Edward Slingerland: University of British Columbia Department of Asian Studies, Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied CognitionCalls to "vertically integrate" (Tooby & Cosmides) or achieve "consilience" (E.O. Wilson) between the sciences and the humanities have, for the most part, been received with a great deal of hostility by humanists. This talk explores some […]

Eric Alden Smith: University of Washington Department of AnthropologyCollective action with low relatedness (large-n, low-r cooperation) is a common feature of human societies, in marked contrast to patterns in other species. This is particularly puzzling for small-scale societies of foragers and horticulturalists, where formal social institutions to enforce collective action are weak or absent. There […]

Doug Kenrick: Arizona State University Department of PsychologyThe human mind processes information in a famously selective and shockingly biased way. Who and what do we select for attention, encoding, and retrieval, and how, why, and when do we distort certain kinds of information in certain ways and not others? My colleagues and I have been […]

Elizabeth Pillsworth: CSU Fullerton Department of AnthropologyDarwin's theory of sexual selection emphasizes the role of female mate choice in shaping male morphology and behavior. In evolutionary psychology, the model of female choice has served as one organizing feature of research on human mating. However, in many human societies women are reported to have very little […]

Carlos Navarrete: Michigan State University Department of Psychology & Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior ProgramIntergroup aggression perpetrated by men has been a persistent feature of human societies for centuries, and may have been common enough over evolutionary time to have allowed selection to shape the neural circuitry underlying the psychology of prejudice. Because intergroup aggression poses […]

Quentin Atkinson: University of Oxford Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary AnthropologyLanguages, like species, evolve. Words and phrases compete for our favour in a struggle for existence that is analogous to natural selection. Words that survive are passed on from generation to generation in a process of descent with modification. This process has generated the thousands […]