation in Humans
2022-01-03 12:00 - 13:30
Valuing things comes naturally to us. But valuing things would be a forbidding task if we lacked the information-processing machinery that enables value computation and that needs to be understood. How does the human brain compute the value of things, events, and states of affairs? Things afford positive, neutral, or negative long-run effects on the replicative probability of the focal individual’s genes. At the most general level, values are internal estimates of those effects. Value information steers physiology and behavior in the right direction: approach apple; avoid enemy. Therefore, value computation is of paramount biological importance. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss shame, pride, and other social emotions. These emotions function to recalibrate the social valuations held by self and others. For example, shame functions to minimize the likelihood and cost of being devalued by others when negative information about the self spreads into the community. I will discuss findings my collaborators and I have published showing functionality and regularity in emotion across mass societies and small-scale societies and throughout history. The emotion–valuation nexus regulates interpersonal interactions. This nexus may also form the core of, e.g., justice-making institutions. For example, the shame laypeople report if they committed each of various offenses echoes the legal thinking of lawmakers—shame intensities retrodict the punishments provided for offenses by actual laws, including laws from radically unfamiliar cultures (e.g., the Tang Code, China CE 653; the Laws of Eshnunna, Mesopotamia ca. 1770 BCE). In the second part of the talk, I will focus on value computation. One wants to know: What features does a computational system need to be equipped with in order to value anything and everything that humans are known to value?—true friendship and self-transcendence, but also: water, rice, honey, obsidian, harpoons, the Cessna 172, fire, fire extinguishers, double-entry bookkeeping, sleeping, explanations, allies, mates, etc. I will present recent findings indicating accuracy and adaptive integration in value computation. For example, the subjective food value imputed to a hot dog reflects the protein and carbohydrate content of the hot dog (accuracy); the intensity of gratitude aroused if someone gave you a hot dog reflects the food value imputed to the hot dog (integration). Task analysis suggests many additional features are involved in human value computation, some of which have been mapped out (e.g., common neural representation of value) and some of which have not. More research is needed!

Ed Hagen - Homo medicus: The transition to meat eating, increased pathogen pressure, and the constitutive and inducible use of pharmacological plants in Homo
2022-01-10 12:00 - 13:30
Homo medicus: The transition to meat eating, increased pathogen pressure, and the constitutive and inducible use of pharmacological plants in Homo

Edward H. Hagen, Aaron D. Blackwell, Aaron D. Lightner, Roger J. Sullivan

Click here for link to manuscript pre-print

The human lineage entered a more carnivorous niche 2.6 mya. A range of evidence indicates this increased zoonotic pathogen pressure. This evidence includes increased zoonotic infections modern hunter-gatherers and bushmeat hunters relative to others living in the same environments, exceptionally low stomach pH compared to other primates, human-specific down-regulation in ANTXR2 that would have protected against increased exposure to zoonotic anthrax, exceptional human immune responses to LPS compared to other primates, and other divergent immune genes. These all point to change, and likely intensification, in the disease environment of Homo compared to earlier hominins and other apes. At the same time, the brain, an organ in which inflammatory immune responses are highly constrained, begins to increase, eventually tripling in size.

We propose that the combination of increased zoonotic pathogen pressure and the challenges of defending a large brain and body from pathogens across what would eventually become the longest lifespan of any mammal, selected for intensification of the self-medication strategies already in place in apes and other primates, resulting in a variety of plant-based pathogen defenses. In support, there is evidence of medicinal plant use by hominins in the middle Paleolithic, and all cultures today have sophisticated, plant-based medical systems, incorporate plant components high in secondary compounds (spices) into food, and regularly consume psychoactive substances that are harmful to helminths and other pathogens in the CNS and other tissues. The computational challenges of discovering effective plant-based treatments, and the economic challenges of benefiting from costly-to-acquire medical knowledge that would be more often useful to others than oneself, were selection pressures for increased cognitive abilities and unique exchange relationships in Homo. In the story of human evolution, which has long featured hunters, shamans and healers had an equal role to play.

Gerry Carter - Cooperative Relationships in Vampire Bats
2022-01-24 12:00 - 13:30
Several birds and mammals form affiliative relationships with both kin and nonkin that involve multiple forms of cooperation. When individuals form these long-term cooperative relationships, both the causes and consequences of each individual’s cooperative investments are difficult to study. To understand how individuals form and maintain cooperative relationships, one must ultimately manipulate both associations and interactions to experimentally test for predicted changes in relationship dynamics. In this talk, I will review what we have learned so far from 10 years of experiments with common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus). These blood-feeding vampire bats regurgitate food to help unfed bats in need, and these costly donations occur reciprocally among both related and unrelated adult females. My work to date suggests that such food sharing has origins in extended maternal care and kin selection, but now provides multiple kinds of direct and indirect fitness benefits through some combination of reciprocity and interdependence. New reciprocal food-sharing relationships form between strangers initially through escalating reciprocal allogrooming, and new allogrooming relationships can be experimentally “seeded” by forcing bats into close spatial proximity. A key concept is that the amount of fitness interdependence in social relationships can change continuously over time, blurring the lines between categorical models of cooperation such as reciprocity and ‘pseudo-reciprocity’.

Gerry Carter
Ohio State University
https://eeob.osu.edu/people/carter.1640

Jenny Tung - The social genome and primate evolution
2022-01-31 12:00 - 13:30
Jenny Tung
Duke University
http://www.tung-lab.org/

Helen Davis - Culture, Cultural Change, and Cognitive Development
2022-02-14 12:00 - 13:30
What does cognitive development look like in a world without schools or formally educated parents or communities? What if our most fundamental measures of cognitive performance were influenced by small amounts of schooling or by having parents, siblings or others who attended schools in one’s household or community? Growing evidence suggests that the human mind is shaped by the socially and culturally incentivized institutions it is exposed to during our unusually long childhood. Yet, many contemporary theories of early learning capacities and cognition are drawn from samples where formal schooling, a prolific cultural institution, has been nearly ubiquitous for at least a century. In such novel environments, the impact of formal schooling on cognition and learning can easily be confused with species-wide maturational processes. This talk will discuss research focused on fundamental aspects of cognition and the institutions and cultural transitions shaping them using findings from two unique, ongoing studies in Amazonia, Bolivia and in the Namib Desert of Namibia and Angola. Additionally, this talk will address growing challenges associated with cross-cultural research, as well as the need for a conscientious commitment to participant communities.
Helen Davis
Harvard University
https://helen-elizabeth-davis.com/

Elizabeth Hobson - Dominance hierarchies, fight decisions, and social support as windows into animal social cognition
2022-02-28 12:00 - 13:30
Elizabeth Hobson
University of Cincinnati
http://hobsonresearch.com/

Federico Rossano - Interacting like a human being: a developmental and comparative perspective on calibrating requests
2022-03-07 12:00 - 13:30
In his paper on the “human interaction engine”, Levinson famously asserted that, in social interaction, people’s responses “are to actions and intentions, not to behaviors” (2006: 45). Indeed human beings attribute intentions/goals to the production of signals and parsing other’s signals means simulating others’ mental worlds, at least to some degree. But how do speakers calibrate their interactional moves in first position so that they are more likely to elicit their preferred response? Which variables do they take into account?
In this talk I present observational and experimental data on how human (children and adults) and non-human primates (chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans) calibrate requests for actions and for objects. I will discuss the roles of prospection, entitlement and accountability in the calibration of requests and outline to what degree non-human primates share with humans cognitive abilities that allow for a flexible assessment of when, how and to whom to deliver requests. I will also show where the critical differences lie. In doing so, I will show what it means to interact like a human being.
Federico Rossano
UCSD Cognitive Science
https://cogsci.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/federico-rossano.html

Lisa O'Bryan - Communication and the Coordination of Collective Behavior in Non-human and Human Social Groups
2022-03-28 12:00 - 13:30
Lisa O’Bryan, Rice University
In order to obtain social benefits, individuals must remain cohesive, coordinate their behavior, and collectively process information. The field of collective behavior focuses on understanding how group-wide properties such as these emerge from the interactions of many individuals. Most studies of collective behavior examine how coordination is achieved through visual cues about others’ positions and behavior. However, in many complex social and ecological environments, communication can be critical for achieving successful outcomes since many signals have evolved to advertise location, express motivational state and share information. My research focuses on how vocal communication both influences, and is influenced by, individual and group-wide properties, with the aim of better understanding the behavioral mechanisms underlying the successful (and unsuccessful) functioning of social groups. I study this topic using technology to obtain detailed, continuous measurements of individual behaviors and interactions in both non-human and human social groups. In this talk I will review my work using wearable dataloggers to study how vocalizations influence the collective movements of domesticated herds and wild baboons. I will also discuss current studies focused on the role conversational turn-taking plays in the decision-making and collective intelligence of human teams. The long-term goal of my research program is to gain new insights into the function and evolution of communication systems involved in the mediation of collective behaviors and how we can engineer communication systems within our own societies to produce more favorable group-wide outcomes.

Kelsey McCune - Space Use, Exploratory Behavior and Rapid Range Expansion in Great-Tailed Grackles
2022-04-04 12:00 - 13:30
Humans are rapidly changing the natural world, leading to decreasing native fauna and increasing non-native fauna. Problematic species range expansions are occurring across the globe, but not all species are able to become established outside of their original range. It is still unclear which characteristics facilitate successful invasions or native species persistence in human-modified environments. One hypothesis is that variation in behavior may be important when certain individuals possess traits that make them more likely to succeed when venturing into new habitats and outcompeting heterospecifics. For example, variation in the ability (movement) and motivation (exploratory tendency) to encounter conspecifics and novel food sources could facilitate range expansions. However, no previous research has compared measures of exploration to the natural movement behavior of individuals along the range of a currently invading species. In this talk I will discuss my research on movement and exploratory behaviors in a species that has rapidly expanded its range in the U.S., the great-tailed grackle. I consider whether individuals consistently differ in their movement behavior such that it can be considered an inherent individual trait, whether movement relates to performance on an exploration task, and whether movement and exploration differ between grackles in the center of the range and those on the invasion front. Invasive species are implicated as a leading cause of biodiversity loss, so this research will facilitate a better understanding of the importance of these behavioral characteristics in predicting potential invasions in other systems.

James Higham - Insights into Life-History from the Cayo Santiago Rhesus Macaques
2022-04-11 12:00 - 13:30
We humans come from a diverse order, the primates, which make excellent model systems for studying the interface between the biological and the social. In this talk, I focus on our long-running field studies of the rhesus macaques of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Decades of individual-based demographic data allow us to explore variation in life history, including the impacts of interbirth intervals and infant birth weights on infant survival, and both the development and senescence of reproduction in the same individuals across the lifespan. Our studies leverage behavioral observations, cognitive experiments, physiological measures, genomic and transcriptomic data from blood and tissues, measurements of soft-tissues and skeletons, microbiome samples, and more. I show how long-term integrative study allows us to explore the interactions between the biological and the social from two perspectives: bottom-up and top-down. From the bottom-up perspective, we are beginning to ask how variation in the genome and epigenome, via the transcriptome, constructs cellular, tissue- and organ-level biology in individuals, and in turn, how individual-level behaviors structure societies and populations. From the top-down perspective, we study how variation in the social environment can get under the skin and impact health and disease. I finish by discussing the Anthropocene, and by demonstrating the top-down effects of climate change-linked natural disasters on rhesus macaque societies, and on individual health via effects on the transcriptome. Combining approaches from behavioral ecology, physiology, quantitative genetics, genomics and transcriptomics, computer vision, and comparative psychology, this talk is part demonstration of the value of integrative research, and part love-letter to long-term field studies.

Luke Premo - How Cultural Evolutionary Forces Affect Regional Variation in Structured Populations and the Archaeological Assemblages They Leave Behind
2022-04-25 12:00 - 23:30
Paleolithic archaeologists have employed expectations generated from models developed in evolutionary anthropology to aid in the investigation of the origins of high-fidelity cultural transmission. Based on the notion that copying error ought to yield high levels of between-group cultural variation under unbiased cultural transmission, archaeologists have interpreted ostensibly “lower-than-expected” levels of cultural variation among regional archaeological assemblages as evidence of widespread conformist biased transmission. But a closer inspection of cultural evolutionary theory suggests the expectation that unbiased transmission yields high between-group differentiation holds only for a narrow, idealized set of conditions that are likely to be violated in empirical cases. Additionally, it is unclear how or if this expectation translates to time-averaged assemblages of artifacts even under special conditions. I’ve developed a relatively simple agent-based model of cultural transmission in a structured population to improve our understanding of how cultural evolutionary forces affect between-group variation in a selectively neutral discrete trait under a wide range of conditions. My experimental design addresses how intergroup transmission and copying error affect regional cultural variation under four different mechanisms of cultural transmission (unbiased, vertical, conformist, or prestige biased) and two different models of copying error (finite or infinite variants). I quantify cultural differentiation not only between groups in a structured population but also between time-averaged assemblages of culture material. The results highlight three points: 1) there are many conditions—not just widespread conformity—in which one should expect relatively low variation among semi-, or even completely, isolated groups (and the archaeological assemblages they create through time) despite the effects of copying error, 2) the way in which intergroup transmission and copying error affect between-group (and between-assemblage) variation varies among cultural transmission mechanisms, and 3) time-averaging affects between-assemblage variation differently under different cultural transmission mechanisms. Considering these findings, I propose a list of questions one should answer before attempting to infer mechanisms of cultural transmission from time-averaged archaeological assemblages. Answers to these questions will help researchers better match expectations of regional cultural variation with the empirical case at hand.

https://anthro.wsu.edu/faculty-and-staff/luke-premo/

Sasha Kimel - Meatborne Xenophobia: Understanding When Disgust Fuels Outgroup Hate
2022-05-02 12:00 - 13:30
Given that animal-borne pathogens pose especially high disease risks and, moreover, that a growing body of research suggests that the evolved function of disgust is the avoidance of disease, it is largely unsurprising that the consumption of non-normative meat would evoke strong disgust reactions. Yet, it is largely unclear whether and when concerns about disease can also evoke negative reactions to third-parties who engage in such norm-violations. In a series of experiments, participants in the U.S. were randomly assigned to learn about cuisine from another culture (i.e., fabricated and real) that contained a meat that was either relatively neutral (i.e., beef), disgusting due to disease threat (i.e., rat) or disgusting due to a combination of disease threat and the immorality of causing a cared-for animal harm (i.e., dog, monkey). Our results suggest that disgust may only exacerbate negative judgements and behaviors towards third-parties when the disease threat also has a strong immorality component (e.g., eating of dogs but not rats) and, moreover, that this may increase depending on how cared-for the being is. Implications for theories on disgust, compassion and third-party punishment will be addressed.

Jaimie Krems - Tackling Friendship: Appraising, Finding, Getting, and Keeping Partners
2022-05-09 12:00 - 13:30
Friends have recurrently provided social, material, and emotional support—helping humans meet a range of recurrent challenges tributary to fitness. But friendships are not the first type of relationship that comes to mind when thinking about research in social psychology or evolutionary social science. Moreover, when friendships are the focus, work typically foregrounds the friendship dyad. Taking an evolutionary approach suggests a different natural ecology for friendship psychology—one that implies the challenges of friendship are more and more complex than we might typically consider them to be. Perhaps, then, the challenges one must solve to reap the benefits of friendship should be thought of not (only) as two-person games, so to speak, but (also) as n-person games. I illustrate this by exploring several major friendship challenges—identifying good friends, competing for friends, and maintaining friendships. I also propose and test some of the possible means by which our social minds might meet these challenges, toward ultimately maximizing the benefits and minimizing the costs of our sociality.
https://www.kremslab.com/

Richard Wrangham - Hunter-Gatherers, Homo duplex and the Evolution of Human Groupishness
2022-05-16 12:00 - 13:30
Groupishness is a tendency to commit prosocial acts for which the pathway to
compensatory fitness benefits is unpredictable. It is unique to humans, and its evolution is
not well understood. A difficulty is that the adaptive value of groupishness comes from
indirect reciprocity, which is hard to explain in societies that contain power asymmetries
such that a dominant can appropriate resources at will. To date the only solution is Boehm’s
proposal, namely that morality was favored because allied males were selected to use
coercive behavior first to eliminate tyrants, then subsequently to favor prosociality and
punish antisociality. Using information on self-domestication, a topic that Boehm did not
explore, I present several tests of Boehm’s thesis. All are supportive, while also modifying
Boehm’s ideas. I conclude that a major increase in evolved groupishness began with the
origin of Homo sapiens and the ability to execute tyrants. This process generated Homo
duplex, including the uniquely human tension between selfishness and duty seen in hunter-
gatherers and other societies.

Dietrich Stout - The Evolution of Technology
2022-05-23 12:00 - 13:30
For better or worse, humans are now one of the major causal forces acting on the earth’s biosphere. Many would point to technology as the reason, but what exactly is technology? In this lecture, I will develop an evolutionarily grounded definition of technology that highlights three key features: material production, social collaboration, and cultural reproduction. Using examples from my own lab’s studies of stone tool making, I will argue that these features implicate a wide range of perceptual, motor, and cognitive capacities as well as multiple channels of cultural inheritance and biocultural evolutionary processes. This perspective blurs presumed distinctions between social and individual learning that have shaped formal modeling approaches to cultural evolution. In so doing it calls into question the idea that one key capacity, event, or evolutionary Rubicon initiated cumulative technological evolution and a pattern of sustained autocatalytic biocultural feedback in human evolution. This interpretation is consistent with growing paleoanthropological and archaeological evidence of the multi-lineal, intermittent, asynchronous course of human evolution, and presents a view of technological evolution as a complex and contingent process spanning a scale from neurons to societies and beyond. Nevertheless, some synthesis may be possible with respect to a smaller number of recurring processes and relationships. In this vein, I advance a “Perceptual Motor Hypothesis” proposing that human technological cognition has been evolutionarily and developmentally constructed from ancient primate perceptual-motor systems for body awareness and engagement with the world. Testing such hypotheses will require a multidisciplinary and comparative approach to identify patterned relations between contexts, mechanisms, and functions across diverse technological systems.

Joe Manson - Nine years of research on life history strategy and individual differences, or: How I learned to start worrying about constructs and instruments
2022-05-31 15:00 - 17:00
This is a special BEC talk in honor of the retirement of one of BEC‘s core faculty members, Joe Manson. Please note the special time! Refreshments and snacks on the balcony of the anthropology department will follow Joe’s talk.

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz - The 600-million-year history of human affective disorder
2023-10-02 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
The 600-million-year history of human affective disorder
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz
Division of Cardiology, UCLA School of Medicine
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Fifty years ago this October, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to three animal behaviorists based on the belief that the emerging field of ethology could transform our understanding of human biobehavioral health. Unfortunately, the promise was not realized within the lifetimes of the scientists themselves. In the decades that followed, advances in biological psychiatry challenged psychoanalysis as the singular source of explanatory insights into mental illness. Regrettably, highly reductive biological approaches that lack a broader, integrated organismal and ecological context have not led to much needed transformational knowledge.
Today, broadly comparative and ecologically-informed studies of animal behavior are revealing: 1) the ancient origins of human affective systems and affective disorders in the social brain networks of early social animals, 2) the important links between brain biology promoting adaptive behavior in chronically subordinated animals and neurovegetative symptoms in depressed human beings, and 3) evidence that withdrawn behavior, anhedonia, and reduced cognitive and motoric activity in chronic subordinates increases survival in certain individuals. Recent studies connecting social defeat to severe depression point, once again, to animal behavior as a source of insights into human mental health. In fact, phylogenetic perspectives can provide much needed scaffolding on which to layer, with context, the rapidly growing body of reductive knowledge about the human brain in health and illness.
Dr Natterson-Horowitz’s lecture will first survey the historical and scientific settings in which both insights were recognized and overlooked. She will then present an up-to-date summary of insights into human affective disorders emerging at the intersection of behavioral ecology, neurobiology, psychopharmacology, and evolutionary biology.
