Francis Steen: UCLA Department of Communication StudiesI argued in Steen & Owens (2001) that play is a behavioral and cognitive simulation whose biological function is learning. In this presentation, I address the question of how such learning takes place, focusing on the role of consciousness. I present some preliminary data from an experiment on strategy-learning […]

William Rice: UCSB Department of Ecology, Evolution & Marine BiologyThe empirical foundation for sexual conflict theory is the unequivocal data from many different taxa demonstrating that females are harmed while interacting with males. But the interpretation of this keystone evidence has been challenged because females may more than compensate the direct costs of interacting with […]

Michael Sockol: UC Davis Department of Anthropology The origin of the human family, Hominidae, has been a primary focus of paleoanthropologists for more than a century. Indeed, the desire to understand our origins is ubiquitous in human society. Of continuing interest to anthropologists is the nature of the shift to bipedal locomotion in our earliest […]

Dan Blumstein: UCLA Department of Organismic Biology, Ecology and Evolution Many prey species signal when they encounter a predator. For over a decade I've used anti-predator communication as a model for understanding the evolution of complex communication in general. I will summarize results, primarily focusing on my work with marmots--large, alpine ground squirrels found throughout […]

David Reznick: UC Riverside Department of BiologyAn unanswered question in biology is “how do complex traits evolve?”. This question endures as an area of controversy because of a paucity of empirical evidence and because the process unfolds on a time scale that is far longer than human experience. I am developing a model system for […]

Jon Haidt: University of Virginia Department of PsychologyMorality has long been thought to come from outside – from God, society, or parents – into children, who are empty vessels. In contrast, an “externalization” model is presented in which four cognitive/affective modules generate intuitions about social events. The modules respond to issues of harm/suffering, reciprocity/fairness, hierarchy/duty, […]

Richard McElreath: UC Davis Department of AnthropologyCultural evolution is driven in part by the strategies individuals employ to acquire behavior from others. These strategies themselves are partly products of natural selection, making the study of social learning an inherently Darwinian project. Formal models of the evolution of social learning suggest that reliance on social learning […]

Dwight Read: UCLA Department of AnthropologyA long standing issue in human societies has been the relationship between culture and behavior. One extreme position views culture as arising primarily out of behavior structured by a variety of processes, ranging from external factors such as environmental conditions to internal factors such as behavioral consequences arising directly from […]

Neil Tsutsui: UC Irvine Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyCultural evolution is driven in part by the strategies individuals employ to acquire behavior from others. These strategies themselves are partly products of natural selection, making the study of social learning an inherently Darwinian project. Formal models of the evolution of social learning suggest that reliance […]

Joanna Mountain: Stanford University Department of Anthropological SciencesIn the 1960's linguist Joseph Greenberg classified all languages spoken primarily in Africa into four families. One of those families, Khoisan, includes not only the languages of the Khoe and San peoples of southern Africa, but also the languages of the Hadzabe and Sandawe peoples of Tanzania. Primary […]