Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture

Quayshawn Spencer - A metaphysical mapping problem for race theorists and human population geneticists
2021-01-25 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
A metaphysical mapping problem for race theorists and human population geneticists
Quayshawn Spencer
Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy and Race, Science, & Society Working Group, University of Pennsylvania
In this talk, I identify and clarify a metaphysical mapping phenomenon that’s almost twenty years old. The phenomenon is that the populations at a fivefold subdivision of humans into biological populations—the so-called human continental populations—correspond one-to-one with the five official races of the Office of Management and Budget in the US government. After introducing and defending a four-step deductive argument that involves a key premise justified with extensive abductive reasoning, I conclude that the metaphysical relation that’s exemplified by the aforementioned one-to-one correspondence is identity. I end by exploring interesting implications of this identity thesis for metaphysicians of race and NIH-funded medical scientists.

Note: no recording is available for this talk.

Michael Tomasello - Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny
2021-02-01 12:00 - 13:30
Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny
Michael Tomasello
Duke University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Humans are biologically adapted for cultural life in ways that other primates are not. Humans have unique motivations and cognitive skills for sharing emotions, experience, and collaborative actions (shared intentionality). These motivations and skills first emerge in human ontogeny at around one year of age, as infants begin to participate with other persons in various kinds of collaborative and joint attentional activities, including linguistic communication. Our nearest primate relatives understand important aspects of intentional action – especially in competitive situations – but they do not seem to have the motivations and cognitive skills necessary to engage in activities involving collaboration, shared intentionality, and, in general, things cultural.

Dorsa Amir - The development of decision-making across diverse cultural contexts
2021-02-08 12:00 - 13:30
The development of decision-making across diverse cultural contexts
Dorsa Amir
Boston College Department of Psychology
The human behavioral repertoire is uniquely diverse, with an unmatched flexibility that has allowed our species to flourish in every ecology on the planet. Despite its importance, the roots of this behavioral diversity — and how it manifests across development and contexts — remain largely unexplored. I argue that a full account of human behavior requires a cross-cultural, developmental approach that systematically examines how environmental variability shapes behavioral processes. In this talk, I use the development of decision-making across diverse contexts as a window into the relationship between the socioecological environment and behavior. First, I present the results of a cross-cultural investigation of risk and time preferences among children in India, Argentina, the United States, and the Ecuadorian Amazon, suggesting that market integration and related socioecological shifts lead to the development of more risk-seeking and future-oriented preferences. Second, I present the early results of a five-culture investigation into the ontogeny of social preferences — namely, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and fairness. Taken together, these studies help elucidate the developmental origins of behavioral diversity across cultural contexts, and underscore the utility of interdisciplinary research for explaining human behavior.

Note: video of this presentation is not available.

Paul Smaldino - The evolution of covert signaling in diverse societies
2021-02-22 12:00 - 13:30
The evolution of covert signaling in diverse societies
Paul Smaldino
Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced
Identity signals are common components of communication transmissions that inform receivers of the signaler’s membership (or non-membership) in a subset of individuals. Signals can be overt, broadcast to all possible receivers, or covert, encrypted so that only similar receivers are likely to perceive their identity-relevant meaning. I’ll present an instrumental theory of identity signaling as a mechanism for social assortment, formalized with both analytical and agent-based models. Covert signaling is favored when signalers are generous toward strangers, when costs of being discovered as dissimilar are high, and when the ability to assort only with preferred partners is restricted. Covert signaling should be more common among members of “invisible” minorities, who are less likely to encounter similar individuals by chance. I’ll also discuss empirical projects underway to test and extend this theoretical framework using online political communication. This work has implications for theories of signaling and cooperation, social identity, pragmatics, politics, and the maintenance of diversity.

Manvir Singh - The nature and origins of religious super-attractors
2021-03-01 12:00 - 13:30
The nature and origins of religious super-attractors
Manvir Singh
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
Human societies reliably develop “cultural super-attractors”, or complex practices and beliefs that exhibit striking similarities. In this talk, I will present research on the nature and origins of three religious super-attractors: shamanism, religious self-denial, and beliefs in supernatural punishment. These cultural practices appeared in the vast majority of human societies, predated doctrinal religions, and persist even when doctrinal religious authorities try to quash them. Drawing variously on cultural evolutionary theory, cross-cultural comparative projects, and studies conducted among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, I will characterize these practices, present hypotheses for why they recur, and test those hypotheses against anthropological data. The findings of these projects suggest that religious super-attractors develop as people selectively retain cultural practices evaluated as best satisfying subjective goals.

Sophie Scott - It's funny: the evolution and science of laughter
2021-03-08 12:00 - 13:30
It’s funny: the evolution and science of laughter
Sophie Scott
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL
Laughter is a nonverbal emotional expression associated with play and joyful emotions. In this talk I will explore the evolutionary roots of laughter, it’s role in human development, social interactions and communication, and some evidence about the neural systems recruited by the perception and production of laughter.

Britt Florkiewicz - At Face Value: The Role of Chimpanzee Facial Expressivity in the Evolution of Gestural Communication and Social Bonding
2021-03-29 12:00 - 13:30
At Face Value: The Role of Chimpanzee Facial Expressivity in the Evolution of Gestural Communication and Social Bonding
Britt Florkiewicz
UCLA Department of Anthropology
Primates make frequent use of visual signals when communicating with conspecifics, which includes facial expressions and gestures. These two forms of visual communication are thought to be different from one another: facial expressions are perceived as being spontaneous and inflexible, whereas gestures are perceived as being intentional and flexible. As a result, facial expressions are seldom incorporated in gesture research and theories regarding the evolution of human language. The ability to gesture with the face may be useful for non-human primates who rely extensively on their limbs for locomotion. In this talk, I will present data on whether chimpanzee facial expressions are capable of being used as gestures. In addition, I will also present some preliminary work exploring the relationship between facial mobility and facial expressivity in chimpanzees and gibbons. Primates exhibit high facial variability: they can produce a wide variety of facial muscle movements during bouts of communication. High facial variability is thought to be the result of sociality: being able to produce a greater variety of facial signals may help with the establishment and maintenance of social bonds. However, it is unclear if having greater facial variability results in a greater facial repertoire. In this talk, I will compare facial variability and facial repertoires in two distantly related ape species who differ in their social systems.

Nadia Chernyak - Socio-cognitive mechanisms of fairness
2021-04-05 12:00 - 13:30
Socio-cognitive mechanisms of fairness
Nadia Chernyak
UC Irvine Department of Cognitive Sciences
One of the most critical societal issues is our perpetuation of inequality. One important quandary, however, is that humans agree that equality is important, but continue to endorse and perpetuate existing inequalities. This talk presents some developmental evidence for why this may be the case. In particular, this talk presents data suggesting that our understanding equality and inequality follow distinct developmental trajectories and are underpinned by separate underlying cognitive mechanisms. The first part of the talk discusses how developing counting skills help enable children’s abilities to engage in equal resource distribution. The second part of the talk shows that at the same time, counting skills do not help children appreciate and resolve outstanding inequalities. Overall, the talk points to how cognitive and social influences may jointly impact our abilities to reason about inequality.

Oliver Sng - Rethinking stereotypes: Social perceivers as lay adaptationists
2021-04-12 12:00 - 13:30
Rethinking stereotypes: Social perceivers as lay adaptationists
Oliver Sng
Department of Psychological Science, UC Irvine
Individuals have evolved to adaptively allocate energy across different life tasks, such as mating effort, parenting effort, and building embodied capital. From various theoretical perspectives (e.g., parental investment theory, life history theory), an individual’s biological sex, current life stage, and ecological conditions interact to influence how energy is allocated across different tasks. I propose that social perceivers are in fact “lay adaptationists,” generating predictions about the behavior of others based on another’s sex, age, and home ecology. This idea has several implications for thinking about the origin and content of social stereotypes: first, perceivers hold ecology stereotypes—beliefs about individuals living in more harsh and unpredictable environments as having faster life history strategies. Ecology stereotypes are held by perceivers across societies and demographic groups, and also underpin certain race stereotypes. Second, perceivers hold stereotypes of how men and women at different ages are oriented towards mating and parenting goals. Such goal stereotypes may in turn underpin certain gender stereotypes. Finally, stereotypes exist not just as beliefs about a group’s general traits, but as beliefs about how a group is likely to behave towards specific others. I introduce this idea of “directed” stereotypes and present relevant evidence. Broadly, the lay adaptationist perspective provides novel insights to thinking about the nature of social stereotypes and highlights the strategic nature of our stereotypes.

Celeste Kidd - How to know
2021-04-19 12:00 - 13:30
How to Know
Celeste Kidd
Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley
This talk will discuss Kidd’s research about how people come to know what they know. The world is a sea of information too vast for any one person to acquire entirely. How then do people navigate the information overload, and how do their decisions shape their knowledge and beliefs? In this talk, Kidd will discuss research from her lab about the core cognitive systems people use to guide their learning about the world—including attention, curiosity, and metacognition (thinking about thinking). The talk will discuss the evidence that people play an active role in their own learning, starting in infancy and continuing through adulthood. Kidd will explain why we are curious about some things but not others, and how our past experiences and existing knowledge shape our future interests. She will also discuss why people sometimes hold beliefs that are inconsistent with evidence available in the world, and how we might leverage our knowledge of human curiosity and learning to design systems that better support access to truth and reality.

Sheina Lew-Levy - Learning to forage in hunter-gatherer societies
2021-04-26 12:00 - 13:30
Learning to forage in hunter-gatherer societies
Sheina Lew-Levy
Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University & Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University
Studying how contemporary hunter-gatherer children learn to forage can help shed light on the evolution of human cognition, life history, and social organization. Still, our species’ developmental plasticity and socioecological diversity complicates the applicability of single-population findings to our understanding of human evolutionary processes. In this presentation, I draw upon systematic literature reviews and empirical research with Tanzanian Hadza and Congolese BaYaka hunter-gatherer children and adolescents to outline cross-cultural similarities and differences in contemporary hunter-gatherer children’s learning. I first show how play, teaching, participation, and imitation biases contribute to children’s acquisition of skill and cooperative norms. One striking cross-cultural similarity is the primacy of learning with and from peers in the mixed-sex multi-age playgroup. I argue that peer learning may contribute to more rapid, and potentially less costly, knowledge transfers in humans, and may also lead to the innovation of new social norms and subsistence practices. I discuss the implications of these findings to cumulative cultural evolution. Second, I outline how cultural beliefs, ecology, settlement structure, and subsistence opportunities contribute to cross-cultural variation in hunter-gatherer children’s economic work and learning. I argue that these contextual factors can help us understand the selection pressures which have shaped our long childhood and the age-graded division of labour.

Agustín Fuentes - Meaning-making, belief and world shaping as core processes in the human niche
2021-05-10 12:00 - 13:30
Meaning-making, belief and world shaping as core processes in the human niche
Agustín Fuentes
Department of Anthropology, Princeton University
Humans are not unique in the world. But we are quite idiosyncratic. Across the Pleistocene the genus Homo developed a distinctive suite of cognitive, behavioral, ecological, and technological processes and patterns; in short, a human niche. This niche eventually included a core role for meaning making, augmenting the capacity to engage with more than the “here and now” to develop novel ideas and concepts, share them, and convert them in material reality. Today humans represent an infinitesimally small percentage of all the life on this planet, yet despite being such a tiny part of the great diversity of living things, humans are among the most significant forces affecting ecosystems and all other life on this planet. Why and how this came to be are two of the most pressing questions one can ask about what it means to be human. I suggest that extensive and distinctive capacities for meaning-making, belief and world shaping (or better put, niche construction) are at the heart of the answers to these queries.

Kim TallBear - Indigenous STS, Governance, and Decolonization
2021-05-13 12:00 - 14:00
Indigenous STS, Governance, and Decolonization
Kim TallBear
Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment
Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Fellow
Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta
Like traditional Science and Technology Studies, the new field of Indigenous STS studies the cultures, politics, and histories of non-Indigenous science and technology efforts. In addition, it studies Indigenous-led science and technology, including knowledges classified as “traditional.” Indigenous STS refuses the purported divide between scientific and Indigenous knowledges, yet it does not conflate knowledge traditions. It understands them as potentially sharing methods while deriving in practice from different worldviews. Indigenous STS—comprised of mostly Indigenous thinkers trained and working in a variety of disciplines and applied fields—also focuses on science and technology knowledge production for social change (since technoscience has long been integral to colonialism). Indigenous STS works with scientists and those in technology fields to change fields from within. Some Indigenous STS scholars are practicing scientists. After discussing Indigenous STS foundations and goals, this talk showcases the Summer internship for INdigenous peoples in Genomics (SING), a training program founded in 2011 in the US. SING has since expanded to Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and Australia in conjunction with Indigenous STS efforts to support global Indigenous governance via science and technology.
Co-sponsored by BEC, The American Indian Studies Center, the Institute for Society and Genetics, and the Culture, Power, and Social Change Group
Note special day and time: Thursday, May 13, 12:15 to 1:45 PST
And special Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97160150930
TallBear Indigenous STS

Isabelle Laumer - Physical and social cognition in a parrot (Cacatua goffiniana) and ape model species (Pongo abelii)
2021-05-17 12:00 - 13:30
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/
