Cailin O'Connor: University of California IrvineWhy do some groups get more and others less? And why is this sort of pattern so pervasive across human cultures? In this talk, I'll discuss cultural evolutionary modeling work that address these questions. In particular, I look at the dynamics of bargaining and coordination in cultural evolution when groups […]
Josh Armstrong: UCLAContemporary linguistic theory takes the generative features of language use as a central focus of study. Many linguists—most notably Noam Chomsky—have maintained that explaining these generative features of language requires an appeal to a human language faculty or a universal grammar: a biologically guided, species-typical, set of cognitive procedures for building linguistic meanings […]
Rafael Nuñez: University of California San DiegoIs there a biologically endowed capacity specific for number and arithmetic? A widely accepted view in cognitive neuroscience, child psychology, and animal cognition gives an unproblematic ‘yes’ for an answer to this question, claiming that there is a biologically evolved capacity specific for number and arithmetic that humans share […]
