Robert Boyd: UCLA Department of AnthropologyIn this talk I explain how culturally heritable differences in wealth between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning process driving cultural evolution increases individuals' economic gains. The key assumptions are that human populations are structured into groups and that cultural learning is more […]
David Sloan Wilson: SUNY Binghamton Department of Biological Sciences & Department of AnthropologyEvolutionary theory is rapidly expanding beyond the biological sciences to include all human-related subjects in academia. Since evolution is fundamentally about organisms in relation to their environment, basic scientific research needs to focus on people from all walks of life, as they go […]
Daniel Nettle: Newcastle University Centre for Behaviour and EvolutionEven in the most developed countries, many people do not accept the theory of evolution as true. Whilst there are cultural and ideological reasons for this, part of the issue is that evolutionary ideas appear to violate certain intuitive beliefs. Even more interestingly, recent research has shown […]
Patricia Gowaty: UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BehaviorDo genes for choosy females and indiscriminate mates determine typical sex roles; or, do ecological and social constraints determine sex roles? Or is sex role determination due to more complex interactions of sex-associated genes and ecological conditions? Answering this question has been difficult, largely because until now […]
Rebecca Bliege Bird: Stanford University Department of AnthropologyAnthropologists commonly invoke an "economy of scale" to explain gender differences in hunter-gatherer subsistence and economic production: wives pursue childcare-compatible tasks and husbands, of necessity, provision wives and offspring with hunted meat. This theory explains little about the division of labor among the Australian Martu, where women hunt […]
Roberto Delgado: USC Department of AnthropologyInitial field observations and reports from a few short-term studies pointed to island differences between Bornean and Sumatran orangutans in their general appearance and behavioral ecology, implying meaningful taxonomic distinctions. However, upon further scrutiny at multiple sites and for longer periods of study, researchers have found population-specific differences across a […]
Joseph Henrich: University of British Columbia Departments of Psychology and EconomicsThis talk will first develop an evolutionarily-informed, cognitively-grounded approach to culture, and then apply this approach to explain patterns of food taboos for pregnant and lactating women on Yasawa Island, Fiji. Within a broader cognitive framework, I focus on (1) understanding our capacities for cultural […]
Naomi Eisenberger: UCLA Department of PsychologyNumerous languages characterize ‘social pain,’ the feelings resulting from social rejection or loss, with words typically reserved for describing physical pain (“broken hearts,†“hurt feelingsâ€) and perhaps for good reason. It has been suggested that, in mammalian species, the social attachment system borrowed the computations of the physical pain system […]
Barbara König: University of Zurich Institute of ZoologyIn addition to sexual selection, selection resulting from social interactions in contexts other than mating can be a potent evolutionary force. Such social selection processes are facilitated whenever individual fitness varies as a result of any form of social interactions. The choice of social partners for communal care […]
Edouard Machery: University of Pittsburgh Department of History and Philosophy of ScienceThat morality evolved is a commonplace among evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists. In this talk, I will however argue that biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have failed to pay enough attention to the differences between three distinct interpretations of the hypothesis that morality evolved: (1) […]
