Polly Wiessner: University of Utah Department of AnthropologyIndoctrinability, the capacity to be inculcated with values or doctrines and to accept them uncritically, poses an evolutionary puzzle because it can lead individuals to voluntarily sacrificing immediate individual interest for a belief, cause, or group. I will briefly explore the cognitive capacities underlying indoctrinability. Then I will […]

Daniel M.T. Fessler: UCLA Department of AnthropologyThe evolutionary study of mind and behavior has benefited enormously from the functionality heuristic, i.e., the assumption that mental mechanisms can usefully be understood as well-designed solutions to recurrent adaptive problems. While virtually every investigator in this area acknowledges the importance of Tinbergen’s (1963) Four Levels of Explanation, in […]

Siobhán M. Mattison: Stanford University Department of Anthropology and Morrison Institute for Population and Resource StudiesThe study of kinship is foundational to anthropology. Though interest in kinship waned briefly, it has recently been rekindled, particularly in the area of evolutionary ecology. In this talk, I review briefly the major trends in anthropological thought on kinship […]

Peter Nonacs: UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyHamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness broadly states that whether or not a trait increases in frequency is dependent on both the direct reproductive success of individuals having that trait and the help that such individuals can provide to other trait bearers for their reproduction. The latter portion […]

Mary K. Shenk: University of Missouri Department of AnthropologyEvolutionary anthropologists have given significant attention to the global phenomenon of the demographic transition, especially the remarkable decreases in fertility that characterize it. The literature is crowded with competing theories and sub-theories, and scholars often call for more comprehensive, better-controlled studies that would allow us to distinguish […]

Federico Rossano: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary AnthropologyIn this talk I address two crucial aspects of gestural communication in non-human primates: how gestures are acquired/developed and how similar is their use when compared to human behavior (in particular with respect to issues such as communicative intentions and recipient design). There is general agreement among researchers […]

Charles Perreault: UCLA Department of AnthropologyHumans adaptive radiation has been explained by our capacity to socially learn information (culture). Culture is an inheritance system that parallels and interacts with the genetic one. Cultural variation and innovations accumulate in a population throughout time, allowing for complex cultural adaptations to evolve. Since, it is assumed, cultural evolution […]

Ralph Adolphs: Cal TechLike most other social neuroscience groups, my lab has been using pictures of faces as stimuli for a long time-- we investigate how people look at them, what social judgments they make about them, and how their brains respond to them. But how ecologically valid is this? Recently, we have begun exploring […]

Dora Costa, Matthew Kahn: UCLAIn Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War we used the life histories of more than forty thousand Civil War soldiers to discover when people are willing to sacrifice for the common good, what are the benefits of friendship, and what are the costs and benefits of being in a […]

Alyssa Crittenden: UNLVHuman prosociality is one of the defining characteristics of our species, yet the developmental origins of altruistic behavior remain little understood. The evolution of widespread food sharing in humans helped shape cooperation, family formation, life history, language, and the development of economies of scale. While the behavioral and ecological correlates of food sharing […]