Past Presentation

Fiona Cowie: California Institute of Technology Division of the Humanities and Social SciencesThe recent identification of the so-called 'grammar gene,' FOXP2, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the numerous psychological mechanisms involved in language acquisition, raise a number of conceptual and empirical issues that are vital to our understanding of language evolution. […]

Francis Steen: UCLA Department of Communication StudiesI argued in Steen & Owens (2001) that play is a behavioral and cognitive simulation whose biological function is learning. In this presentation, I address the question of how such learning takes place, focusing on the role of consciousness. I present some preliminary data from an experiment on strategy-learning […]

William Rice: UCSB Department of Ecology, Evolution & Marine BiologyThe empirical foundation for sexual conflict theory is the unequivocal data from many different taxa demonstrating that females are harmed while interacting with males. But the interpretation of this keystone evidence has been challenged because females may more than compensate the direct costs of interacting with […]

Michael Sockol: UC Davis Department of Anthropology The origin of the human family, Hominidae, has been a primary focus of paleoanthropologists for more than a century. Indeed, the desire to understand our origins is ubiquitous in human society. Of continuing interest to anthropologists is the nature of the shift to bipedal locomotion in our earliest […]