All Episodes

#734 Helena Miton: Cognitive Science, Cultural Transmission, and Tacit Knowledge

Jan 23, 2023

Dr. Helena Miton is Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Miton’s research agenda approaches culture as an emergent effect of human everyday life. It aims to understand how individuals interact to produce, organize and transmit cultural systems. Aiming to redefine how we study culture, her research program includes both theoretical advances and empirical case studies. She studies cultural evolution using data from human and social sciences, with a strong emphasis on cognitive science. She plans on investigating how characteristics of small-scale interactions can impact cultural productions at larger scales, in the context of both technical knowledge and economic practices. More»
#733 Andrew Knoll - A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters

Jan 20, 2023

Dr. Andrew Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. Dr. Knoll’s research focuses on the early evolution of life, Earth’s environmental history, and, especially, the interconnections between the two. For the past decade, he has served on the science team for NASA’s MER mission to Mars. Professor Knoll’s honors include the Walcott Medal and the Mary Clark Thompson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science (for his 2003 book Life on a Young Planet), the Moore Medal of the Society for Sedimentary Geology, the Paleontological Society Medal, and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London. Dr. Knoll is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Microbiology. He is the author of A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters. More»
#732 Jonas Olson: Ethics, Moral Error Theory, Abolitionism, Moral Nihilism, and Practical Philosophy

Jan 19, 2023

Dr. Jonas Olson is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University. His research areas include metaethics and related subjects. More»
#731 Clara Mattei The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

Jan 16, 2023

Dr. Clara Mattei is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of The New School for Social Research, and was a 2018-2019 member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Her research contributes to the history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making. She is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. More»
#730 Victoria Dougherty: Science and Literature, Character Development, Realism, and Free Speech

Jan 13, 2023

Victoria Dougherty is the author of The Bone Church, Welcome to the Hotel Yalta, and Cold. She writes fiction, drama, and essays that revolve around lovers, killers, curses, and destinies. Her work has been published or profiled in the New York Times, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. Earlier in her career, while living in Prague, she co-founded Black Box Theater, translating, producing, and acting in several Czech plays. Her blog – COLD – features her short essays on faith, family, love, and writing. WordPress, the blogging platform that hosts some 70 million blogs worldwide, has singled out COLD as one of the Top 50 Recommended Blogs by writers or about writing. More»
#729 Gregory Forth - Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid

Jan 12, 2023

Dr. Gregory Forth received his doctorate at Oxford and was a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta for more than three decades. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and is the author of more than one hundred scholarly papers and several academic books. His latest book is Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid. More»
#728 Filipe Nobre Faria: The Evolutionary Limits of Liberalism

Jan 9, 2023

Dr. Filipe Nobre Faria currently works as a researcher in ethics and political philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy of the Nova University of Lisbon (IFILNOVA). Furthermore, he lectures on subjects of his expertise at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences/Nova. His main research interest lies in applying the insights of the behavioral and evolutionary sciences to issues in social and political philosophy. He is the author of The Evolutionary Limits of Liberalism: Democratic Problems, Market Solutions and the Ethics of Preference Satisfaction. More»
#727 Robert Talisse: Political Philosophy, Pragmatism, Democracy, and Liberalism

Jan 6, 2023

Dr. Robert Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. His main area of research is political philosophy, with an emphasis on democratic theory and liberalism. More»
#726 Cristina Moya: Ethnic Categories, and Social Effects on Reproduction

Jan 5, 2023

Dr. Cristina Moya is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is an evolutionary anthropologist interested in how humans respond adaptively to culturally structured social worlds. Two main foci of her research are: intergroup interactions and social cognition; and cross-cultural variation in social effects on reproduction. More»
#725 Sarah Mathew: Human Sociality, Cooperation, Reciprocity, and Warfare

Jan 2, 2023

Dr. Sarah Mathew is Associate Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. She studies the evolution of human ultra-sociality and the role of culture in enabling it. She is especially interested in how humans evolved the capacity to cooperate with millions of genetically unrelated individuals, and how this links to the origins of moral sentiments, prosocial behavior, norms, and large-scale warfare. To address these issues, she directs a theoretically-informed field research program among the Turkana, a subsistence pastoral society in Kenya who cooperate at a large scale, including in lethal interethnic raids, without formal centralized political institutions. More»