All Episodes

#1017 Erica Cartmill: The Evolution of Ape Gestures and Human Language

Nov 8, 2024

Dr. Erica Cartmill is Professor of Cognitive Science, Anthropology, and Animal Behavior at Indiana University. She studies the acquisition and evolution of human language. Her work bridges the biological and linguistic subfields and involves both comparative and developmental approaches to communication. She is interested in how the multimodal aspects of communication contribute to and constrain the construction of meaning in spontaneous interaction. She is particularly interested in whether gesture played a role in the origins of human language. More»
#1016 Gail Dines: Is Pornography Harmful?

Nov 7, 2024

Dr. Gail Dines is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women's Studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Dines specializes in the study of pornography. She is CEO of Culture Reframed, a non-profit built to build resilience and resistance in kinds to pornography and hypersexualized media. created to address pornography as a public-health crisis. She is the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. More»
#1015 Julia Hermann: The Ethics of Artificial Wombs

Nov 4, 2024

Dr. Julia Hermann is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Twente where she works on ectogestative technology, care robots, technomoral change and progress, and new methodologies in the ethics of technology. More»
#1014 Walter Scheirer: A History of Fake Things on the Internet

Nov 1, 2024

Dr. Walter Scheirer is Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of A History of Fake Things on the Internet. More»
#1013 Aaron Lukaszewski: An Evolutionary Approach to Personality

Oct 31, 2024

Dr. Aaron Lukaszewski is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology & Center for the Study of Human Nature at California State University, Fullerton. His research topics include status hierarchy, leadership, group cooperation, personality variation, social comparison, social valuation, partner preferences, and anthropometrics. More»
#1012 Lance Grande - The Evolution of Religions: A History of Related Traditions

Oct 28, 2024

Dr. Lance Grande is a Distinguished Service Curator Emeritus at the Field Museum. Dr. Grande's research covers many aspects of fossil and living fishes, including the early development of North American freshwater fish fauna. Over the last 30 years, he has led numerous field trips to collect fossils from Fossil Lake, a 52-million-year-old lake bed in Wyoming. Studying these fossils, together with other well-preserved fossils and living species, allows Dr. Grande to investigate broad-scale questions about the history of the earth and its inhabitants and how they evolved together. He is the author of The Evolution of Religions: A History of Related Traditions. More»
#1011 Will Storr - The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It

Oct 25, 2024

Will Storr is a British author, journalist and former photographer. He has been a contributing editor at Esquire and GQ Australia. He is the author of several books, including The Science of Storytelling, and The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It. More»
#1010 Michael Price: The Biocultural Evolution of Religion, and Universal Darwinism

Oct 24, 2024

Dr. Michael Price is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Brunel University London. His past research has focused mainly on evolutionary moral psychology. More recently, his primary research interests have been the biological and biocultural evolution of religio-spirituality, and “Universal Darwinism”, which investigates the anti-entropic, creative power of Darwinian selection across all natural domains, from physics to biology to culture. More»
#1009 Jaroslava Valentova: Sexual Orientation, Gender Expression, and Physical Attractiveness

Oct 21, 2024

Dr. Jaroslava Valentova is a Professor Doctor at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. She has research experience in evolutionary psychology, anthropology and human ethology. Her primary research interest is human sexual orientation, and its proximate and ultimate causes. She further focuses on research of masculinity and femininity, differences between men and women in sexual strategies, sexual orientation attributions, mate preferences and mate choice and she has also been studying dynamics of long-term relationships, such as factors influencing relationship satisfaction, homogamy, complementarity, and jealousy. More»
#1008 Paul Smaldino: Modeling Social Behavior

Oct 18, 2024

Dr. Paul Smaldino is an Associate Professor of Cognitive & Information Sciences and faculty in the Quantitative and Systems Biology graduate program at the University of California Merced, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Analytic Political Engagement and the Center for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience. Extramurally, he is an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He studies how behaviors emerge and evolve in response to social, cultural, and ecological pressures, as well as how those pressures can themselves evolve. He is the author of Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution. More»