Mary Towner: UC Davis Department of AnthropologyCultural traits are distributed across human societies in a patterned way. Study of the mechanisms whereby cultural traits persist and change over time is key to understanding human cultural diversity. For more than a century, a central question has engaged anthropologists interested in the study of cultural trait variation—what […]

Mark Kleiman: UCLA Department of Public PolicyThe threat of punishment can facilitate cooperation by discouraging defection and aggression. Because punishment is scarce, costly, and painful, optimal enforcement strategies will minimize the amount of actual punishment required to effectuate deterrence. If potential offenders are deterrable, increasing the conditional probability of punishment (given violation) can reduce the […]

Hanna Kokko: University of Helsinki Department of Biological and Environmental SciencesI will present results on both `love´ (sexual selection) and `hatred´ (territorial conflict). In both cases I will investigate the role of `feedback´, that is, ask the question how strongly individual behaviour influences population dynamics, which then feeds back to influence what is adaptive at […]