Why divination? A salient cultural attractor, an explanatory model, and some lessons for how to understand the generation of culture Pascal Boyer Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Psychology​ and Henry Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory, Washington University in St. Louis Divination is a good example of a cultural attractor - almost all human […]

Representation and understanding in music across cultures Samuel Mehr The Music Lab and Department of Psychology, Harvard University Discovering the universal features of human musicality is a prerequisite for explaining the biological and cultural evolution of music. What is universal about our psychology of music, and what varies? In this talk I will present analyses […]

How social inequities create health inequities: An integration of social and biological mechanisms Zaneta Thayer Department of Anthropology and Ecology, Evolution, Environment & Society Program, Dartmouth College A remarkably consistent pattern of human variation is the social gradient in health. This is the observation that, both within and between societies, individuals who are socially disadvantaged […]