Lauren Schroeder: University of Toronto Mississauga Our genus is characterized by a significant amount of morphological diversity, a phenomenon at the heart of the longstanding debate surrounding the origin and evolution of Homo. Recent fossil discoveries from Dmanisi, Georgia, Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia, and the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa have expanded the range of morphological […]
Michael Gurven: University of California, Santa BarbaraSex differences in human mortality and health are widely documented in both low and high income countries. Usual explanations focus on differences in intrinsic senescence, lifestyle, and health-seeking behaviors. Another possibility is that costs of reproduction unique to women may alter their physical condition in adulthood relative to men. […]
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 […]
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 : 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
