All Episodes

#124 Robert Plomin: Blueprint, Genetics, Environment, Clinical Psychology, and Gene Editing

Jan 11, 2019

Dr. Robert Plomin is Professor of Behavioural Genetics at the Social Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Center at King’s College London, and Research Professor at the Medical Research Council (MRC). He’s one of the leading figures in the entire field of Behavioral Genetics. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Dr. Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. And he’s also the author of many books, including Behavioral Genetics: A Primer (1989), Separate Lives: Why Siblings Are So Different (1992), Nature And Nurture: An Introduction To Human Behavioral Genetics (2004), Nature and Nurture During Infancy and Early Childhood (2006), G Is for Genes (2013), and, the most recent one, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (2018). More»
#123 David Sloan Wilson: Evolution, Contextual Behavioral Science, Religion, and Group Selection

Jan 10, 2019

Dr. David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He applies evolutionary theory to all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life, both in his own research and as director of the Evolution Institute, a unique campus-wide evolutionary studies program that recently received NSF funding to expand into a nationwide consortium. His books include Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society; Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives; The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time and Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others; and a recently edited book, Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science. More»
#122 Mark Blyth: Austerity, The European Union, Inequality, and Global Trumpism

Jan 7, 2019

Dr. Mark Blyth is William R. Roads Professor of International Economics at Brown University. His research interests lie in the field of international political economy. More specifically, his research trespasses several fields and aims to be as interdisciplinary as possible, drawing from political science, economics, sociology, complexity theory, and evolutionary theory. His work falls into several related areas: the politics of ideas, how institutions change, political parties, and the politics of finance. He’s also the author of books like Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century, and Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. More»
#121 Alan Fiske: The Four Relational Models, Virtuous Violence, and Morality

Jan 4, 2019

Dr. Alan Fiske is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He’s a psychological anthropologist studying how natural selection, neurobiology, ontogeny, psychology, and culture jointly shape human sociality. He’s also the author of the books Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations, and Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships. More»
#120 Michael Bang Petersen: Evolution, Emotions, Groups, and Politics

Jan 3, 2019

Dr. Michael Bang Petersen is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, in Denmark. He also directs The Politics and Evolution Lab (PoNE Lab) there. He investigates how the adaptive challenges of human evolutionary history shape the way modern citizens think about mass politics. More»
#119 Terrence Deacon: Incomplete Nature, from Physics to Mind

Dec 31, 2018

Dr. Terrence Deacon is currently Professor of Anthropology and member of the Cognitive Science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. His theoretical interests include the study of evolution-like processes at multiple levels, including their role in embryonic development, neural signal processing, language change, social processes, and focusing especially on how these different processes interact and depend on each other. Professor Deacon's research has combined human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition. He’s the author of The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain, and his most recent book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, explores the relationship between thermodynamic, self-organizing, evolutionary and semiotic processes and provides a new technical conception of information that explains both its representational and normative properties. More»
#118 Lee Ross: Fundamental Attribution Error, Naïve Realism, and Politics

Dec 28, 2018

Dr. Lee Ross is a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and co-founder of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation. He’s been the recipient of several awards. The author of three influential books, Human Inference and the Person and the Situation (both with Richard Nisbett) and, more recently, The Wisest One in the Room (with Thomas Gilovich), and many highly cited papers. His research on attributional biases and shortcomings in human inference has exerted a major impact in social psychology and the field of human inference, judgment and decision-making. Among the phenomena he identified and has explored are the fundamental attribution error, the false consensus effect, reactive devaluation, the hostile media phenomenon, and the convictions of naïve realism. More»
#117 Wendy Johnson: Genetics and Environment in Personality and Intelligence

Dec 27, 2018

Dr. Wendy Johnson is Professor of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. She also holds the Chair in Differential Development in the University of Edinburgh's Department of Psychology and Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology. She is known for her research on human intelligence and personality. In 2004, the International Society for Intelligence Research honored her with its John B. Carroll Award for Research Methodology. In 2011, she received the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology, in recognition of her work on the individual differences of intelligence and personality. Topics of her research include: structure of intelligence and personality, life-span development of intelligence and personality, health and aging, genetic and environmental transactions and their influence on behavior, intelligence, and personality. More»
#116 Colin Holbrook: Threat Detection, Group Prejudice, Warfare, and Religion

Dec 24, 2018

Dr. Colin Holbrook is Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He researches decision-making under contexts of threat, with particular focus on political orientation, group prejudice, and the representation of mental states. More»
#115 Alexander Rosenberg: Theory of Mind, History, Mental Illusions, and Nihilism

Dec 21, 2018

Dr. Alexander Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He has been a visiting professor and fellow at the Center for the Philosophy of Science, at the University of Minnesota, as well as the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Oxford University, and a visiting fellow of the Philosophy Department at the Research School of Social Science, of the Australian National University. In 2016 he was the Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol. He has held fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In 1993, Dr. Rosenberg received the Lakatos Award in the philosophy of science. In 2006-2007 he held a fellowship at the National Humanities Center. He was also the Phi Beta Kappa-Romanell Lecturer for 2006-2007. He’s the author of both fictional and non-fictional literature, including The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, The Girl from Krakow, and How History Gets Things Wrong. More»