Jelmer Eerkens: UC Davis AnthropologyLaboratory experiments and ethnographic studies show that many aspects of human culture, particularly information, can change quickly in the course of transmission. The archaeological record indicates much more conservative rates of change, at least for material culture. Is there common theoretical ground between the micro- and macro- scales? This paper considers […]

Becky Frank: UCLA AnthropologyThe goal of this project was to examine the dynamics of exchange among female baboons and test predictions derived from a biological market model of grooming. Evolutionary theory predicts that cooperation among nonkin will be limited to reciprocating partners who monitor the balance of trade within their relationships in order to prevent […]

Carel van Schaik: Anthropological Institute & Museum, University of ZurichNaturalistic data on nonhuman primates show that the degree of despotism among males in primate groups is predicted by the degree to which mating access to females can be monopolized. Degree of despotism should affect other aspects of male behavioral strategies, such as how long top-dominants’ […]

Sam Bowles: Santa Fe InstituteAltruism -- benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself -- and parochialism – hostility toward individuals not of one’s own ethnic, racial or other group -- are common human behaviors. The intersection of the two – which we term parochial altruism -- is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because […]

Carol Padden & Mark Aronoff: UCSD, Stonybrook UWe report here on work we have carried out with colleagues Wendy Sandler and Irit Meir on an emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). ABSL developed de novo in a small closed community of Bedouins which is now in its third generation of signers. In this […]

Gary Marcus: NYU PsychologyIn fields ranging from reasoning to linguistics, the idea of humans as perfect, rational, optimal creatures is making a comeback – but should it be? Hamlet’s musings that the mind was “noble in reason ...infinite in faculty” have their counterparts in recent scholarly claims that the mind consists of an “accumulation of […]

Susan Perry: UCLA AnthropologyWhite-faced capuchin monkeys are best known for their innovation and traditions in the domain of social communication; however, social learning appears to play a role in the acquisition of their foraging techniques as well. In this talk, I explore several lines of evidence indicating social influence in food processing techniques. Several foods […]

Debra Lieberman: U of Hawaii PsychologyMechanisms for detecting kin rely on cues that correlated with relatedness in ancestral environments to adaptively regulate mate selection and altruistic effort. For siblings, one potential cue, proposed by Edward Westermarck, is co-residence duration. Another cue that would have been highly predictive of siblingship is seeing one's mother caring for […]

Peter Todd: U of Indiana Cognitive Science, Informatics, and Psychological and Brain SciencesThe choice of a mate is not only one of the most important decisions in our lives, but also one of the most difficult, fraught by lack of knowledge of the options to come and inability to return to options already passed by. […]

Katie Hinde: UCLA AnthropologyLactation represents the greatest post-natal cost of mothering in primates and numerous studies have established that variation in maternal condition is associated with infant growth, development, health, and survival. Presumably the effects of maternal condition are mediated through milk output during lactation, however this relationship remains poorly understood. Here I present the […]