Barry Bogin: Loughborough University & University of Michigan-DearbornThe World Health Organization defines stunting as, “…impaired growth and development that children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation.” Most of the recent research literature equates stunting with malnutrition, less with infection, and rarely with psychosocial issues. In contrast, most of the historic literature […]

Colin Allen: University of Pittsburgh2020 marks the 40th anniversary* of the publication of the pioneering work on vervet monkey alarm calls by Robert Seyfarth, Dorothy Cheney, and Peter Marler, as well as the 30th anniversary of the publication of Cheney & Seyfarth's book How Monkeys See the World. Although not everyone was as willing as […]

Alison Gopnik: University of California BerkeleyI argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. This cognitive profile is also found in other animals and is associated with early behaviours such […]

Gordon Burghardt: University of TennesseeOur understanding of the evolution, phylogeny, and functions of playfulness in animals is surprisingly minimal, largely because the function of play in both human and nonhuman animals remains controversial. Consequently, biologists have typically ignored play. After all, something frivolous and fun cannot be too important as compared to feeding, mating, fighting, […]

Matt Cartmill: Boston University

The communicative functions of facial expressions L. Ian Reed Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, NYU Previous research suggests that some facial expressions of emotion serve a communicative function by signaling private feelings and action tendencies.  Further, some expressions such as smiles and scowls affect receivers by increasing the credibility of accompanying verbal and/or written […]

Rethinking reproduction in human evolutionary research Heidi Colleran BirthRites Independent Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany In this talk I would like to critique and try to reframe the way that evolutionary researchers approach human reproductive […]

Structural thinking about social categories Nadya Vasilyeva Postdoctoral Scholar, Geography of Philosophy Project, UCLA Department of Anthropology Categorical reasoning is one of the cornerstones of psychological functioning, supporting explanation, induction, and learning in virtually every domain of knowledge, including reasoning about social categories. Dominant theories of social cognition focus on the role of internal/essential characteristics […]

A history of our times Tyler Marghetis Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced & Omidyar Fellow, The Santa Fe Institute This is a talk about Time. I start with the tension between, on the one hand, the global diversity in how people conceive of time, and on the other, the […]

How social inequities create health inequities: An integration of social and biological mechanisms Zaneta Thayer Department of Anthropology and Ecology, Evolution, Environment & Society Program, Dartmouth College A remarkably consistent pattern of human variation is the social gradient in health. This is the observation that, both within and between societies, individuals who are socially disadvantaged […]