Russell Gray: University of Auckland Department of PsychologyCurrent debates about “Darwinizing culture†have typically focused on the validity of memetics. In this talk I will argue that meme-like inheritance is not a necessary requirement for descent with modification and suggest that an alternative, and more productive, way of Darwinizing culture can be found in the […]
Peter Fashing: CSU Fullerton Department of AnthropologyGiven that animal societies represent a collection of genetically selfish individuals that have come together to live and reproduce as part of a group, conflicts over the allocation of resources essential to survival and reproduction must routinely occur. For groups to remain stable over evolutionary time, these conflicts must […]
P. Jeffrey Brantingham: UCLA Department of AnthropologyIt is well known that victims of both violent and property crime experience an increased risk of being victimized again, especially during a brief interval of time following the initial event. Ethnographic evidence suggests, in the case of property crime, that offenders seek out previous targets to replicate previous […]
Peter Gray: University of Nevada-Las Vegas Department of AnthropologyHow does fatherhood impact men's sexuality? In this presentation, we review some of the core facets of paternal sexuality. Cross-cultural patterns of fertility beliefs suggest that a physiological basis of paternity is usually recognized, but without a link to mid-cycle ovulation. Male anatomy and semen components are […]
Tom Griffiths: UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and Group Major in Cognitive ScienceLearning a language, a concept, or a social norm all require making an inductive inference, going beyond the data provided by the behavior of other people. Such inferences are underdetermined by the available data, allowing people's biases to influence the conclusion that they […]
Justin Wood: USC Department of PsychologyAs social creatures, we wake up every morning to a dizzying array of actions from allies and competitors, in contexts that include cooperation, resource competition and parental care. Some actions are intentional, motivated by either distal or proximal goals; some are accidental, but nonetheless result in similar consequences. How do […]
Dario Maestripieri: University of Chicago Professor of Comparative Human Development, Evolutionary Biology, Neurobiology, and PsychiatryPost-copulatory sexual selection operates through two main mechanisms: sperm competition and post-copulatory female choice. Little is known about the role of female behavior in inciting sperm competition or in the expression of post-copulatory choice. Little is also known about signals that […]
Edward Slingerland: University of British Columbia Department of Asian Studies, Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied CognitionCalls to "vertically integrate" (Tooby & Cosmides) or achieve "consilience" (E.O. Wilson) between the sciences and the humanities have, for the most part, been received with a great deal of hostility by humanists. This talk explores some […]
Eric Alden Smith: University of Washington Department of AnthropologyCollective action with low relatedness (large-n, low-r cooperation) is a common feature of human societies, in marked contrast to patterns in other species. This is particularly puzzling for small-scale societies of foragers and horticulturalists, where formal social institutions to enforce collective action are weak or absent. There […]
Doug Kenrick: Arizona State University Department of PsychologyThe human mind processes information in a famously selective and shockingly biased way. Who and what do we select for attention, encoding, and retrieval, and how, why, and when do we distort certain kinds of information in certain ways and not others? My colleagues and I have been […]
