Cristine H. Legare: University of Texas at AustinHumans display a wide repertoire of socially acquired and transmitted behaviors that vary substantially across populations. Information is accumulated and transferred within and across generations through the process of cumulative culture. What are the evolved psychological mechanisms that underlie cultural learning and how do they develop over the […]
Kevin Langergraber: Arizona State UniversityMany animals carry out activities together because the benefits derived from collective action exceed those that can be achieved individually. But how can collective action evolve when individuals benefit from cooperation regardless of whether they pay its participation costs? According to one influential perspective, collective action problems are common, especially when […]
Claudia Valeggia: UC DavisThis talk will be about change and how we experience it. Humans go through several transitions during the course of their life. The transition from one life history phase to the next, e.g. from infancy to childhood or from reproductive to post-reproductive life, represents a physiological challenge as well as a sociocultural […]
Anita Stone: California Lutheran UniversityThe primate juvenile period has been considered a “limbo phase” with few evolutionary consequences, a view that has been challenged. In addition, it has been proposed that juvenility is a high-risk stage in which juveniles are at social and ecological disadvantages compared to adults in their group. Using field data from […]
Adrian Bell: University of UtahMost evolutionary ecological outcomes are highly sensitive to the nature of migration. The when, where, and how of migration are fundamental to evolutionary questions that anthropologists and others have tackled, though with varying levels of analytical rigor. In worst cases, migration is merely acknowledged as the elephant in the room. How […]
Peter B. Gray: University of Nevada, Las VegasCompared to great apes, several key features of human hunter-gatherer family life stand out: having more children at shorter inter-birth intervals, forming long-term reproductive partnerships, and investment by fathers and female relatives beyond their reproductive years. Behavioral reconstructions suggest derived features of human hunter-gatherer families evolved during the […]
William Audeh : Cedars-Sinai Medical CenterPrinciples of Evolutionary Biology have been applied to the problem of cancer, primarily to explain why cancer develops. This approach has focused on intrinsic mutation rates and the stochastic risk of carcinogenesis, as well as the issue of "mismatch", in which the argument is made that cancer arises because the […]
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 […]
