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 […]
Brenda Bowser: Cal State Fullerton Department of AnthropologyThis paper examines the transmission of stylistic behavior in the community of Conambo. The people of Conambo are self-sufficient horticultural foragers who are strongly divided into two competing coalitions with flexible membership and defections across the coalitional boundary. The women of Conambo maintain a domestic polychrome ceramic tradition […]
Daniel J. Kruger: University of Michigan School of Public HealthSex differences in human mortality rates stem from genetic, physiological, behavioral, and social causes that are best understood when integrated in an evolutionary life history framework. Males in many species are selected for riskier physiological and behavioral strategies that enhance reproductive success at the expense of […]
Paul Griffiths: University of Queensland Department of PhilosophyMany evolutionary processes have been described in which a trait that initially develops in the members of a population as a result of some interaction with the environment comes to develop without that interaction in their descendants. Waddington’s genetic assimilation is importantly different from the rest of this […]
Hillard Kaplan: University of New Mexico Department of AnthropologyThis paper will present an overview of age-specific mortality rates among hunter-gatherers and forager-horticulturalists. It will also present new data on resource transfers and physical rates of aging among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists in Bolivia. It will be argued that the balance of costs and benefits of maintenance and […]
Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell: Stanford University Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck SurgeryThe structure of African elephant society is primarily matriarchal in nature, where dominant female elephants make decisions for the herd as a whole with regard to safety, movements, resource choices and affiliations. Culture is often influenced by local environmental and social pressures, as well as […]
Joan Silk: UCLA Department of Anthropology
Nicola S. Clayton: University of Cambridge Department of Experimental PsychologyAccording to the mental time travel hypothesis only humans can mentally dissociate themselves from the present, travelling backwards in time to recollect specific past events about what happened where and when (episodic memory) and travelling forwards in time to anticipate future needs (future planning). Studies on […]
James Roney: UC Santa Barbara Department of PsychologyMenstrual cycle shifts in women's mate preferences have generally been interpreted as products of adaptations designed to alter behavior during the fertile window relative to other times in the cycle. I will discuss an alternative theory that posits that such shifts may be produced by mechanisms designed to […]
