Joan Silk: UCLA Department of AnthropologyHumans differ from most other animals, and from virtually all other primates, in the extent of our dependence on cooperation. In humans, altruism seems to be at least partly based on empathy and genuine concern for the welfare of others (Batson and Powell 1998; Fehr and Fischbacher 2003). We may […]
Peter Richerson: UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and PolicyReligion is often held to play a large, even dominant, role in supporting human cooperation. Much variation in propensities to cooperate and treat others fairly exists within and between human societies. Previous work by social psychologists suggested that religion plays a small role in explaining this […]
Dario Maestripieri: University of Chicago Department of Comparative Human DevelopmentIn human and nonhuman primates, caregiver attachment is a motivational/ behavioral system that promotes the maintenance of proximity between a caregiver and an infant and facilitates the expression of caregiving behavior. Comparative data on female interest in infant and infant-directed behavior in nonhuman primates and humans […]
Rob Boyd: UCLA Department of AnthropologyRecent discussions of human cooperation assume that the theory reciprocal altruism provides an established explanation for human cooperation, and that therefore, alternative explanations invoking cultural group selection face a burden of proof. In this talk, I argue that this assumption is not justified. The theory of reciprocal altruism does predict […]
Wendy Saltzman: UC Riverside Department of BiologyCommon marmosets are cooperatively breeding monkeys that exhibit high female reproductive skew: typically only a single, dominant female breeds successfully in each social group. Laboratory studies have indicated that reproductive suppression in subordinate females is not aggressively imposed on them by dominant females and is not associated with stress; […]
Alex Mesoudi: University of British Columbia W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied EthicsA Darwinian theory of cultural evolution holds that the same fundamental principles that govern biological change – variation, selection and inheritance – also underlie human cultural change. In fact, the empirical case for cultural evolution is now as strong as the case that […]
Pascal Boyer: Washington University Department of PsychologyRitualized behavior is found in children's typical development, as well as in the pathology of OCD and in cultural ceremonies. Pierrre Lienard and I proposed elsewhere a neurocognitive model of ritualized behavior in human development and pathology, as based on the activation of a specific hazard-precaution system specialized in […]
Karl Sigmund: University of Vienna Department of MathematicsA considerable body of theoretical and empirical evidence underlines the important role of punishment in stabilising high contributions to joint enterprises. But how does punishing behaviour emerge? This talk highlights the role of voluntary participation. Analytical methods and individual-based simulations show that social norms including the punishment of […]
Susan Carey: Harvard Department of PsychologyI make two non-controversial assumptions about human conceptual understanding. First, it is built from a shared set of developmental primitives--the representational resources bequeathed to all human beings by evolution. Equally obviously, human cultures create new representational resources, transcending these initial ones in format, content and expressive power, which are turn […]
Bernard Comrie: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Department of Linguistics & UC Santa Barbara Department of LinguisticsAn understanding of the transmission of language across time requires reference to both vertical transmission - for instance, the English word "father" is a direct inheritance from the ancestral language Proto-Indo-European - and horizontal transmission - "paternal" was […]
