All Episodes

#480 Vibeke Ottesen: The Evolution of Homicide, Filicide, and Neonaticide

Jun 10, 2021

Dr. Vibeke Ottesen is a Norwegian criminologist with an interest in how nature and nurture combined create human behavior. She has a popular science blog – Biosocial - where she comments on news, scientific findings and literature relevant to her subject – more often than not with an evolutionary informed approach to understanding the subject matter. She has held numerous lectures on the benefits of an evolutionary informed approach to understanding the cross-cultural sex and age differences in anti-social and criminal behavior. More»
#479 James Cortada - Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America

Jun 7, 2021

Dr. James W. Cortada is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. He worked at IBM for thirty-eight years in sales, consulting, managerial, and research positions. He is the author of books like Information and the Modern Corporation, and Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America. More»
#478 Cari Goetz: Mate Preferences, Mate Value, the EEA, and Evolutionary Mismatch

Jun 4, 2021

Dr. Cari D. Goetz is Associate Professor of Psychology at California State University, San Bernardino. She does research in Evolutionary Psychology, specifically human mating strategies and mating-related psychology. More»
#477 Ilana Redstone - Unassailable Ideas, Social Media, and Discourse in American Higher Education

Jun 3, 2021

Dr. Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Redstone's work has focused on legal permanent residents to the United States. Using a quantitative analytic approach, she has addressed questions surrounding a variety of dimensions of immigrant adaptation to the U.S. She has also written on the discipline of Sociology and the divisions therein. Dr. Redstone's current work focuses on campus climate and viewpoint diversity. She is the author of Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education. More»
#476 Edward Slingerland - Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

May 31, 2021

Dr. Edward Slingerland is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He’s the Director of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), the Director of the Database of Religious History (DRH), and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC). His most recent book is Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. More»
#475 Lee McIntyre - The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience

May 28, 2021

Dr. Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. He is interested in comparative methodology across the natural and social sciences. He is the author of books like Post-Truth, and The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience. More»
#474 Andrew Norman - Mental Immunity; Reason, Critical Thinking, Beliefs, and Morality

May 27, 2021

Dr. Andrew Norman teaches philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He works on the conceptual and historical foundations of humanism. He has published widely on the nature of reason and the teaching of wisdom, and written books on critical thinking and the structure of dialogue. Dr. Andrew Norman is the former Director of CMU’s Ethics, History and Public Policy program, and is interested in constructive engagement with the religious and in developing naturalistic alternatives to destructive religious mythologies. He speaks regularly on such topics as reason and faith, science and religion, the foundations of ethics, and the evolutionary, cultural, and attitudinal roots of prosocial behavior. He is the author of Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. More»
#473 George Yancey: Racism in the US, and Anti-Christian Hostility

May 24, 2021

Dr. George Yancey is a Professor of Sociology at the Baylor University. He has published several research articles on the topics of institutional racial diversity, racial identity, academic bias, progressive Christians and anti-Christian hostility. His books include Compromising Scholarship, What Motivates Cultural Progressives, There is no God, So Many Christians, So Few Lions (Rowman and Littlefield) a book that assess Christianophobia in the United States. More»
#472 Aiyana Koka Willard: Religion, Cognition, Culture, and Human Universals

May 21, 2021

Dr. Aiyana Koka Willard is a Lecturer in the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London. Her research focuses around the culture and cognitive origins of supernatural and religious beliefs. She is particularly interested in how thinking about minds and causal reasoning is related to supernatural beliefs. Her current research focuses on witchcraft, karma, and evil eye beliefs. More»
#471 Darcia Narvaez: Moral Development, and Flourishing

May 20, 2021

Dr. Darcia Narvaez is a Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Notre Dame. She has written extensively on issues of character and moral development. Dr. Narvaez’ research explores questions of species-typical and species-atypical development in terms of wellbeing, morality, and sustainable wisdom. She examines how early life experience (the evolved nest) influences moral functioning and wellbeing in children and adults. She integrates evolutionary, anthropological, neurobiological, clinical, developmental and education sciences in her work. Her 2014 book - Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality - won the 2015 William James Book Award from the APA and the 2017 Expanded Reason Award for research. She also writes a popular blog for Psychology Today called “Moral Landscapes.” More»