Latest Past Events

James Fowler – Genes and Social Networks

James Fowler: UCSD Political Science DepartmentSocial networks exhibit strikingly systematic patterns across a wide range of human contexts. While genetic variation accounts for a significant portion of the variation in many complex social behaviors, the heritability of egocentric social network attributes is unknown. Here we show that three of these attributes (in-degree, transitivity, and centrality) […]

Karthik Panchanathan – Quantifying the Bystander Effect in a Multi-Player Dictator Game

Karthik Panchanathan: UCLA Department of AnthropologyBehavioral economics studies have shown people to have other-regarding social preferences. In the Dictator Game, for example, dictators transfer some portion of their endowment to recipients, who start out without an endowment. If people were self-interested, those assigned the role of dictator would keep all of their endowment; those assigned […]

Caleb Finch – The Role of Diet and Infection in Human Evolution

Caleb Finch: USC Davis School of GerontologyHuman lifespans have increased remarkably from the 20 year life expectancy (LE) of the great apes. The normative 40 y LE of pre-industrial peoples has recently risen to about 80 y in privileged populations during the last 200 years. I propose that diet and infections are key to understanding […]