Rafael Nuñez: UCSD Department of Cognitive ScienceHow can we "objectively" share abstract entities with others, in a stable and consistent way? How can we evaluate "Truth" when purely imaginary entities are concerned? Mathematics provides a very intriguing case for studying these questions. Indeed, mathematics, on the one hand deals with purely imaginary entities (e.g., a […]

Gail Heyman: UCSD Department of PsychologyThe human capacity to acquire knowledge from others, rather than only relying upon what can be observed or experienced directly, opens vast opportunities for learning. As a result of this capacity, humans are highly adaptable across many contexts. However, the use of such information can also pose difficulties. For example, […]

John Patton: California State University Fullerton Department of AnthropologyThe search for solutions to the conundrum of altruism is a central focus of evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior. The focus of this talk is to present data on cooperation collected among horticultural foragers in the Ecuadorian Amazon to argue that a better understanding […]

Teresa Seeman : UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine Division of GeriatricsDr. Seeman will discuss evidence linking socio-economic, social and psychological resources to trajectories of health and aging and the multiple biological pathways through which these factors appear to impact on health outcomes over the life course. Possible sex and/or ethnic differences in these patterns […]

Leeat Yariv: Caltech Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, UCLA Department of EconomicsIn this talk, I will briefly survey the existing literature on social learning and conformity (both theoretical and experimental) and then present evidence from an array of new experiments disentangling conformity, an intrinsic taste to follow others, from informational herding in a sequential […]

Terrence Deacon: UC Berkeley Department of AnthropologyAlthough biologists have long recognized examples of regressive processes in evolution as well as a role for regressive processes in the development of brains, research interest tends to focus on presumably constructive and progressive processes under the influence of natural selection. Particularly in the case of human brains and […]

Peter Whybrow: UCLA David Geffen School of MedicineDr. Whybrow poses the question, “Are we Americans becoming the first addicts of the technological age?” Despite an astonishing appetite for life, more and more Americans are feeling overworked and dissatisfied in the world’s most affluent nation, epidemic rates of stress, anxiety, depression, obesity, and time urgency are […]

Jeffrey Davis: California State University Long Beach Department of SociologyFisher is widely known for his extraordinary contributions to population genetics and evolutionary biology. His sociological insights have received far less attention, even though five of the twelve chapters of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection are devoted to developing a theory of the evolutionary consequences […]

Chris Guzelian: Searle Scholar, Northwestern University School of LawEvidence increasingly suggests that selection between competing ideas to become a prevailing social belief may be strongly influenced by evolutionarily descended limitations on human sensory and mental capabilities. Scholars posit that these limitations permit many "selfish" ideas to gain social traction and spread epidemically, driving out and […]

Joseph Campos: UC Berkeley Department of PsychologyThere is a fascinating paradox about fear of heights in humans and some animal species. Such fear has enormous biological adaptive value, represents a true life-span emotional reaction, and constitutes one of the strongest and most reliably-elicited fears in the human. As such, one would expect fear of heights […]