Christopher von Rueden: UCSB Department of AnthropologyThe relationship between social status and reproductive success in small-scale societies can provide insight into how natural selection may have acted on status-seeking behavior in ancestral human environments. With data from the Tsimane horticulturalists of Bolivia and other small-scale societies, I show that high male status increases lifetime fitness, […]

Andrew Delton: UCSB Department of Psychology and Center for Evolutionary PsychologyMembers of social species routinely make decisions that involve welfare allocations—decisions that impact the welfare of two or more parties. These decisions often involve welfare tradeoffs such that increasing one organism’s welfare comes at the expense of another organism’s welfare. In this talk, I present […]

Polly Wiessner: University of Utah Department of AnthropologyIndoctrinability, the capacity to be inculcated with values or doctrines and to accept them uncritically, poses an evolutionary puzzle because it can lead individuals to voluntarily sacrificing immediate individual interest for a belief, cause, or group. I will briefly explore the cognitive capacities underlying indoctrinability. Then I will […]

Daniel M.T. Fessler: UCLA Department of AnthropologyThe evolutionary study of mind and behavior has benefited enormously from the functionality heuristic, i.e., the assumption that mental mechanisms can usefully be understood as well-designed solutions to recurrent adaptive problems. While virtually every investigator in this area acknowledges the importance of Tinbergen’s (1963) Four Levels of Explanation, in […]