Sarah Mathew - Peer Sanctioning and Cultural Group Selection Promotes Large-Scale Cooperation: Evidence from Kenyan Pastoralists
2017-10-23 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Sarah Mathew: Arizona State UniversityExplaining why humans cooperate in sizable groups requires detailed knowledge of how people cooperate in politically uncentralized societies. I will present findings from the Turkana, a politically uncentralized population of pastoralists in Kenya, which indicate that: a) the Turkana maintain costly large-scale cooperation in warfare through peer sanctioning of free riders; and b) Turkana norms regulating punishment mitigate the second-order free rider problem and promote group-beneficial punitive behavior. Additionally, with data from 750 individuals drawn from nine clans of four neighboring ethnolinguistic groups, the Turkana, Samburu, Rendille and Borana, I will show that: a) between-group cultural variation is sufficiently high for cultural group selection to operate; and b) the scale at which cultural variation is maintained can explain the scale at which people cooperate. This suite of patterns indicates that peer sanctioning and cultural group selection in combination played a key role in enabling large-scale cooperation in humans.

Darby Saxbe - Hormones, Sleep, and Health Over the Transition to Parenthood
2017-10-30 00:00
Darby Saxbe: University of Southern CaliforniaBecoming a parent is transformative. This talk will review recent research on neuroendocrine and behavioral changes in new parents, including studies of longitudinal change and within-person linkage in testosterone, cortisol, sleep, and depression in both mothers and fathers.

Robert Kurzban - Is Moral Judgment Designed to Deter?
2017-11-06 00:00
Robert Kurzban : University of Pennsylvania Evolutionary psychologists are committed to the view that form follows function. This commitment carries an epistemic corollary: if a mechanism with a proposed function does not have the form that is required to perform that function, confidence in the proposed function should be reduced. The view that moralistic punishment – imposing costs on those who violate a moral norm – functions to deter harm requires that moralistic punishment have a number of features to implement that function. First, moralistic punishment should be desired and deployed (only) in cases in which agents intend that harm come about; without intent, harmful acts can’t be deterred. Second, the magnitude of punishment desired should relate systematically to the benefits perpetrators receive, in line with standard decision theory. Third, and related, no punishment should be desired when no harm is intended and no harm comes about; there should be no victimless norm violations. Fourth, whether and how much punishment is desired should depend only on the costs and benefits of perpetrators’ actions/inactions; how violations occur is irrelevant to deterrence. All four of these predicted features of moralistic punishment have been empirically falsified. In this talk, I will briefly review this evidence and discuss the implications.

Tamsin German - Core Intuitions about Persons Co-Exist and Interfere with Acquired Christian Beliefs about God
2017-11-13 00:00
Tamsin German: University of California, Santa BarbaraI will discuss research conducted in my lab assessing recent proposals that complex human cultural concepts such as acquired scientific knowledge and religious belief rely on the co-option of early developing psychological mechanisms for representing and reasoning about the world. I will present evidence for this idea from studies showing that a basic intuition that, for example, God is a person, co-exists and interferes with later acquired theological conceptions of God’s omniscience and omnipotence. This pattern of results mirrors those found showing the co-existence of and interference between core conceptions of the world and later acquired knowledge in the domain of science.

Anne Pisor - Extra-Community Relationships in Humans: From Tolerance to Transactions
2017-11-20 00:00
Anne Pisor : Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary AnthropologyRelative to non-human primates, humans are heavily reliant on social connections beyond the boundaries of their local communities. However, individuals vary in the extent to which they exhibit interest in extra-community relationships. How did humans come to have such pronounced tolerance toward extra-community individuals, and what are the relevant payoffs that modulate interest in extra-community relationships? To address these questions, I first identify the incentive structures favoring tolerance in inter-group encounters in the Primate order. Turning to ethnographic and ethnohistoric data, I emphasize how incentives for encounter are even more pronounced in humans, often with high payoffs to forming enduring social relationships via inter-group encounters. I then focus on the instantiations of these relationships among three populations of Bolivian horticulturalists, for whom integration to the national economy is changing the affordances of these connections. I discuss the extent to which an individual’s interest in extra-community relationships varies with her opportunities for access to market goods, experience of resource shortfalls, and perceptions of the qualities of extra-community individuals as social partners. I conclude by identifying candidate ways forward, including how we might better document the existence of extra-community relationships in the field and formulate informed hypotheses about the relevant incentive structures favoring, or disfavoring, these relationships.https://ac.els-cdn.com/S1090513816303178/1-s2.0-S1090513816303178-main.pdf?_tid=bc376a48-cda7-11e7-ba36-00000aacb361&acdnat=1511150776_c708aab11cea987e2b4481a174afcecbhttps://peerj.com/preprints/3400.pdf

Carolyn Parkinson - Neural Encoding and Cognitive Consequences of Human Social Networks
2017-11-27 00:00
Carolyn Parkinson: University of California, Los AngelesThe cognitive demands of navigating large groups comprised of many varied and enduring social bonds are thought to have significantly shaped human brain evolution. Yet, much remains to be understood about how the human brain tracks, encodes, and is influenced by the social networks in which it is embedded. The work presented in this talk integrates approaches from social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and social network analysis in order to better understand how the structure of the social world is encoded in the human brain and the cognitive consequences of this structure.

Ara Norenzayan - The Origins of Prosocial Religions and the Emergence of Large-Scale Cooperation and Conflict
2017-12-04 00:00
Ara Norenzayan: University of British ColumbiaThe rise of large-scale cooperation and the spread of parochial-prosocial religions in the last 12 millennia are two longstanding puzzles, one of human psychology, and the other of cultural history. I present a theory, maintaining that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. It is grounded in the idea that although supernatural beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. A suite of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded and outcompeted rival groups through high fertility rates, conversions, cultural imitation, and conquest. In doing so, these relentlessly expanding human populations have brought about the Anthropocene, dominating every ecological niche and gravely straining the planet’s entire ecosystem. Evidence for some of these hypotheses, alternative accounts, and intriguing open questions are discussed.

Julian Kapoor - Leks, Lies, and Audiotape: Dialects and Deception in a Tropical Hummingbird.
2018-01-08 00:00
Julian Kapoor: Cornell UniversityAmong animals that develop signals through social learning, dialects – shared signals among a subset of individuals within a larger population – are nearly ubiquitous. Despite the prevalence of dialects across social animal species ranging from hummingbirds to whales to humans, the functional significance of such variation remains elusive; do dialects reflect an evolutionarily adaptive process, or are they simply the result of randomly generated variation in signals? The majority of scientific attention has focused on the broad-scale patterns of regional dialects, where it is thought that the process of cultural drift is a major driver of divergence. Relatively little work, however, has sought to explain the existence of fine-scale dialects between sets of individuals within social groups. In my talk, I will explain the evolutionary mechanisms leading to microgeographic vocal dialects among a group-living species of tropical hummingbird, the little hermit. Specifically, I will address tests of the ideas that microgeographic dialects might represent 1) strategic avoidance of superior competitors, 2) the effects of spatial and temporal queuing for status within the social group, 3) the result of sexual selection for increased signal salience to receivers, or 4) the effects of deceptive mimicry. Finally, I will discuss the implications of my findings for the evolution of vocal learning in social organisms.

Katie Hinde - Mother's Milk: Building Blocks and Blueprints for Infant BioBehavioral Development
2018-01-22 00:00
Katie Hinde: Arizona State UniversityMother’s milk is more than a food full of essential nutrients and more than a medicine packed with protective immunofactors. Mother’s milk contains maternal signals- hormones- that influence infant metabolism, neurobiology, and behavior. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that hormones from the mother, ingested through milk, bind to receptors within the young. Glucocorticoids in mother’s milk have been associated with offspring temperament, behavior, and cognition in rodents, monkeys, and humans. Among monkeys, glucocorticoids in mother’s milk, predict better cognitive performance and, independent of available milk energy, predict a more Nervous, less Confident temperament in both sons and daughters. Additionally, maternal-origin glucocorticoids in milk predict offspring growth. Taken collectively, emerging results suggest that mothers with fewer somatic resources may be “programming” behaviorally cautious offspring that prioritize growth through hormonal signaling. Glucocorticoids ingested through milk may importantly contribute to the assimilation of available milk energy, development of temperament, and orchestrate, in part, the allocation tradeoffs of maternal milk energy between growth and behavior.

Steven Neuberg - Discriminating Ecologies: A Life History Approach to Stigma and Health
2018-01-29 00:00
Steven Neuberg : Arizona State UniversityHow does being discriminated against affect a person’s health, and through what mechanisms? Most research has focused on two causal pathways, highlighting how discrimination increases psychological stress and exposure to neighborhood hazards. I advance an alternative, complementary set of mechanisms through which stigma and discrimination may shape health. Grounded in evolutionary biology’s life history theory, the framework holds that discrimination alters aspects of the physical and social ecologies in which people live, such as access to tangible economic resources, unpredictable extrinsic causes of early mortality, biased sex ratios, and community social networks. These discriminating ecologies, in turn, pull for specific behaviors and physiological responses (e.g., related to risk taking, sexual activity, offspring care, fat storage) that can be viewed as active, strategic, and rational given the threats and opportunities afforded by these ecologies, but which also have downstream implications for a wide range of health outcomes. This framework generates unique hypotheses, including predictions (a) about the effects of discrimination on a large number of (often underappreciated) negative health outcomes, ranging from physical injury and sexually transmitted diseases to diseases related to obesity and drug use; and (b) about the ecological factors that mediate between stigmatization and health outcomes, and the behavioral and physiological strategies these features engage. It also suggests specific approaches to intervention, while pointing to complex ethical issues. In all, the life history framework complements more traditional perspectives by providing nuanced insights and hypotheses about the discrimination-health relationship.

Sandeep Mishra - Minding the Gap: Inequality, Socioemotional Comparisons, and Risk-Sensitivity
2018-02-05 00:00
Sandeep Mishra: University of ReginaSubstantial epidemiological evidence shows that higher levels of income inequality are associated with a wide array of negative societal-level outcomes, ranging from greater risk-taking and crime to poorer mental and physical health. However, surprisingly little research has examined individual-level consequences of inequality. Risk-sensitivity theory, developed in the field of behavioral ecology, may help to shed light on why inequality has such wide-ranging harmful effects. Risk-sensitivity theory specifically posits that that risk-taking is a product of conditions of need (i.e., disparity between one’s present and desired/goal states). In this presentation, I explore how risk-sensitivity can be applied to understanding risk-taking under conditions of inequality. I also address research suggesting that proximate-level emotional reactions to social comparisons and disparity can shed light on risk-sensitive decision-making specifically, and mental health more generally.

Joshua Ackerman - The Sick Sense: Sensory Detection of Infectious Disease
2018-02-12 00:00
Joshua Ackerman: University of MichiganFunctional psychological responses to the dangers of infectious disease first require perceiving that pathogenic threats exist. How do people detect such threats? One way is through use of conceptual knowledge from lay beliefs or direct communication, but another, perhaps more primitive, means involves use of specific sensory information. In this talk, I will review human and non-human evidence regarding detection of pathogen indicators, focusing on various domains of sensory cues. I will also consider the relevance of this evidence for our understanding of downstream consequences that occur following detection. These sensory processes and downstream outcomes are marked by biases that drive behavior in particular, often functional ways.

Matthew Zefferman - The Evolutionary Origins of PTSD and Moral Injury: Evidence from a Small Scale Society.
2018-02-26 00:00
Matthew Zefferman: Arizona State UniversityCombat veterans in western industrialized societies can develop a collection of symptoms classified as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The origins of PTSD are a mystery. Some posit that it has deep evolutionary roots as a mechanism for avoiding and responding to harm. Others posit that it is socially constructed and perhaps unique to industrialized societies. I propose, with a gene-culture co-evolutionary theory of combat stress, that both perspectives are partially right and incomplete. This theory explains additional puzzling aspects of combat stress, such as the origins of “moral injury.” I support this new theory with evidence from ethnographic research and interviews with Turkana warriors from northern Kenya.

Louise Barrett - Primates, Plasticity and (Un)predictability: A Pragmatic View of Social Evolution
2018-03-05 00:00
Louise Barrett: University of LethbridgePrimates are known for their large brains, behavioural flexibility and cognitive complexity. These, in turn, are argued to have been selected for by the complexity of the social environment. The interesting thing is that no one quite knows what social and cognitive complexity actually are, and our attempts at conceptualising primate social life are often anthropocentric and “logomorphic”. Here, using both empirical data from vervet monkeys and baboons, along with recent work in radical enactivism and embodied cognitive science, I discuss ways in which we can think about plasticity, complexity and social life in ways that do justice to evolutionary continuity, but don’t require primates and other animals to just be hairier, less talkative versions of ourselves. This in turn has implications for how we think about our own evolution, and what we talk about when we talk about “minds”.

Michele Gelfand - Tight or Loose: A Fractal Pattern of Human Difference
2018-03-12 00:00
Michele Gelfand: University of Maryland Over the past century, we have explored the solar system, split the atom, and wired the Earth, but somehow, despite all of our technical prowess, we have struggled to understand something far more important: our own cultural differences. Observing the wide variety of cultural permutations, people assumed for centuries that there were as many explanations for these permutations and rifts as there were examples of them. But what my research has uncovered is that many cultural differences reflect a simple, but often invisible distinction: The strength of social norms. Tight cultures have strong social norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures have weak social norms and are highly permissive. The tightness or looseness of social norms turns out to be a Rosetta Stone for human groups. Using field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods, I’ve found similar patterns of difference across nations, states, organizations, and social class. Tight-loose is also a global fault line: many of the conflicts we encounter spring from the structural stress of tight-loose tension. By unmasking culture to reveal tight-loose dynamics, we can see fresh patterns in history, illuminate some of today’s most puzzling trends and events, and see our own behavior in a new light. At a time of intense political conflict and rapid social change, this template shows us that there is indeed a method to the madness, and that moderation – not tight or loose extremes – has never been more needed.

Simine Vazire - Safer Science: The Credibility Revolution in Psychological Science
2018-04-02 00:00
Simine Vazire: University of California, DavisA fundamental part of the scientific enterprise is for each field to engage in critical self-examination to detect errors in our theories and methods, and improve them. Psychology has recently been undergoing such a self-examination. Psychological scientists arguably tackle one of the hardest phenomena to understand and predict: human behavior. Naturally, our data are noisy and our findings are often tentative. However, we are slowly building knowledge and making our theories more complete. The recent self-analysis has revealed several ways we can further improve our research practices to make our findings more sound. These new norms are gaining steam within psychology and beyond, making science stronger.

Amy Boddy - Life History Trade-Offs in Reproduction and Cancer
2018-04-09 00:00
Amy Boddy: University of California, Santa BarbaraLife history theory is a powerful approach to study human health and disease. However, there has been little work in applications of life history theory in cancer biology. Here I will discuss how cancer is fundamentally characterized by life history trade-offs, as cancer defense mechanisms are a major component of somatic maintenance. Using a newly curated comparative oncology dataset across a wide range of mammals, birds and reptiles, we show a negative relationship with cancer rates and body mass or lifespan. Additionally, these organismal life history traits reflect the cellular response to DNA damage assays, providing insights into potential mechanisms of cancer defense. Understanding these trade-offs in the context of organismal evolution may help explain variability we see in cancer susceptibility across human populations. Additionally, our dataset demonstrates mammals get higher rates of cancer than other vertebrates. I will discuss the constraints of internal gestation, the process of placentation and and how these reproductive processes may lead to a trade-off with cancer susceptibility.

Zoe Liberman - Birds of a Feather Flock Together: Similarity Drives Reasoning about Affiliation and Social Group
2018-04-16 00:00
Zoe Liberman: University of California, Santa BarbaraSimilarity influences myriad social relationships. From group membership to friendship, to marriage, to mere proximity, people who are similar to one another tend to be closer than people who are dissimilar. Here, I present research indicating that infants understand the importance of homophily in determining social structure: they expect people who are similar to one another to affiliate. I also explore questions about they types of similarity infants use to reason about the social world. I hypothesize that (1) similarities that have marked human social groups across evolutionary history may be attended to earliest , and (2) that different types of similarities will be most relevant for reasoning about different types of relationships (e.g., group members vs. friends vs. family members).

Matthew Lieberman - The Brain is Social by Default
2018-04-23 00:00
Matthew Lieberman: University of California, Los AngelesOur social cognitive abilities can either be thought of like a piece of software that is written on top of existing general purpose hardware or as dedicated machinery of its own. I will present six lines of research from my lab that examine the ways in which our brain is fundamentally social rather than it being one more application of more general domain-free cognitive mechanisms. In addition, some of these lines of research will present data demonstrating that even when the brain is at rest it is actively preparing and learning from the social world.

Julie Miller - Collective Behavior in a Slave-Making Ant: Coordination and Decision-Making During Raids
2018-04-30 00:00
Julie Miller: University of California, Los AngelesThe slave-making ants are social parasites that steal their workers in coordinated raids on other colonies. Their parasitic lifestyle has made these ants a model of host-parasite co-evolution, however their charismatic brood-raiding behavior is virtually unstudied. Here I explore how colonies make collective decisions when selecting a raiding site and how colonies coordinate their attack. Slave-making has independently evolved multiple times in ants, but I focused this study on one species of North American slave-maker, Temnothorax americanus. I staged raids in table-top arenas in the lab to standardize conditions and made detailed observations of individual and colony-level behaviors. I found that the success of group raids depends on the ability of slave-makers to coordinate the timing of two roles: herding and guarding the entrance. Having established that raiding is a coordination problem, I then investigated how the colony selects a raiding site in the first place. I first measured colony preferences using choice experiments, but colonies demonstrated no preference for any size-related host features. This apparent lack of preference led to a separate question: why do colonies disregard fitness-relevant host variation? Theoretical work has offered suggestions about which conditions ought to favor low-choosiness, so I empirically tested whether they are met by T. americanus colonies, specifically testing the hypotheses that slave-makers experience (1) low host encounter rates, (2) high time constrains, or (3) low variability in host quality. To test these hypotheses, observations of lab raids were combined with spatial field data on host distribution and brood phenology. These data support that raiding is constrained by both the brief window of host brood availability, particularly of the highly valuable pupae, combined with low encounter rates of host colonies in the field. Variation in host nest quality was relatively high, and thus unlikely to favor low acceptance thresholds of slave-maker colonies. The implications of these results are that slave-maker colony raiding decisions are selected to maximize the number of raids per season, and not to selectively exploit the few most profitable ones.

Cristina Moya - The Evolution and Ontogeny of Ethno-Linguistic Reasoning
2018-05-07 00:00
Cristina Moya: University of California, DavisWhile many social species are group living, linguistically or symbolically marked social groups, characterized by large repertoires of shared cultural norms and behaviours, are uniquely human. However, the evolutionary relevance and psychological underpinnings of such ethnic groups remains debated. In this talk, I will examine the possibility that the way humans learn about ethno-linguistic boundaries reveal the structure of adaptations for reasoning about these. I report on psychological and ethnographic research from the Quechua-Aymara border in the Peruvian altiplano, and cross-cultural comparative work that speak to these questions. Results reveal 1) the importance of distinguishing between functionally independent intergroup phenomena such as stereotyping and cooperation, 2) that children are prone to develop believe that linguistic boundaries are important and fixed, and 3) that cultural evolutionary processes are likely more important than genetically evolved biases in determining the form of ethnic boundaries. Further implications for models of human social evolution will be discussed.

Amy Non - Stress, Resilience, and Embodiment of Cardiometabolic Risk in Children of Hispanic Immigrants
2018-05-14 00:00
Amy Non: University of California, San DiegoHispanic immigrants represent the largest and fastest growing ethnic minority in the US. Thus, an important research focus for the future health of the US is to determine factors that influence the declining health of immigrants with more time lived in the US, and across generations. Much research has focused on the adoption of poorer health behaviors with acculturation, but less attention has focused on the role of psychosocial stress, or resilience factors, experienced by immigrant mothers or their children. Through focus groups and extensive structured interviews with Hispanic immigrant mothers and their children (aged 6-13) in Nashville, TN, we examined a range of psychosocial stress exposures, such as work-family tradeoff and limited freedom/mobility, and resilience factors, such as optimism and social support. I will also discuss results of ongoing quantitative analyses exploring hormonal and epigenetic mechanisms through which these stressors may become biologically embedded to predispose children of Hispanic descent to higher risk for cardiometabolic diseases.

P.J. Lamberson - Exploration versus Exploitation in Collective Problem Solving
2018-05-21 00:00
P.J. Lamberson: University of California, Los AngelesThe challenge of balancing between exploiting existing solutions and exploring for new ones spans problem domains from animals foraging for food to businesses searching for new revenue streams. In this talk I will discuss a simple version of this tradeoff: When tackling a complex problem, is it better for problem solvers to work in-sequence, where each problem solver exploits the progress of those that have come before them, or in-parallel where each individual explores for new solutions independently? Using a novel mathematical model of collective problem solving we prove that for a class of especially difficult problems that we call unstructured, problem solving in-parallel performs better in expectation. We then use computational simulations to examine how violating the unstructured assumption can lead in-sequence problem solving to be superior. This is joint work with ULCA postdoctoral fellow John Lang.

Jim Sidanius - Social Dominance Theory and the Dynamics of Gendered Prejudice
2018-06-04 00:00
Jim Sidanius: Harvard UniversityUsing Social Dominance and evolutionary theory as theoretical frameworks, we argue for a model entitled the Theory of Gendered Prejudice (TGP), which in broad terms, suggests that arbitrary-set discrimination must be understood as an inherently gendered phenomenon. Employing multiple methodologies, I argue that: 1) In general, males will display higher levels of xenophobia, discrimination, social predation, and social dominance orientation than will females, everything else being equal. 2) Males will tend to be both the primary perpetrators, and the primary victims of arbitrary-set discrimination. 3) The motives for outgroup discrimination are somewhat different for males and females.

Elizabeth Chrastil - Spatial Knowledge, the Environment, and Individual Differences in Navigation Ability
2018-10-01 00:00
Elizabeth Chrastil: University of California, Santa BarbaraOrienting oneself in novel environments, as well as finding and remembering the locations of resources, is critical for human and animal existence. Despite the importance of this skill, getting around is easy for some people, while others struggle. Working at the interface between immersive virtual reality and neuroimaging techniques, my research demonstrates how these complementary approaches can inform questions about how we acquire and use spatial knowledge. In this talk, I will share emerging research about the relationship between humans and the environment during navigation, centering on three main themes: 1) how we learn new environments, 2) the type of spatial information we learn from environments, and 3) how individuals differ in their spatial abilities, including sex differences. This talk will integrate these behavioral and neuroimaging studies with an understanding of how the environment shapes our navigational abilities to inform new frameworks of spatial knowledge.

Michael Rescorla - Foundations of Cognitive Science: Mental Representation
2018-10-08 00:00
Michael Rescorla: University of California, Los AngelesJust as the heart serves to pump blood and the stomach serves to digest food, one of the mind’s principal functions is to represent the world. For instance, I have various beliefs about Barack Obama: that he was once president of the United States, that he is married to Michelle Obama, and so on. These beliefs represent Barack Obama as being a certain way. Thus, the mind somehow reaches beyond itself to external reality, depicting the world as having certain features. In that sense, the mind is a representational organ. Traditionally, philosophers have emphasized the mind’s representational capacity as among its most important properties. Cognitive science builds upon this tradition, assigning a foundational role to mental representation when constructing theories of perception, motor control, navigation, reasoning, decision-making, planning, linguistic communication, and other core mental activities. Cognitive scientists elaborate the traditional picture of the mind as a representational organ into rigorous, empirically well-confirmed theories.

Sarah Benson-Amram - Individual, Social, and Ecological Influences on Problem-Solving Abilities
2018-10-15 00:00
Sarah Benson-Amram: University of WyomingAs urban centers all over the world have grown, biologists have struggled to explain why some species can invade and thrive despite human-induced environmental change whereas others suffer often to the point of extinction. One potential explanation is that the evolution of advanced cognitive abilities has enabled some species to exhibit more flexible behavioral responses to anthropogenic disturbances. Empirical evidence for this hypothesis is lacking, however, as it is difficult both to assess cognition in wild animals and to standardize assessments of cognition across multiple species in differing environments. The main goals of my research program are: 1) to understand the selection pressures driving the evolution of intelligence, 2) to clarify how the expression of behavioral flexibility and other cognitive abilities changes depending on the individual’s personality, the presence and identity of conspecifics, and the ecological environment, and 3) to investigate how cognition might facilitate successful adaptation to human-altered environments. In this talk, I will touch upon all three of these areas of research. I will first discuss my work examining the evolution of brain size and problem-solving abilities in a large comparative study of zoo-housed carnivores. I will then describe results from our research examining cognitive abilities in wild and captive populations of two highly successful carnivores, the spotted hyena and the raccoon. Finally, I will briefly describe some current research in our lab examining the interaction between personality and problem-solving performance in the monogamous zebra finch.

Eduardo Guerra Amorim - Migration and social organization in medieval Europe: a paleogenomic approach
2018-10-22 00:00
Eduardo Guerra Amorim: University of California, Los AngelesDespite centuries of research, much about the barbarian migrations that took place between the fourth and sixth centuries in Europe remains hotly debated. To better understand this key era that marks the dawn of modern European societies, we obtained ancient genomic DNA from 63 samples from two cemeteries (from Hungary and Northern Italy) that have been previously associated with the Longobards, a barbarian people that ruled large parts of Italy for over 200 years after invading from Pannonia in 568 CE. Our dense cemetery-based sampling revealed that each cemetery was primarily organized around one large pedigree, suggesting that biological relationships played an important role in these early medieval societies. Moreover, we identified genetic structure in each cemetery involving at least two groups with different ancestry that were very distinct in terms of their funerary customs. Finally, our data are consistent with the proposed long-distance migration from Pannonia to Northern Italy.

Daniel Benyshek - Human Maternal Placentophagy: evolutionary roots, cross-cultural occurrence, and an emerging post-industrial health trend
2018-10-29 00:00
Daniel Benyshek: University of Nevada Las VegasMaternal placentophagy, the mother’s consumption of the ‘afterbirth’ following parturition, is a ubiquitous behavior among terrestrial mammals – including non-human primates. Despite myriad hypothesized fitness-enhancing consequences of the behavior, including predator avoidance, improved lactation, enhanced care-taking behaviors, maternal analgesic effects, and the replenishment of maternal nutrients, among others, human maternal placentophagy is unknown in the cross-cultural ethnographic literature. The conspicuous absence of placentophagy in humans as a traditional cultural practice, raises interesting questions relative to its evolution in other mammals, the reasons for its apparent absence among historic and contemporary human populations, and its implications for maternal and child health in the context of an emerging placentophagy ‘alternative health’ practice among some women in post-industrial societies.

Susan Schaffnit - ‘Child marriage’ in context: understanding the drivers of early marriage in rural Tanzania
2018-11-05 00:00
Susan Schaffnit: University of California, Santa BarbaraA global campaign to end ‘child marriage’ (i.e. marriage before 18 years) has emerged over the last decade as part of growing international commitments to address gender inequities and improve female wellbeing. Proponents of this movement assert that young brides have negligible autonomy in the marriage process and that marrying under 18 years has resolutely negative impacts on wellbeing. This concern surrounding early marriage has largely proceeded without theoretical engagement with anthropologists and despite gaps in supporting evidence of harm to women. Using data collected in rural, northwest Tanzania where early marriage is common, I will (1) discuss local views on marriage, (2) test hypotheses as to why early marriage is common despite purported harm. Our findings suggest that early marriages can be understood as serving the strategic interests of both parents and daughters in some circumstances. I will discuss the generalizability of this finding and implications for the ‘end child marriage’ movement.
