BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture - ECPv6.16.5.1//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-CALNAME:Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://bec.ucla.edu X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20070311T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20071104T090000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20080309T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20081102T090000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20090308T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20091101T090000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20080407T000000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20080407T000000 DTSTAMP:20201013T004834Z CREATED:20200922T214118Z LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T004834Z UID:4069-1207526400-1207526400@bec.ucla.edu SUMMARY:Sam Bowles - The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War DESCRIPTION:Sam Bowles: Santa Fe InstituteAltruism — benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself — and parochialism – hostility toward\nindividuals not of one’s own ethnic\, racial or other group — are common human behaviors. The intersection of\nthe two – which we term parochial altruism — is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because altruistic or\nparochial behavior reduces ones payoffs by comparison to what one would gain by eschewing these\nbehaviors. But parochial altruism could have evolved if parochialism promoted inter-group hostilities and the\ncombination of altruism and parochialism contributed to success in these conflicts. Our game-theoretic\nanalysis and agent-based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late\nPleistocene and early Holocene humans\, neither parochialism nor altruism is viable singly\, but by promoting\ngroup conflict\, they could have evolved jointly. http://www.bec.ucla.edu/Bowles.pdf URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/sam-bowles-the-coevolution-of-parochial-altruism-and-war/ CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20080414T000000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20080414T000000 DTSTAMP:20201013T004834Z CREATED:20200922T214118Z LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T004834Z UID:4070-1208131200-1208131200@bec.ucla.edu SUMMARY:Carol Padden & Mark Aronoff - Embodied cognition in an emerging language: Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language DESCRIPTION:Carol Padden & Mark Aronoff: UCSD\, Stonybrook UWe report here on work we have carried out with colleagues Wendy Sandler and Irit Meir on an emerging sign\nlanguage\, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). ABSL developed de novo in a small closed community\nof Bedouins which is now in its third generation of signers. In this talk\, we show how a new human language\nis assembled over a relatively short period of time. In this language\, the body emerges as a primary signifier\,\nfiguring prominently in the form of verbs\, particularly in grammatical notion of subject. Broadly\, we find that the\niconicity of the body and space around the body interacts with emerging grammatical structures\, including\nword order and morphology\, resulting in a complex story about the deployment of physical\, human resources\nin the service of natural language grammars. URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/carol-padden-mark-aronoff-embodied-cognition-in-an-emerging-language-al-sayyid-bedouin-sign-language/ CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20080421T000000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20080421T000000 DTSTAMP:20201013T004834Z CREATED:20200922T214118Z LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T004834Z UID:4071-1208736000-1208736000@bec.ucla.edu SUMMARY:Gary Marcus - Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind DESCRIPTION:Gary Marcus: NYU PsychologyIn fields ranging from reasoning to linguistics\, the idea of humans as perfect\, rational\, optimal creatures is\nmaking a comeback – but should it be? Hamlet’s musings that the mind was “noble in reason …infinite in\nfaculty” have their counterparts in recent scholarly claims that the mind consists of an “accumulation of\nsuperlatively well- engineered designs” shaped by the process of natural selection (Tooby and Cosmides\,\n1995)\, and the 2006 suggestions of Bayesian cognitive scientists Chater\, Tenenbaum and Yuille that “it\nseems increasingly plausible that human cognition may be explicable in rational probabilistic terms and that\,\nin core domains\, human cognition approaches an optimal level of performance”\, as well as in Chomsky’s\nrecent suggestions that language is close “to what some super-engineer would construct\, given the\nconditions that the language faculty must satisfy”. \nIn this talk\, I will I argue that this resurgent enthusiasm for rationality is misplaced\, for three reasons. First\, I\nwill suggest that recent empirical arguments in favor of human rationality rest on a fallacy of composition\,\nimplicitly but mistakenly assuming that evidence of rationality in some (carefully analyzed) aspects of cognition\nentails that the broader whole (i.e. the human mind in toto) is rational. In fact\, establishing that some particular\naspect of cognition is optimal (or perfect\, or near optimal) is not tantamount to showing that the system is a\nwhole is; current enthusiasm for optimality overlooks the possibility that the mind might be suboptimal even if\nsome (or even many) of the components of cognition have been optimized. Second\, I will argue that there is\nconsiderable empirical evidence (most well-known\, but rarely given due attention in the neo-Rationalist\nliterature) that militates against any strong claim of human cognitive perfection. Finally\, I will argue that the\nassumption that evolution tends creatures towards rationality or “superlative adaptation” is itself theoretically\nsuspect\, and ought to be considerably tempered by recognition of what Stephen Jay Gould called “remnants of\nhistory”\, or what might be termed evolutionary inertia. \nI will close by suggesting that mind might be better seen as what engineers call a kluge: clumsy and\ninelegant\, yet remarkably effective. URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/gary-marcus-kluge-the-haphazard-construction-of-the-human-mind/ CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20080428T000000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20080428T000000 DTSTAMP:20201013T004834Z CREATED:20200922T214125Z LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T004834Z UID:4072-1209340800-1209340800@bec.ucla.edu SUMMARY:Susan Perry - Social learning about foraging strategies in wild capuchin monkeys. DESCRIPTION:Susan Perry: UCLA AnthropologyWhite-faced capuchin monkeys are best known for their innovation and traditions in the domain of social\ncommunication; however\, social learning appears to play a role in the acquisition of their foraging techniques\nas well. In this talk\, I explore several lines of evidence indicating social influence in food processing\ntechniques. Several foods are processed differently at different sites that are similar both genetically and\necologically. Within social groups\, those monkeys who spend more time together are also more likely to\nshare the same foraging technique. There is also evidence that monkeys bias their social learning\nopportunities to preferentially observe models who are foraging on rare or hard-to-process foods\, thus\nproviding useful information on what to eat and how to eat it. Developmental studies yield evidence for a\nconformity bias in use of food processing techniques\, even for individuals who have already learned both of\ntwo possible techniques. URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/susan-perry-social-learning-about-foraging-strategies-in-wild-capuchin-monkeys/ CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR