All Episodes

#317 Khandis Blake: Evolution, Income Inequality, Female Competition, And Feminism

Apr 6, 2020

Dr. Khandis Blake is an evolutionary social psychologist at The University of Melbourne. She is an expert in gendered conflict. Her research considers how behavior, attitudes, and culture associated with gender are influenced by the interplay between nature, nurture, and the state of the economy. Herself and her collaborators propose that gendered phenomena such as inimate partner violence, attitudes toward abortion, and male-male aggression arise partially out of market conditions that shift the bargaining power between men and women. Second, she investigates the causes and consequences of female competition and the conditions under which female sexualization elevates women's agency. Third, she develops methodological tools to advance the psychosocial study of female ovulation and ovarian hormones. Finally, she is interested in the social contexts eliciting aggression, especially male-to-female aggression and intimate partner violence. More»
#316 Colin Wright: Insect Personality, And The New Evolution Deniers

Apr 3, 2020

Dr. Colin Wright is Eberly Fellow in the Department of Biology at Pennsylvania State University. His research explores the effects of animal personality on collective behavior and colony success. Using a combination of laboratory and field experiments, he tests for relationships between group personality composition, inter-colony differences in collective behavior and behavioral flexibility, and colony performance. He uses social spiders (genus Stegodyphus) and paper wasps (genus Polistes) to probe these topics. More»
#315 Edward Hagen: Anthropology, And The Bargaining Model of Depression And Suicide

Apr 2, 2020

Dr. Edward Hagen is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Washington State University. His research takes an evolutionary approach to non-infectious diseases, with a focus on mental health. He investigates tobacco use in the larger context of human use of plant secondary compounds. He investigates depression, suicide, and deliberate self-harm as potential signaling strategies. Child growth and development is a research theme that grew out of his work on postpartum depression. He has also recently begun testing evolutionary models of leadership, as part of his more general interest in the evolution of human social organization. Finally, he has published a number of theoretical papers on evolutionary approaches to ontogeny, cognition, and behavior. More»
#314 Zanna Clay: Bonobo Societies, And Comparative Psychology

Mar 30, 2020

Dr. Zanna Clay is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Durham University. She is a comparative and developmental psychologist with expertise in primatology. She studies and compares great apes and young children in order to investigate the evolutionary and developmental basis of hominid social cognition and behavior. Her main interests are the development & evolution of social cognition and communication, focusing on empathy, language and social learning. More»
#313 Robert Kelly: The Fifth Beginning, And The Lifeways Of Hunter-Gatherers

Mar 27, 2020

Dr. Robert Kelly is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Kelly has shaped and contributed much to our understanding of hunter-gatherer societies. He has a deep interest in Western North American archaeology, especially in the Great Basin area. Current understanding of hunter-gatherer mobility and foraging patterns are also influenced strongly by his research, fieldwork, and ethnology. By examining the Pleistocene colonization of the Americas by examining artifacts and lithic technology, Dr. Kelly reconstructs past life-ways and compares them to current foraging societies, and examines human adaptation to climate change during different periods in the past. He’s the author of books like The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways, and The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us about Our Future. More»
#312 Sven Nyholm - Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and Anthropomorphism

Mar 26, 2020

Dr. Sven Nyholm is an Assistant Professor of Philosophical Ethics at Utrecht University. His main areas of research are applied ethics (especially the ethics of technology), ethical theory, and the history of ethics. More specifically, he has recently published on love-relationships and biomedical enhancements, sex robots, motivation-enhancements, accident-algorithms for self-driving cars, deep brain stimulation, happiness and well-being, meaning in life, and interpersonal respect and moral reasoning. His work also focuses on the ethics of automated driving, human-robot collaboration, deep brain stimulation (including its effect on the self), and disability and the goods of life. He is especially interested in how robotization and other types of automation affect traditional human values, as well as in existential questions raised by new technological developments. He has a new book coming out, Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and Anthropomorphism. More»
#311 Renee Magnan: Health, Affect, Physical Activity, And Addiction

Mar 23, 2020

Dr. Renee Magnan is Associate Professor and Director of Experimental Training in the Department of Psychology at Washington State University. She applies social psychological theory to address issues in preventive health behaviors and health behavior promotion. Specifically, much of the research in her lab focuses on understanding the role that affect (e.g., worry) plays on health decisions and behavior (e.g., smoking cessation, exercise, cannabis). She is interested in both how one’s feelings about health behaviors may influence their decisions to engage in health behavior and also how health behaviors may influence one’s feelings. Both perspectives can provide important insight to identify targets for interventions to prevent negative health consequences and promote wellness. More»
#310 Hal Whitehead: The Sociality And Culture Of Whales

Mar 20, 2020

Dr. Hal Whitehead is Professor in the Department of Biology at Dalhousie University. His work focuses mainly on the behavior, ecology, population biology and conservation of two species of deep-diving whale: the sperm and northern bottlenose. He and his team have ongoing research projects on sperm whales in the eastern Pacific (since 1985) and Atlantic (since 2004) on northern bottlenose whales off Nova Scotia (since 1998), and on pilot whales off Nova Scotia Isince 1998). They spend periods of weeks at sea on board ocean-going sailing boats collecting acoustic, visual, photographic, genetic and oceanographic data. More»
#309 Robert Sapolsky: Human Behavior, Evolution, Morality, and Free Will

Mar 19, 2020

Dr. Robert Sapolsky is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology and Professor of Neurology and of Neurosurgery at Stanford University. Dr. Sapolsky is the author of several informative and comical books that present cutting edge psychoneurobiological knowledge in an enjoyable, easy to read format. He's also a renowned researcher and award-winning professor at Stanford University. He’s the author of books like Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament, A Primate's Memoir, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. More»
#308 Pedro Galvão: O Que É A Ética? + Aborto E Eutanásia

Mar 16, 2020

GRAVADA NO DIA 6 DE JANEIRO DE 2020. More»