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Luke Premo – How Cultural Evolutionary Forces Affect Regional Variation in Structured Populations and the Archaeological Assemblages They Leave Behind

Paleolithic archaeologists have employed expectations generated from models developed in evolutionary anthropology to aid in the investigation of the origins of high-fidelity cultural transmission. Based on the notion that copying error ought to yield high levels of between-group cultural variation under unbiased cultural transmission, archaeologists have interpreted ostensibly “lower-than-expected” levels of cultural variation among regional […]

Sasha Kimel – Meatborne Xenophobia: Understanding When Disgust Fuels Outgroup Hate

Given that animal-borne pathogens pose especially high disease risks and, moreover, that a growing body of research suggests that the evolved function of disgust is the avoidance of disease, it is largely unsurprising that the consumption of non-normative meat would evoke strong disgust reactions. Yet, it is largely unclear whether and when concerns about disease […]

Jaimie Krems – Tackling Friendship: Appraising, Finding, Getting, and Keeping Partners

Friends have recurrently provided social, material, and emotional support—helping humans meet a range of recurrent challenges tributary to fitness. But friendships are not the first type of relationship that comes to mind when thinking about research in social psychology or evolutionary social science. Moreover, when friendships are the focus, work typically foregrounds the friendship dyad. […]

Richard Wrangham – Hunter-Gatherers, Homo duplex and the Evolution of Human Groupishness

Groupishness is a tendency to commit prosocial acts for which the pathway to compensatory fitness benefits is unpredictable. It is unique to humans, and its evolution is not well understood. A difficulty is that the adaptive value of groupishness comes from indirect reciprocity, which is hard to explain in societies that contain power asymmetries such […]

Dietrich Stout – The Evolution of Technology

For better or worse, humans are now one of the major causal forces acting on the earth’s biosphere. Many would point to technology as the reason, but what exactly is technology? In this lecture, I will develop an evolutionarily grounded definition of technology that highlights three key features: material production, social collaboration, and cultural reproduction. […]

Indigenous Data Lifecycles for Indigenous Futures

352 Haines Hall

Dr. Keolu Fox, Asst. Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, UCSD This speaker will be presenting in person. Indigenous Data Lifecycles for Indigenous Futures Abstract: According to The Economist, in 2018 oil was the most-traded commodity in the world. But in 2019, the demand for oil had been surpassed by the demand for data, including digital sequence information (DSI) […]

Aspects of competition and cooperation in the genus Pan

352 Haines Hall

Dr. Martin Surbeck, Asst. Professor, Dept. of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University This talk will be presented via Zoom. Aspects of competition and cooperation in the genus Pan. Abstract: I will talk about aspects of competition and cooperation in our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees. Firstly, I will explore how differences in female sexuality […]

Laughter and Smiles: Towards understanding the Complexity and Phylogenetic Continuity of Positive Communication in Hominids

352 Haines Hall

Dr. Marina Davila-Ross, Reader in Comparative Psychology, University of Portsmouth This talk will be presented via Zoom. Laughter and Smiles: Towards understanding the Complexity and Phylogenetic Continuity of Positive Communication in Hominids Abstract: Laughter and smiles are arguably the strongest behavioural indicators of positive emotional states in humans and they also represent pervasive tools of […]

Growing up in a dynamic social world: early-life effects on behavior and neuroendocrine function

352 Haines Hall

Dr. Tessa Solomon-Lane, Asst. Professor of Biology, Keck Science Dept., Claremont McKenna, Pitzer & Scripps Colleges More info: https://tessasolomonlane.com/ This speaker will be presenting in person. Growing up in a dynamic social world: early-life effects on behavior and neuroendocrine function   Abstract: Why, and how, do individuals behave the way they do? Social behavior has long […]