All Episodes

#217 Maryanne Fisher: Evolutionary Psychology, Women, And Feminism

Aug 16, 2019

Dr. Maryanne Fisher is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, and a member of the Women and Gender Studies Program, at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Canada. Her research on how women compete for men has received international media attention, such as the BBC and Discovery Channel. She also investigates the determinants of women's physical attractiveness and what women want in a mate. She has published over 90 peer-reviewed journal articles primarily related to interpersonal relationships. She is an award-winning teacher, and was recognized by the Canadian Progress Club as a Woman of Excellent in the Division of Research and Education. She’s also the editor of Evolution's Empress: Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women. More»
#216 Thomas Morgan: Cultural Evolution And Transmission, And Cumulative Culture

Aug 15, 2019

Dr. Thomas Morgan is Assistant Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. His background is in the evolution of animal social behavior and cognition. He graduated from Cambridge with a bachelor's in zoology in 2009, focusing on vertebrate evolution and behavioral ecology. He completed his doctorate in 2013 at the University of St. Andrews working with Kevin Laland to carry out a series of experiments testing evolutionary hypotheses about human social learning. From 2014 to 2016, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Tom Griffiths in the computational cognitive science lab at University of California at Berkeley where he developed a new platform for large-scale online social experiments called Dallinger. He joined the Adaptation, Behavior, Culture and Society group at Arizona State Unviersity in August 2016. He’s interested in the psychological mechanisms that support culture and evolutionary explanations for how humans came to be. More»
#215 Peter Adamson: The Origins of Philosophy, and the Pre-Socratics

Aug 12, 2019

Dr. Peter Adamson is Professor of Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at King's College London. He has written articles, monographs and edited books, mostly on philosophy in the Islamic world and ancient philosophy. He is the host of the weekly podcast "History of Philosophy without any gaps", which by 2014 had more than four million downloads and led to the publication of a book series. He received the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2003, for "outstanding research achievements of young scholars of distinction and promise based in UK institutions" and received a grant from the same institution in 2010. More»
#214 Jonathon Crystal: Memory and Metacognition in Animal Models

Aug 9, 2019

Dr. Jonathon Crystal is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. His research focuses on developing animal models of cognition. His current work focuses on episodic memory, source memory, and prospective memory in rats. He has also developed rodent models to assess retrieval practice, working memory, and metacognition. He is currently the Editor of Learning & Behavior, and he recently served as President of the Comparative Cognition Society. More»
#213 Paulo Castro: Philosophy of Quantum Physics, Pilot Wave Theory, And the EmDrive

Aug 8, 2019

Dr. PauIo Castro graduated in Anthropology at the NOVA University of Lisbon in 1996 after studying Physics at the University of Lisbon. He taught Mathematics and IT in Secondary and Polythecnical schools. In 2014 he obtained his PhD in the Philosophy of Contemporary Thought at the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, with the dissertation “The Epistemology of Choice – On the possibility of artificial simulation of human intelligence”. In 2015 Dr. Castro became a member of the Center for Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon in the Philosophy of Nature Sciences Research Group, working on Philosophy of Quantum Physics. Recently, and pursuing more foundational questions in Physics, he’s started working on the Philosophy of Quantum Gravity. He is also very interested in both Artificial Intelligence and Environmental Philosophy, related to Sustainability. More»
#212 Donald Hoffman: The Case Against Reality; Perception, Consciousness, And Reality

Aug 5, 2019

Dr. Donald Hoffman is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and color, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem. He has co-authored two technical books: Observer Mechanics: A Formal Theory of Perception, and Automotive Lighting and Human Vision. He is just about to release a new book, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. More»
#206 Derek Leben: Ethics for Robots, Contractarianism, Self-Driving Cars

Aug 3, 2019

Dr. Derek Leben is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown. He works at the intersection of ethics, cognitive science, and emerging technologies. In his new book, Ethics for Robots, Dr. Leben argues for the use of a particular moral framework for designing autonomous systems based on the Contractarianism of John Rawls. He also demonstrates how this framework can be productively applied to autonomous vehicles, medical technologies, and weapons systems. More»
#211 Catherine Wilson: Epicureanism, Atomism, Materialism, And Modernity

Aug 2, 2019

Dr. Catherine Wilson was until recently Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, and is now teaching part-time at the City University of New York, and also a writer. She holds degrees in Philosophy from Yale, Oxford and Princeton and has taught in the USA, Canada, and Germany. Dr. Wilson teaches and writes in the history of modern philosophy and on early modern science and also works in the areas of ethics and aesthetics with a special interest in the evolution of morality and the science behind visual experience. She’s the author of books like Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity, and Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction, and Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy. More»
#210 Dwight Read: Cultural Kin Systems, And The Evolution Of Human Sociality

Aug 1, 2019

Dr. Dwight Read is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). His research interests include mathematical anthropology, the structural logic of kinship terminologies, theory of social organization, cultural evolution, and archaeological classification. He’s the author of books like Artifact Classification: A Conceptual and Methodological Approach, Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane, and How Culture Makes Us Human: Primate Social Evolution and the Formation of Human Societies. More»
#205 Laura Cabrera: The Philosophy of Human Enhancement

Jul 31, 2019

Dr. Laura Cabrera is Assistant Professor in the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences and the Department of Translational Science & Molecular Medicine at Michigan State University. Dr. Cabrera's interests focus on the ethical and societal implications of neurotechnology and neuroscientific advances. She has been working on projects that explore the media coverage and the attitudes of the general public toward pharmacological and novel neurosurgical interventions for the treatment of psychiatric disorders. She has also worked on the public perceptions towards the use of different modalities of neuromodifiers for enhancement purposes, as well as their normative implications. Her current work focuses on the ethical and social implications of environmental changes for brain and mental health. She’s also the author of the book Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies. More»