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Katie Hinde – Mother’s Milk: Building Blocks and Blueprints for Infant BioBehavioral Development

Katie Hinde: Arizona State UniversityMother’s milk is more than a food full of essential nutrients and more than a medicine packed with protective immunofactors. Mother’s milk contains maternal signals- hormones- that influence infant metabolism, neurobiology, and behavior. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that hormones from the mother, ingested through milk, bind to receptors within […]

Julian Kapoor – Leks, Lies, and Audiotape: Dialects and Deception in a Tropical Hummingbird.

Julian Kapoor: Cornell UniversityAmong animals that develop signals through social learning, dialects – shared signals among a subset of individuals within a larger population – are nearly ubiquitous. Despite the prevalence of dialects across social animal species ranging from hummingbirds to whales to humans, the functional significance of such variation remains elusive; do dialects reflect […]

Ara Norenzayan – The Origins of Prosocial Religions and the Emergence of Large-Scale Cooperation and Conflict

Ara Norenzayan: University of British ColumbiaThe rise of large-scale cooperation and the spread of parochial-prosocial religions in the last 12 millennia are two longstanding puzzles, one of human psychology, and the other of cultural history. I present a theory, maintaining that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. It is grounded in the […]