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 […]

Helen Davis – Culture, Cultural Change, and Cognitive Development

What does cognitive development look like in a world without schools or formally educated parents or communities? What if our most fundamental measures of cognitive performance were influenced by small amounts of schooling or by having parents, siblings or others who attended schools in one’s household or community? Growing evidence suggests that the human mind […]

Federico Rossano – Interacting like a human being: a developmental and comparative perspective on calibrating requests

In his paper on the “human interaction engine”, Levinson famously asserted that, in social interaction, people’s responses “are to actions and intentions, not to behaviors” (2006: 45). Indeed human beings attribute intentions/goals to the production of signals and parsing other’s signals means simulating others’ mental worlds, at least to some degree.  But how do speakers calibrate their […]