Latest Past Events

Robert Provine – From Laughter to Speech Evolution: A Bipedal Perspective

Robert Provine: University of MarylandAfter an introduction to the nature and use of laughter in daily life, discussion turns to the evolution of laughter and its implications for the emergence of speech. Contrasts between human and chimpanzee laughter reveal that laughter is the ritualized signal of labored breathing of rough-and-tumble, with the vocalization representing the […]

John Tooby – Political Epidemiology, History, and the Evolutionary Psychology of Outrage.

John Tooby: UCSBDon’t shoot! Rodney King. Remember the Maine. The Reichstag Fire. Guernica. The War of Jenkins Ear. The murder of Emmet Till. Events in which one or more members of one group injure the welfare of one or more members of another group (“outrages”) typically provoke extraordinarily strong and frequently violent responses directed more […]

Eduardo Fernandez-Duque – The Importance of Food, Jealousy, and Paternal Care in the Evolution of Owl Monkey Monogamy

Eduardo Fernandez-Duque: Yale UniversityI will discuss published and new data from a population of monogamous owl monkeys in the Argentinean Chaco that we have been studying for almost 20 years to examine the hypothesis that social monogamy is a default social system imposed upon males because the spatial and/or temporal distribution of resources and females […]