Past Presentation

Trent Smith: UCLA International InstituteThe economic theory of "rational addiction" posits that drug addiction can usefully be viewed as the outcome of an informed decision undertaken on the part of […]

Michael Rose: UC Irvine Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary BiologyHuman behavior is unlike that of all other known animal behavior in its high degree of flexibility and versatility. A problem […]

Olav Sorenson: UCLA Anderson School of ManagementStudies have consistently found that social structure influences who transacts with whom, and that actors appear to benefit when exchange occurs embedded within these […]

Patricia Churchland: UCSD Dept. of PhilosophyAlthough questions concerning the nature of free choice have long been at the center of philosophical reflection, new discoveries, especially from neuropharmacology and neuropsychology, have […]

Gary Marcus: NYU Dept. of PsychologyTwo of the most central questions in understanding the nature of the uniquely human talent for language are the extent to which the underlying neural […]

Jerome Siegel: UCLA Dept. of PsychiatrySleep amounts vary by more than an order of magnitude across mammalian species. Either the amount of time spent sleeping has no relation to underlying […]

Chris Boehm: USC Dept. of AnthropologyChimpanzees and human hunter-gatherers are taken as models which help to explain our troubled world of nations, which in many ways is like a chimpanzee […]

Aimee Plourde: UCLA Dept. of AnthropologyThe emergence of social ranking and political hierarchy in human society constituted a fundamental departure from the small, egalitarian group structure thought to characterize society […]

Rob Boyd: UCLA Dept. of Anthropology

Jim Sidanius: UCLA Dept. of PsychologyBased upon ideas borrowed from classical elitism theory, social identity theory and evolutionary psychology, social dominance theory basically assumes that human social systems are predisposed […]