Dora Costa, Matthew Kahn - Heroes, Cowards, and Beyond
2011-10-03 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Dora Costa, Matthew Kahn: UCLAIn Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War we used the life histories of more than forty thousand Civil War soldiers to discover when people are willing to sacrifice for the common good, what are the benefits of friendship, and what are the costs and benefits of being in a diverse community. We discuss these themes as well as the role of leadership in eliciting sacrifice, the role of social networks in mediating wartime stress, and the scarring effects of wartime experiences.

Alyssa Crittenden - The ontogeny of prosocial behavior: foraging and food sharing among Hadza hunter-gatherer children
2011-10-10 00:00
Alyssa Crittenden: UNLVHuman prosociality is one of the defining characteristics of our species, yet the developmental origins of altruistic behavior remain little understood. The evolution of widespread food sharing in humans helped shape cooperation, family formation, life history, language, and the development of economies of scale. While the behavioral and ecological correlates of food sharing among adults are widely studied, very little is known about what motivates children to share food. Here, in the first study to analyze food collection and distribution of hunter-gatherer children, a higher degree of genetic relatedness between sharing partners correlates with both a higher frequency of sharing and a greater amount of food shared. Among genetically unrelated sharing partners, reciprocity appears to motivate food sharing. These results support recent suggestions that prosocial behaviors and egalitarianism develop strongly in middle childhood when children acquire the normative rules of their society. http://www.bec.ucla.edu/crittenden_ucla_oct_2011.pdf

Andrew Shtulman - Cognitive constraints on the understanding and acceptance of evolution
2011-10-17 00:00
Andrew Shtulman: OccidentalEvolution by natural selection is a theory that has unified the biological sciences but divided the general public. In this talk, I shall discuss how early-emerging, essentialist constraints on the conceptualization of biological kinds impedes learning about population-level phenomena like evolution and natural selection. Data from cognitive studies (Shtulman, 2006), developmental studies (Shtulman & Schulz, 2008) and teaching-intervention studies (Shtulman & Calabi, 2011) all suggest that students initially construe evolution as the uniform transformation of all species members – a view consistent with early views of evolution in the history of science (Mayr, 1982). Only through specialized instruction are students able to replace their “transformational” misconceptions with a correct, “variational” view of evolution, in which evolution is construed as the selective propagation of within-species variation. This transition is marked not only by an increased understanding of what evolution is but also by an increased willingness to accept evolution as true.

Derek Penn - Why Are We So Odd? Explaining the Discontinuity Between Human and Nonhuman Minds
2011-10-24 00:00
Derek Penn: UCLAHuman animals– and no other– build fires and wheels, diagnose each other’s illnesses, communicate using symbols, risk their lives for ideals, collaborate with others, explain the world in terms of unobservable causes, punish strangers for breaking the rules, worship ghosts and teach each other how to do all of the above.
Why are we so odd?
In this talk, I will explore what we now know (and don’t know) about the discontinuity between extant human and nonhuman minds. I will argue that this cognitive discontinuity runs much deeper than language, culture, a prosocial disposition or a “Theory of Mind” alone can explain. And I will sketch out a functional specification of where the root of the discontinuity might lie.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/penn-2011.pdf

Robin Nelson - Contextualizing Kinship: A Bio-cultural Study of Families and Health in Jamaica
2011-10-31 00:00
Robin Nelson: UCRIn this talk, I will explore the extent to which variability in the quality of familial and social relationships is correlated to the phenotypic expression of biological indicators of health status for adults and children. This research applies theories popularized in evolutionary ecology to a study of sociality and health in Manchester Parish, Jamaica. Using ethnographic methods, I identified culturally salient aspects of investment relationships amongst a lower class study population. Jamaica’s unstable economic climate necessitates increased investment from social and familial contacts and thus, provides the framework for studies of this received investment. Health outcomes were measured using anthropometric and immunological analyses. In this presentation, I will discuss my findings regarding the impact of a variety of investment relationships on health outcomes for (1) adults who are involved in romantic relationships and (2) adults who were children during the post-colonial era in Jamaica and (3) a recent study of children living in state-sponsored orphanages. These findings suggest that investment relationships in Jamaica, specifically with relatives, serve as one important factor in the maintenance of good individual health. These relationships are particularly important in the context of Jamaica’s risky and unstable economic environment.
