Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Cody Ross – Social networks, network-structured economic games, and a toolbox for fine-scale, comparative research

In this talk, I review challenges of collecting and analyzing human social network data. I first discuss trade-offs between the use of roster-based and name-generator-based tools for studying cooperative networks, and highlight the potential of roster-based, network-structured economic games (e.g., the RICH economic games introduced by Gervais 2017) to address anthropological questions. I then introduce […]

David Raichlen – Evolutionary links between physical activity and brain health

Recent work suggests physical activity can have important beneficial effects on the aging brain, however the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. An evolutionary-neuroscience approach may help us better understand these mechanisms and can provide a foundation for developing novel interventions to improve brain aging. Here, we suggest that, from an evolutionary perspective, physical activity mainly […]

Melissa Emery Thompson – The Gray Ape: What Can Chimpanzees Tell Us About Human Aging?

Melissa Emery Thompson Evolutionary Anthropology, University of New Mexico Given their close evolutionary relationship to humans and lifespans that can extend into their 60s, chimpanzees are a uniquely informative comparative model for the evolution of human aging. Here, I will review early findings of the first focused study of aging in wild chimpanzees. Chimpanzees share […]

Bernard Koch – White Supremacist Trees in An Academic Forest: Does Anybody Hear Them?

Bernard Koch, UCLA Sociology In this paper, we quantify the enduring legacy of scientific racism both within academia and online. Hereditarian arguments correlating race and IQ have been used to justify regressive social policies since the 1950s, and this literature remains active within academia today. We characterize a tight collaboration community of authors promoting these […]

Daniel Sznycer – Value Computation in Humans

Valuing things comes naturally to us. But valuing things would be a forbidding task if we lacked the information-processing machinery that enables value computation and that needs to be understood. How does the human brain compute the value of things, events, and states of affairs? Things afford positive, neutral, or negative long-run effects on the […]

Ed Hagen – Homo medicus: The transition to meat eating, increased pathogen pressure, and the constitutive and inducible use of pharmacological plants in Homo

Homo medicus: The transition to meat eating, increased pathogen pressure, and the constitutive and inducible use of pharmacological plants in Homo Edward H. Hagen, Aaron D. Blackwell, Aaron D. Lightner, Roger J. Sullivan Click here for link to manuscript pre-print   The human lineage entered a more carnivorous niche 2.6 mya. A range of evidence […]

Gerry Carter – Cooperative Relationships in Vampire Bats

Several birds and mammals form affiliative relationships with both kin and nonkin that involve multiple forms of cooperation. When individuals form these long-term cooperative relationships, both the causes and consequences of each individual's cooperative investments are difficult to study. To understand how individuals form and maintain cooperative relationships, one must ultimately manipulate both associations and interactions […]

Chris Kelty & Jessica Lynch – Pouncing on opportunities: domestic/feral cat biology and global human-mediated cat niche expansion

Why are cats everywhere? Grounded on research into the controversy around feral or community cats and 'TNR' (Trap, Neuter, Return) in Los Angeles, we posit that the modern domestic/feral cat has demonstrated abilities toward multidimensional "niche expansion" and "niche space saturation" that allow it to succeed and increase in population density through behavioral diversification, where […]