Sam Bowles: Santa Fe InstituteAltruism -- benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself -- and parochialism – hostility toward individuals not of one’s own ethnic, racial or other group -- are common human behaviors. The intersection of the two – which we term parochial altruism -- is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because […]

Carol Padden & Mark Aronoff: UCSD, Stonybrook UWe report here on work we have carried out with colleagues Wendy Sandler and Irit Meir on an emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). ABSL developed de novo in a small closed community of Bedouins which is now in its third generation of signers. In this […]

Gary Marcus: NYU PsychologyIn fields ranging from reasoning to linguistics, the idea of humans as perfect, rational, optimal creatures is making a comeback – but should it be? Hamlet’s musings that the mind was “noble in reason ...infinite in faculty” have their counterparts in recent scholarly claims that the mind consists of an “accumulation of […]

Susan Perry: UCLA AnthropologyWhite-faced capuchin monkeys are best known for their innovation and traditions in the domain of social communication; however, social learning appears to play a role in the acquisition of their foraging techniques as well. In this talk, I explore several lines of evidence indicating social influence in food processing techniques. Several foods […]