All Episodes

#645 Steven Churchill: Homo naledi, Australopithecus sediba, and Human Evolution

Jun 30, 2022

Dr. Steven Churchill is a Professor and past Chair of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University. He is also an Honorary Reader in the Evolutionary Studies Institute and Centre for Excellence in PalaeoSciences at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a paleontologist who studies the fossil record of human evolution, especially that of early members of our genus (Homo) that lived between about two million to ten thousand years ago. More»
#644 Mathias Clasen: The Evolutionary Psychology of Horror, Apocalyptic Stories, and Villains

Jun 27, 2022

Dr. Mathias Clasen is associate professor in literature and media at Aarhus University. He is the Director of the Recreational Fear Lab, and Associate Editor of Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. He studies horror fiction, and is the author of Why Horror Seduces, and A Very Nervous Person's Guide to Horror Movies. More»
#643 Masahiro Morioka - Manga Introduction to Philosophy; Life, Death, Time, and the Meaning of Life

Jun 24, 2022

Dr. Masahiro Morioka is a professor of philosophy and ethics at Waseda University, Japan. He is considered by many to be one of the most influential thinkers in the current Japanese philosophical community, along with Hitoshi Nagai (Nihon University), and Motoyoshi Irifuji (Aoyama Gakuin University). He is the director of Tokyo Philosophy Project, and the editor-in-chief of Journal of Philosophy of Life. He specializes in philosophy of life, life studies, bioethics, gender studies, and criticism of contemporary civilization. He is the author of books like Nihilism and the Meaning of Life: A Philosophical Dialogue with James Tartaglia, and Manga Introduction to Philosophy: An Exploration of Time, Existence, the Self, and the Meaning of Life. More»
#642 Douglas Kenrick & David Lundberg-Kenrick - Solving Modern Problems with a Stone-Age Brain

Jun 23, 2022

Dr. Douglas Kenrick is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. More»
#641 Robert Barton: The Evolution of the Primate Brain, The Visual Brain, and the Color Red

Jun 20, 2022

Dr. Robert Barton is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Member of the Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre at Durham University, UK. He is an evolutionary biologist/anthropologist interested in brains, behavior and cognition, using phylogenetic comparative methods to study how these traits evolved. He developed and tested the 'Visual brain hypothesis' for primate brain size evolution. He is currently interested in the underestimated role of the cerebellum in brain evolution and cognition. He also works on the evolutionary and cultural significance of the color red. More»
#640 Manvir Singh: Going Beyond the Nomadic-Egalitarian Model of Hunter-Gatherers

Jun 17, 2022

Dr. Manvir Singh is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse. His research program aims to explain why societies develop complex, recurrent traditions such as shamanism, witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance, music, and gods, as these have appeared in all types of societies across the globe, from nomadic hunter-gatherer bands to complex, industrial, mega-urbanized states. More»
#639 Leo Tiokhin: Producing Scientific Knowledge, and Improving the Social Sciences

Jun 16, 2022

Dr. Leo Tiokhin is Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Amsterdam, an Interdisciplinary Research Specialist at Strategic Alliance: TU/e, WUR, UU & UMC Utrecht, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Dr. Tiokhin is a meta-scientist who studies the forces that shape how scientists do their work and make inferences from the populations that they study. Much of his research focuses on how incentive structures affect scientific efficiency and reliability, and how we can improve the recognition and reward structures in science. More»
#638 Henkjan Honing: The Evolution, Cognition, and Neuroscience of Musicality and Music

Jun 13, 2022

Dr. Henkjan Honing is professor in Music Cognition at both the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He conducts his research under the auspices of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) and the University of Amsterdam's Brain and Cognition (ABC) Center. Dr. Honing is known as a passionate researcher in this new interdisciplinary field that gives us fundamental insights in the cognitive mechanisms underlying musicality. He published several books, including Music Cognition: The Basics (2021, Routledge), The Evolving Animal Orchestra: In Search of What Makes Us Musical (2019, The MIT Press)–, and an edited volume with a research agenda on musicality entitled The Origins of Musicality (2018, The MIT Press). More»
#637 Lars Sandman: Ethics in Healthcare, Priority Settings, and End-of-Life Decisions

Jun 10, 2022

Dr. Lars Sandman is Professor of Healthcare Ethics at Linköping University, and Director at National Centre for Priorities in Health, in Sweden. His research area is organizational ethics in healthcare, focusing on priority setting and ethical analysis of healthcare methods. He is the author of A Good Death: On the Value of Death and Dying. More»
#636 Dan Weijers: The Philosophy of Wellbeing and Happiness

Jun 9, 2022

Dr. Dan Weijers is a permanent Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy Programme at the University of Waikato, in New Zealand. His research specialties include normative ethics (especially hedonism, wellbeing, and experimental normative ethics), applied ethics (especially the ethics of prediction markets; e.g. PredictIt), and interdisciplinary happiness/wellbeing research (especially wellbeing and public policy, philosophy of happiness science, and conceptions of happiness). More»