anthropology

#266 Lyn Wadley: Archaeology, And The Evolution of Human Cognition

Dec 9, 2019

Dr. Lyn Wadley is jointly Honorary Professor of Archaeology in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, and the Evolutionary Studies Institute, at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She directs a Wits-recognized programme called ACACIA (Ancient Cognition and Culture in Africa). Her specialty is the African Stone Age: Middle Stone Age (which lasted from approximately 300,000 to 25,000 years ago) and Later Stone Age (the last 25,000 years). She began her career researching social and ecological issues during the past 25,000 years of the Later Stone Age in southern Africa. Data for her interpretations were obtained from sites in Namibia and South Africa. Dr. Wadley’s current research is dedicated to the cognition of people who lived in the Middle Stone Age. More»
#259 Tyler Volk: From Quarks to Culture

Nov 22, 2019

I’M SORRY ABOUT THE MISSING BITS OF AUDIO HERE AND THERE, BUT THE CONNECTION WAS A BIT WEAK. More»
#254 Michael Gurven: Division of Labor, Polygyny, and Personality Across Societies

Nov 11, 2019

Dr. Michael Gurven is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, chair of the Integrative Anthropological Sciences Unit, and also head of the Evolutionary Anthropology and Biodemography Research Group. He is an evolutionary anthropologist aiming to explain behavior and physiological systems as adaptive solutions to competing demands of limited resource allocation. He employs ethnographic field settings as laboratories for testing hypotheses about human variation in behavior, psychology and physiology. Currently his research focuses on two broad, inter-related areas: biodemography of human health, lifespan and aging; and transitions in social and economic behavior. More»
#253 Douglas Fry: Is War Part Of Human Nature?

Nov 8, 2019

Dr. Douglas P. Fry is Professor and Chair in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has written extensively on aggression, conflict, and conflict resolution in his own books and in journals such as Science and American Anthropologist. His work frequently engages the debate surrounding the origins of war, arguing against claims that war or lethal aggression is rooted in human evolution. He’s the author or editor of books like The Human Potential for Peace; Beyond War; War, Peace, and Human Nature; and Nurturing Our Humanity. More»
#239 Abigail Page: Cooperative Breeding, Social Networks, And Health In The Agta

Oct 7, 2019

Dr. Abigail Page is MRC Research Fellow at the Department of Population Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her research is focused on understanding the relationship between the environment (both social and natural) and behavior, and ultimately how this influences health and wellbeing. Her background is in evolutionary approaches to human behavior (in particular Human Behavioral Ecology), therefore her research seeks to test hypotheses developed from evolutionary theory and ultimately, to understand the function of any given behavior. Dr. Page’s interests are also influenced by Evolutionary Medicine and Applied Evolutionary Anthropology and Demography. More»
#237 Herbert Gintis: Altruism And Self-interest, As Revealed Through Game Theory

Oct 3, 2019

Dr. Herbert Gintis is External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He and Professor Robert Boyd (Anthropology, UCLA) headed a multidisciplinary research project that models such behaviors as empathy, reciprocity, insider/outsider behavior, vengefulness, and other observed human behaviors not well handled by the traditional model of the self-regarding agent. Professor Gintis is also author of several books including Game Theory Evolving, The Bounds of Reason, A Cooperative Species, Game Theory in Action, and Individuality and Entanglement and also coeditor, with Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, and Ernst Fehr, of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies, and with Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr of Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. More»
#228 Alex Mesoudi: Studying Cultural Evolution, Migration, And Transmission

Sep 12, 2019

Dr. Alex Mesoudi is an Associate Professor of Cultural Evolution at the Human Behaviour and Cultural Evolution Group at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus, UK. He studies cultural evolution, both in the lab and by constructing models and simulations of it. He’s also the author of the book Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences. More»
#223 Pascal Boyer: Minds Make Societies, Religion, and Conspiracy Theories

Aug 30, 2019

Dr. Pascal Boyer is the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He’s also the author of books like Religion Explained; Memory, Mind and Culture; and Minds Make Societies. More»
#219 Lee Cronk: Modern Cultural Anthropology, and Human Cooperation

Aug 22, 2019

Dr. Lee Cronk is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University. His research and teaching interests include human evolutionary ecology, including behavioral ecology, cultural ecology, and cognitive ecology; signaling theory; culture; and cooperation. Dr. Cronk is also affiliated with the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies, the Perceptual Science Graduate Training Program, and the Program in Evolutionary Biology. He is a member of the Evolutionary Anthropology Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the International Society for Human Ethology. Dr. Cronk is also co-director, with C. Athena Aktipis of Arizona State University, of the Human Generosity Project. He is author or co-author of three books, That Complex Whole: Culture and the Evolution of Human Behavior, From Mukogodo to Maasai: Ethnicity and Cultural Change in Kenya, and Meeting at Grand Central: Understanding the Social and Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation, and co-editor of two more, Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, and Through the Looking Glass: Readings in Anthropology. More»
#216 Thomas Morgan: Cultural Evolution And Transmission, And Cumulative Culture

Aug 15, 2019

Dr. Thomas Morgan is Assistant Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. His background is in the evolution of animal social behavior and cognition. He graduated from Cambridge with a bachelor's in zoology in 2009, focusing on vertebrate evolution and behavioral ecology. He completed his doctorate in 2013 at the University of St. Andrews working with Kevin Laland to carry out a series of experiments testing evolutionary hypotheses about human social learning. From 2014 to 2016, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Tom Griffiths in the computational cognitive science lab at University of California at Berkeley where he developed a new platform for large-scale online social experiments called Dallinger. He joined the Adaptation, Behavior, Culture and Society group at Arizona State Unviersity in August 2016. He’s interested in the psychological mechanisms that support culture and evolutionary explanations for how humans came to be. More»