Gary Marcus: NYU Dept. of PsychologyTwo of the most central questions in understanding the nature of the uniquely human talent for language are the extent to which the underlying neural machinery is "innate" (or "built-in"), and the extent to which that machinery is specialized for language as opposed to other cognitive functions. In this talk, […]
Jerome Siegel: UCLA Dept. of PsychiatrySleep amounts vary by more than an order of magnitude across mammalian species. Either the amount of time spent sleeping has no relation to underlying function, which would distinguish sleep from many other homeostatically regulated processes, or sleep need varies considerably across species. Prior data and new data on primitive […]
Chris Boehm: USC Dept. of AnthropologyChimpanzees and human hunter-gatherers are taken as models which help to explain our troubled world of nations, which in many ways is like a chimpanzee community with dominant alpha nations that throw their weight around---but in others is like a hunter-gatherer band, in which the group sees to it that […]
Aimee Plourde: UCLA Dept. of AnthropologyThe emergence of social ranking and political hierarchy in human society constituted a fundamental departure from the small, egalitarian group structure thought to characterize society for most of our species’ history. Explaining the origins of social ranking is thus key to understanding the underlying structures of modern human societies, and […]
Rob Boyd: UCLA Dept. of Anthropology
Jim Sidanius: UCLA Dept. of PsychologyBased upon ideas borrowed from classical elitism theory, social identity theory and evolutionary psychology, social dominance theory basically assumes that human social systems are predisposed to organize themselves as group-based social hierarchies. Given this assumption, social dominance theory then attempts to identity the multi-leveled processes that are responsible for the […]
Greg Bryant: UCSC Dept. of PsychologyDuring speech communication, conversationalists produce and understand many simultaneous pieces of information through prosodic features of the voice (i.e., pitch, loudness, and duration properties). Prosodic variations provide cues to lexical and grammatical units (linguistic prosody), as well as emotional and intentional information (affective prosody). But prosody may also be used […]
Alan Dixson: Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, Zoological Society of San DiegoThis talk focuses upon the structure and functions of the reproductive organs of mammals, as viewed from the perspective of sexual selection and sperm competition. The living collections of the Zoological Society of San Diego contain many rare and unusual species; valuable anatomical […]
Lynn Stout: UCLA School of LawLegal scholars have become keenly interested in behavioral approaches to lawthat recognize that real people do not always behave in a selfishly rational fashion: numerous recent papers examine how human choice can be distorted by endowment effects, anchoring effects, availability biases, and other cognitive deficiencies. There is a curious imbalance […]
Nancy K. Dess: Occidental CollegeGlimpses at our primate relatives and diverse human cultures provide prima facie evidence that as a species, we are capable of far more benevolent, just, and healthful living than exists in many places. Illuminating human nature through evolutionary reasoning has great potential to make public policy more effective and more humane. […]
