Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture

Marina Davila-Ross: Laughter and Smiles: Towards understanding the Complexity and Phylogenetic Continuity of Positive Communication in Hominids
2023-01-09 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 352 Haines Hall
Dr. Marina Davila-Ross, Reader in Comparative Psychology, University of Portsmouth
This talk will be presented via Zoom.
Laughter and Smiles: Towards understanding the Complexity and Phylogenetic Continuity of Positive Communication in Hominids
Abstract: Laughter and smiles are arguably the strongest behavioural indicators of positive emotional states in humans and they also represent pervasive tools of social communication, help to develop and maintain social relationships, and affect individuals‘ health and wellbeing. It, thus, may not come to a surprise that these important behaviours are deeply rooted in human biology. More specifically, empirical research on hominids suggests that laughter and smiles are evolutionarily continuous, going back to at least the past 13 million years. As a result, an in-depth evaluation of laughter and smiles in great apes may provide a better understanding of why humans, a highly social-cognitive species, behave the way they do. This talk attempts to reconstruct the evolution of laughter and smiles in great apes and humans by assessing form and function of these expressions in their natural social interactions. Comparative and phylogenetic approaches are applied that include acoustic analyses, FACS (Facial Action Coding System) specifically designed to study great apes, and the coding of bodily actions.
Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/94813693836?pwd=[REDACTED]
Zoom Meeting ID: 928 2643 6236
Passcode: BEC

Skill acquisition and life history: towards a better understanding of cognitive evolution - postponed till spring quarter
2022-11-28 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Dr. Caroline Schuppli, Max Planck Research Group leader, MPI for Animal Behavior
This talk will be presented via Zoom on some date yet to be determined in spring of 2023.
Skill acquisition and life history: towards a better understanding of cognitive evolution
Abstract: Cognitive capacity gets selected for via skills and abilities which provide individuals with fitness benefits. However, strikingly, the larger brained a species is, the more incompetent its infants are at birth and the more they must learn to become functioning adults. This suggests that especially for large-brained species, the developmental construction of intelligence critically depends on inputs during ontogeny. Therefore, to understand the evolution of cognition, we need to look at how skills and abilities develop in individuals. To shed light on these questions, we conduct long-term research on orangutans as well as look at broader patterns across species using comparative analyses. Our results suggest that that extended developmental periods during which skills can develop as well as learning mechanisms that allow for efficient skill acquisition are crucial for the evolution of high-level cognition.
Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92826436236?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 928 2643 6236
Passcode: BEC

Cultural rescue: avoiding extinction with gene-culture coevolution. THIS TALK WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR JUNE 5, 2023
2022-11-21 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Dr. Laurel Fogarty, Senior Scientist, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
This talk will be presented via Zoom.
Cultural rescue: avoiding extinction with gene-culture coevolution.
Abstract: It is often suggested that the adaptability and success of human populations is a direct result of our sophisticated cultural abilities. Previously, we have suggested that in cases where lethal environmental shifts cause population decline, culture may be able to rescue an otherwise doomed population — in other words cause a ‘cultural population rescue’. Innovation and cultural transmission together might provide behavioural adaptations that could compensate for the detrimental effect of an environmental change. To the extent that such innovations could spread and be maintained through cultural transmission, such a process could indefinitely compensate for novel harsh environmental conditions.
However, such a scenario may be rare and culture might do more. Organisms with large body sizes and long generation times, like humans, are not typically thought to be able to undergo true ‘evolutionary rescue’, where compensatory genetic mutations arise and allow the demographic recovery of a declining population. As a consequence of long waiting times for beneficial mutations, where generation times are long, and population sizes are relatively small, populations are overwhelmingly likely to die out before such mutations arise and spread to high frequency. We suggest that where culture does not lead to a direct ‘cultural rescue’, it might nevertheless slow population decline providing time in which compensatory genetic mutations may arise. This mechanism seems plausible. However, the key to understanding the importance of culture in human population survival lies in describing how frequently such culturally-facilitated evolutionary rescues could occur and under what circumstances they are plausible, likely, or impossible.
In this talk I will describe a mathematical model of evolutionary rescue that allows for direct gene-culture interactive effects on biological fitness, and examine the probability of population rescue in the presence and absence of culture.
Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92826436236?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 928 2643 6236
Passcode: BEC

Female counterstrategies to infanticide in lactating gelada females: adaptive, but not cost-free
2022-11-07 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Dr. Amy Lu, Asst. Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, Stony Brook University
This talk will be presented via Zoom.
Female counterstrategies to infanticide in lactating gelada females: adaptive, but not cost-free
Abstract: Adverse socioecological conditions can have pervasive effects on health and fitness. For mothers, adverse conditions can trigger cost-cutting strategies that limit investment in reproduction. These strategies can further impact the health and fitness of current and future offspring. Geladas are an ideal species in which to investigate the intersection between maternal and offspring responses to adversity. Gelada females reside in one-male units where a “leader” male has sole reproductive access to 2-13 adult females. Males without reproductive units must challenge and depose an existing leader to gain reproductive opportunities, and such “takeover” events are known to lead to infanticide, elevated glucocorticoids (GCs), and increased injury risk for all natal individuals within the group. Takeover risk also impacts gelada female reproductive physiology: immature females accelerate reproductive maturation, gestating mothers experience fetal loss (“Bruce effect”), and lactating mothers are suspected of producing immediate signals of fertility (sex skin swellings) that deter the likelihood of infanticide. Here, we draw on over 10 years of data from the Simien Mountains Gelada Research Project to examine the potential costs and benefits associated with this presumed strategy observed in lactating females. We found that lactating gelada females that experienced a takeover produced sex skin swellings earlier than those that did not. However, females with younger infants were less likely to produce such swellings and infant age at maternal swelling was correlated with the subsequent interbirth interval, suggesting that mothers that swell earlier divest in current offspring. Finally, infants that experienced a takeover were more likely to survive when mothers produced swellings, but also when they were simply older at takeover. Taken together, our results suggest that although the production of sex skin swellings by lactating females increases infant survival in geladas, they are not cost-free and may lead to downstream developmental consequences for infants. Furthermore, mothers of the youngest gelada infants are constrained: they are less able to produce swellings, yet their infants are more likely to die of infanticide.
Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92826436236?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 928 2643 6236
Passcode: BEC

The Brain's Crescendo; How Music Training Impacts Child Development
2022-10-31 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Dr. Assal Habibi, Assoc. Professor of Psychology, University of Southern California
This speaker will be presenting in person.
The Brain’s Crescendo; How Music Training Impacts Child Development
Abstract: In an ongoing multi-year longitudinal study, we have been investigating the effects of a group-based music training program on development of children, beginning at age 6, using behavioral, neuroimaging and electrophysiological measures. The target group of children have been participating in the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA) program. This music program is based on the Venezuelan system of musical training known as El-Sistema and offers free music instruction 6–7 hours weekly to children from underprivileged and under-resourced areas of Los Angeles. The children in the music program have been compared with two groups of children, one involved in a community-based sports program and another not enrolled in any systematic afterschool training. At the onset, we established that there were no pre-existing differences among the groups. Over the course of 5 years, we have observed that children in the music group had better performance than comparison groups in musically relevant auditory skills (pitch and rhythm discrimination) and showed an accelerated maturity of auditory processing as measured by cortical auditory evoked potentials. We also observed that children in the music group showed a different rate of cortical thickness maturation between the right and left posterior superior temporal gyrus and higher fractional anisotropy in the corpus callosum, specifically in the crossing pathways connecting superior frontal, sensory, and motor segments. For nonmusical skills, children with music training, compared with children without music training, showed stronger neural activation during a cognitive inhibition task in brain regions involved in response inhibition and decision making (bilateral pre-SMA/SMA, ACC, IFG). Finally, we observed that parents of children involved in music training, after four years, rated their children higher on the emotional stability personality trait and lower on aggression and on hyperactivity compared to children not involved in music activities despite no differences in these measures before children’s entry into the program. Considering a general reduction in art education specifically in the communities that there is limited access to art exposure in general, and specifically to music education, the findings from this study is providing compelling answers to the ongoing discussion about music’s role in the education curriculum.
Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92826436236?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 928 2643 6236
Passcode: BEC

Growing up in a dynamic social world: early-life effects on behavior and neuroendocrine function
2022-10-24 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Dr. Tessa Solomon-Lane, Asst. Professor of Biology, Keck Science Dept., Claremont McKenna, Pitzer & Scripps Colleges
More info: https://tessasolomonlane.com/
This speaker will be presenting in person.
Growing up in a dynamic social world: early-life effects on behavior and neuroendocrine function
Abstract: Why, and how, do individuals behave the way they do? Social behavior has long captivated researchers from diverse fields. Social behavior is common to a remarkably wide range of species, its expression is complex and patterned, and it has deeply conserved effects on evolutionary fitness and health. Similarly, the neuroendocrine signaling pathways that regulate social behavior are also evolutionarily ancient. Early-life experiences are a powerful source of individual variation in adult behavior, yet fundamental questions remain about the development of social behavior and its underlying mechanisms. In my lab, we use the highly social Burton’s Mouthbrooder cichlid fish (Astatotilapia burtoni), a model system in social neuroscience, to investigate the social, behavioral, and neuroendocrine mechanisms regulating the development of social behavior. This species is known for the mixed-sex, hierarchical communities formed by adults, in which individuals express social behaviors common across vertebrates, such as aggression, affiliation, courtship, parenting, and cooperation. As is the case in primates, juveniles are social from the earliest life history stage. I will present the results of a series of experiments that demonstrate that juveniles form nuanced, complex social relationships, and how early-life social environments sculpt social behavior, nonapeptide signaling, and neuroendocrine stress axis function. I will discuss how this work expands our understanding of behavioral development and the origins of individual variation in adult phenotypes, from fish to humans
Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/94813693836?pwd=[REDACTED]
Zoom Meeting ID: 928 2643 6236
Passcode: BEC

Laughter and Smiles: Towards understanding the Complexity and Phylogenetic Continuity of Positive Communication in Hominids
2022-10-17 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall

Aspects of competition and cooperation in the genus Pan
2022-10-03 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Dr. Martin Surbeck, Asst. Professor, Dept. of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
This talk will be presented via Zoom.
Aspects of competition and cooperation in the genus Pan.
Abstract: I will talk about aspects of competition and cooperation in our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees. Firstly, I will explore how differences in female sexuality and male mate competition potentially contribute to observed species differences. There will be a specific focus on the role of mothers during mate competition in male philopatric species and I will speculate about potential implications for life histories. Secondly, I will explore aspects of between group competition in bonobos and discuss the implications of the new findings for the emergence of cooperative relationships between groups.
Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92826436236?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 928 2643 6236
Passcode: BEC

Indigenous Data Lifecycles for Indigenous Futures
2022-09-26 12:00 - 13:30 | 352 Haines Hall
Dr. Keolu Fox, Asst. Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, UCSD
This speaker will be presenting in person.
Indigenous Data Lifecycles for Indigenous Futures
Abstract: According to The Economist, in 2018 oil was the most-traded commodity in the world. But in 2019, the demand for oil had been surpassed by the demand for data, including digital sequence information (DSI) of genetic resources. Despite increasing enthusiasm for historically marginalized communities’ participation in biomedical research and a recognition of the potential for next-generation precision medicine, concerns around control and access of data derived from these populations remain. This lecture will highlight the emergence of new tools to enable equitable Indigenous data futures. Specifically it will explore key paths forward that are not only rooted in Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS), but circular economic systems, and place-based innovation. It will also highlight the potential for vertical integration and control of stacks of technology, including dynamic consent, data trusts, digital ledger systems, and cloud computation to empower Indigenous communities for generations to come.
Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/94813693836?pwd=[REDACTED]
Zoom Meeting ID: 928 2643 6236
Passcode: BEC

Joe Manson - Nine years of research on life history strategy and individual differences, or: How I learned to start worrying about constructs and instruments
2022-05-31 15:00 - 17:00
This is a special BEC talk in honor of the retirement of one of BEC‘s core faculty members, Joe Manson. Please note the special time! Refreshments and snacks on the balcony of the anthropology department will follow Joe’s talk.

Dietrich Stout - The Evolution of Technology
2022-05-23 12:00 - 13:30
For better or worse, humans are now one of the major causal forces acting on the earth’s biosphere. Many would point to technology as the reason, but what exactly is technology? In this lecture, I will develop an evolutionarily grounded definition of technology that highlights three key features: material production, social collaboration, and cultural reproduction. Using examples from my own lab’s studies of stone tool making, I will argue that these features implicate a wide range of perceptual, motor, and cognitive capacities as well as multiple channels of cultural inheritance and biocultural evolutionary processes. This perspective blurs presumed distinctions between social and individual learning that have shaped formal modeling approaches to cultural evolution. In so doing it calls into question the idea that one key capacity, event, or evolutionary Rubicon initiated cumulative technological evolution and a pattern of sustained autocatalytic biocultural feedback in human evolution. This interpretation is consistent with growing paleoanthropological and archaeological evidence of the multi-lineal, intermittent, asynchronous course of human evolution, and presents a view of technological evolution as a complex and contingent process spanning a scale from neurons to societies and beyond. Nevertheless, some synthesis may be possible with respect to a smaller number of recurring processes and relationships. In this vein, I advance a “Perceptual Motor Hypothesis” proposing that human technological cognition has been evolutionarily and developmentally constructed from ancient primate perceptual-motor systems for body awareness and engagement with the world. Testing such hypotheses will require a multidisciplinary and comparative approach to identify patterned relations between contexts, mechanisms, and functions across diverse technological systems.

Richard Wrangham - Hunter-Gatherers, Homo duplex and the Evolution of Human Groupishness
2022-05-16 12:00 - 13:30
Groupishness is a tendency to commit prosocial acts for which the pathway to
compensatory fitness benefits is unpredictable. It is unique to humans, and its evolution is
not well understood. A difficulty is that the adaptive value of groupishness comes from
indirect reciprocity, which is hard to explain in societies that contain power asymmetries
such that a dominant can appropriate resources at will. To date the only solution is Boehm’s
proposal, namely that morality was favored because allied males were selected to use
coercive behavior first to eliminate tyrants, then subsequently to favor prosociality and
punish antisociality. Using information on self-domestication, a topic that Boehm did not
explore, I present several tests of Boehm’s thesis. All are supportive, while also modifying
Boehm’s ideas. I conclude that a major increase in evolved groupishness began with the
origin of Homo sapiens and the ability to execute tyrants. This process generated Homo
duplex, including the uniquely human tension between selfishness and duty seen in hunter-
gatherers and other societies.

Jaimie Krems - Tackling Friendship: Appraising, Finding, Getting, and Keeping Partners
2022-05-09 12:00 - 13:30
Friends have recurrently provided social, material, and emotional support—helping humans meet a range of recurrent challenges tributary to fitness. But friendships are not the first type of relationship that comes to mind when thinking about research in social psychology or evolutionary social science. Moreover, when friendships are the focus, work typically foregrounds the friendship dyad. Taking an evolutionary approach suggests a different natural ecology for friendship psychology—one that implies the challenges of friendship are more and more complex than we might typically consider them to be. Perhaps, then, the challenges one must solve to reap the benefits of friendship should be thought of not (only) as two-person games, so to speak, but (also) as n-person games. I illustrate this by exploring several major friendship challenges—identifying good friends, competing for friends, and maintaining friendships. I also propose and test some of the possible means by which our social minds might meet these challenges, toward ultimately maximizing the benefits and minimizing the costs of our sociality.
https://www.kremslab.com/

Sasha Kimel - Meatborne Xenophobia: Understanding When Disgust Fuels Outgroup Hate
2022-05-02 12:00 - 13:30
Given that animal-borne pathogens pose especially high disease risks and, moreover, that a growing body of research suggests that the evolved function of disgust is the avoidance of disease, it is largely unsurprising that the consumption of non-normative meat would evoke strong disgust reactions. Yet, it is largely unclear whether and when concerns about disease can also evoke negative reactions to third-parties who engage in such norm-violations. In a series of experiments, participants in the U.S. were randomly assigned to learn about cuisine from another culture (i.e., fabricated and real) that contained a meat that was either relatively neutral (i.e., beef), disgusting due to disease threat (i.e., rat) or disgusting due to a combination of disease threat and the immorality of causing a cared-for animal harm (i.e., dog, monkey). Our results suggest that disgust may only exacerbate negative judgements and behaviors towards third-parties when the disease threat also has a strong immorality component (e.g., eating of dogs but not rats) and, moreover, that this may increase depending on how cared-for the being is. Implications for theories on disgust, compassion and third-party punishment will be addressed.

Luke Premo - How Cultural Evolutionary Forces Affect Regional Variation in Structured Populations and the Archaeological Assemblages They Leave Behind
2022-04-25 12:00 - 23:30
Paleolithic archaeologists have employed expectations generated from models developed in evolutionary anthropology to aid in the investigation of the origins of high-fidelity cultural transmission. Based on the notion that copying error ought to yield high levels of between-group cultural variation under unbiased cultural transmission, archaeologists have interpreted ostensibly “lower-than-expected” levels of cultural variation among regional archaeological assemblages as evidence of widespread conformist biased transmission. But a closer inspection of cultural evolutionary theory suggests the expectation that unbiased transmission yields high between-group differentiation holds only for a narrow, idealized set of conditions that are likely to be violated in empirical cases. Additionally, it is unclear how or if this expectation translates to time-averaged assemblages of artifacts even under special conditions. I’ve developed a relatively simple agent-based model of cultural transmission in a structured population to improve our understanding of how cultural evolutionary forces affect between-group variation in a selectively neutral discrete trait under a wide range of conditions. My experimental design addresses how intergroup transmission and copying error affect regional cultural variation under four different mechanisms of cultural transmission (unbiased, vertical, conformist, or prestige biased) and two different models of copying error (finite or infinite variants). I quantify cultural differentiation not only between groups in a structured population but also between time-averaged assemblages of culture material. The results highlight three points: 1) there are many conditions—not just widespread conformity—in which one should expect relatively low variation among semi-, or even completely, isolated groups (and the archaeological assemblages they create through time) despite the effects of copying error, 2) the way in which intergroup transmission and copying error affect between-group (and between-assemblage) variation varies among cultural transmission mechanisms, and 3) time-averaging affects between-assemblage variation differently under different cultural transmission mechanisms. Considering these findings, I propose a list of questions one should answer before attempting to infer mechanisms of cultural transmission from time-averaged archaeological assemblages. Answers to these questions will help researchers better match expectations of regional cultural variation with the empirical case at hand.

https://anthro.wsu.edu/faculty-and-staff/luke-premo/

James Higham - Insights into Life-History from the Cayo Santiago Rhesus Macaques
2022-04-11 12:00 - 13:30
We humans come from a diverse order, the primates, which make excellent model systems for studying the interface between the biological and the social. In this talk, I focus on our long-running field studies of the rhesus macaques of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Decades of individual-based demographic data allow us to explore variation in life history, including the impacts of interbirth intervals and infant birth weights on infant survival, and both the development and senescence of reproduction in the same individuals across the lifespan. Our studies leverage behavioral observations, cognitive experiments, physiological measures, genomic and transcriptomic data from blood and tissues, measurements of soft-tissues and skeletons, microbiome samples, and more. I show how long-term integrative study allows us to explore the interactions between the biological and the social from two perspectives: bottom-up and top-down. From the bottom-up perspective, we are beginning to ask how variation in the genome and epigenome, via the transcriptome, constructs cellular, tissue- and organ-level biology in individuals, and in turn, how individual-level behaviors structure societies and populations. From the top-down perspective, we study how variation in the social environment can get under the skin and impact health and disease. I finish by discussing the Anthropocene, and by demonstrating the top-down effects of climate change-linked natural disasters on rhesus macaque societies, and on individual health via effects on the transcriptome. Combining approaches from behavioral ecology, physiology, quantitative genetics, genomics and transcriptomics, computer vision, and comparative psychology, this talk is part demonstration of the value of integrative research, and part love-letter to long-term field studies.

Kelsey McCune - Space Use, Exploratory Behavior and Rapid Range Expansion in Great-Tailed Grackles
2022-04-04 12:00 - 13:30
Humans are rapidly changing the natural world, leading to decreasing native fauna and increasing non-native fauna. Problematic species range expansions are occurring across the globe, but not all species are able to become established outside of their original range. It is still unclear which characteristics facilitate successful invasions or native species persistence in human-modified environments. One hypothesis is that variation in behavior may be important when certain individuals possess traits that make them more likely to succeed when venturing into new habitats and outcompeting heterospecifics. For example, variation in the ability (movement) and motivation (exploratory tendency) to encounter conspecifics and novel food sources could facilitate range expansions. However, no previous research has compared measures of exploration to the natural movement behavior of individuals along the range of a currently invading species. In this talk I will discuss my research on movement and exploratory behaviors in a species that has rapidly expanded its range in the U.S., the great-tailed grackle. I consider whether individuals consistently differ in their movement behavior such that it can be considered an inherent individual trait, whether movement relates to performance on an exploration task, and whether movement and exploration differ between grackles in the center of the range and those on the invasion front. Invasive species are implicated as a leading cause of biodiversity loss, so this research will facilitate a better understanding of the importance of these behavioral characteristics in predicting potential invasions in other systems.

Lisa O'Bryan - Communication and the Coordination of Collective Behavior in Non-human and Human Social Groups
2022-03-28 12:00 - 13:30
Lisa O’Bryan, Rice University
In order to obtain social benefits, individuals must remain cohesive, coordinate their behavior, and collectively process information. The field of collective behavior focuses on understanding how group-wide properties such as these emerge from the interactions of many individuals. Most studies of collective behavior examine how coordination is achieved through visual cues about others’ positions and behavior. However, in many complex social and ecological environments, communication can be critical for achieving successful outcomes since many signals have evolved to advertise location, express motivational state and share information. My research focuses on how vocal communication both influences, and is influenced by, individual and group-wide properties, with the aim of better understanding the behavioral mechanisms underlying the successful (and unsuccessful) functioning of social groups. I study this topic using technology to obtain detailed, continuous measurements of individual behaviors and interactions in both non-human and human social groups. In this talk I will review my work using wearable dataloggers to study how vocalizations influence the collective movements of domesticated herds and wild baboons. I will also discuss current studies focused on the role conversational turn-taking plays in the decision-making and collective intelligence of human teams. The long-term goal of my research program is to gain new insights into the function and evolution of communication systems involved in the mediation of collective behaviors and how we can engineer communication systems within our own societies to produce more favorable group-wide outcomes.

Federico Rossano - Interacting like a human being: a developmental and comparative perspective on calibrating requests
2022-03-07 12:00 - 13:30
In his paper on the “human interaction engine”, Levinson famously asserted that, in social interaction, people’s responses “are to actions and intentions, not to behaviors” (2006: 45). Indeed human beings attribute intentions/goals to the production of signals and parsing other’s signals means simulating others’ mental worlds, at least to some degree. But how do speakers calibrate their interactional moves in first position so that they are more likely to elicit their preferred response? Which variables do they take into account?
In this talk I present observational and experimental data on how human (children and adults) and non-human primates (chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans) calibrate requests for actions and for objects. I will discuss the roles of prospection, entitlement and accountability in the calibration of requests and outline to what degree non-human primates share with humans cognitive abilities that allow for a flexible assessment of when, how and to whom to deliver requests. I will also show where the critical differences lie. In doing so, I will show what it means to interact like a human being.
Federico Rossano
UCSD Cognitive Science
https://cogsci.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/federico-rossano.html

Elizabeth Hobson - Dominance hierarchies, fight decisions, and social support as windows into animal social cognition
2022-02-28 12:00 - 13:30
Elizabeth Hobson
University of Cincinnati
http://hobsonresearch.com/

Helen Davis - Culture, Cultural Change, and Cognitive Development
2022-02-14 12:00 - 13:30
What does cognitive development look like in a world without schools or formally educated parents or communities? What if our most fundamental measures of cognitive performance were influenced by small amounts of schooling or by having parents, siblings or others who attended schools in one’s household or community? Growing evidence suggests that the human mind is shaped by the socially and culturally incentivized institutions it is exposed to during our unusually long childhood. Yet, many contemporary theories of early learning capacities and cognition are drawn from samples where formal schooling, a prolific cultural institution, has been nearly ubiquitous for at least a century. In such novel environments, the impact of formal schooling on cognition and learning can easily be confused with species-wide maturational processes. This talk will discuss research focused on fundamental aspects of cognition and the institutions and cultural transitions shaping them using findings from two unique, ongoing studies in Amazonia, Bolivia and in the Namib Desert of Namibia and Angola. Additionally, this talk will address growing challenges associated with cross-cultural research, as well as the need for a conscientious commitment to participant communities.
Helen Davis
Harvard University
https://helen-elizabeth-davis.com/

Chris Kelty & Jessica Lynch - Pouncing on opportunities: domestic/feral cat biology and global human-mediated cat niche expansion
2022-02-07 12:00 - 13:30
Why are cats everywhere? Grounded on research into the controversy around feral or community cats and ‘TNR’ (Trap, Neuter, Return) in Los Angeles, we posit that the modern domestic/feral cat has demonstrated abilities toward multidimensional “niche expansion” and “niche space saturation” that allow it to succeed and increase in population density through behavioral diversification, where other creatures (including its felid relatives) might not be able to. This niche expansion is also a story of human collaboration with cats throughout history, not just a story of human “domestication.” Niche expansion and collaboration allow us to think beyond the stories of human intentionality (at the heart of theories of domestication, as well as those of the “Anthropocene”) which overlook distinctive aspects of feline biological and evolutionary capacity, and overestimate human capacities for control.

Jenny Tung - The social genome and primate evolution
2022-01-31 12:00 - 13:30
Jenny Tung
Duke University
http://www.tung-lab.org/

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.
