Ted Bergstrom: UCSB Department of EconomicsAbout 80% of all societies recorded by anthropologists are polygynous (men have many wives). Even our own society is less monogamous than claimed. This paper attempts to explain such mysteries as why bride prices and dowries are not ``opposites'', why polygamous societies are usually characterized by positive bride prices and […]

Andrew Shaner: David Geffen UCLA School of MedicineSchizophrenia should not exist. It crushes sexual relationships and reproductive success and thus should have been eliminated long ago by selection. Yet it persists at a global prevalence far too high to be due to new mutations at a few loci. This has convinced scientists that many loci […]

Yaniv Hanoch: UCLA School of Public Health, Department of Health ServicesHerbert Simon has warned us that an explanatory account of human rationality must identify the significance of emotions for choice behavior. Customarily emphasizing the cognitive dimensions of decision making, relatively few researchers have paid close attention to specifying the complex ways in which emotion may […]

Alan Grafen: University of Oxford Department of ZoologyMost fieldworkers and empirical biologists studying whole organisms use as a working hypothesis that organisms have been designed by natural selection to maximise their inclusive fitness. They have used this approach to great effect since the work of Hamilton (1964) became widely known in the 1970s. On the […]

Fiona Cowie: California Institute of Technology Division of the Humanities and Social SciencesThe recent identification of the so-called 'grammar gene,' FOXP2, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the numerous psychological mechanisms involved in language acquisition, raise a number of conceptual and empirical issues that are vital to our understanding of language evolution. […]

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 […]