Greg Bryant: UCLA Department of Communication Studies, Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture Laughter is a universal vocal signal ubiquitous in human social interaction and homologous to play vocalizations across […]
Trent Smith: University of OtagoWhy have obesity rates risen sharply around the world since 1980? In biological perspective, humans and other animals are thought to have evolved the ability—and the […]
Joshua Greene: Harvard UniversityIn this talk I'll present some of the main themes in my book of the same title. First, there are two general kinds of moral problems: The […]
Carl T. Bergstrom: Washington UniversityOver the past 3.5 billion years, living organisms have evolved to acquire, store, analyze, and transmit information. This information processing capacity has allowed organisms to build […]
Scott Wiltermuth: USCFive studies demonstrated that highly guilt-prone people may avoid forming interdependent partnerships with others whom they perceive to be more competent than themselves, as benefitting a partner less […]
Leda Cosmides: UC Santa BarbaraAccording to the alliance detection hypothesis, racial categorization is a (reversible) byproduct of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for detecting social alliances (Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides, 2001; […]
Katarzyna (Kasia) Pisanski: UCLABody size can have an immense impact on the biology, ecology, and social status of an animal, but so too can ones ability to advertise or assess […]
Kiley Hamlin: University of British ColumbiaHow do humans come to have a “moral sense”? Are adults’ conceptions of which actions are right and which are wrong, of who is good […]
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 […]
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 […]
