All Episodes

#274 Kevin Mitchell - Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are

Dec 27, 2019

Dr. Kevin Mitchell is Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He is interested in the development of connectivity in the brain, specifically in how this process is controlled by genes and how mutations in such genes affect the connectivity of neuronal circuits, influence behavior and perception and contribute to disease. His research group uses genetic approaches in the mouse to address these questions, and they are also involved in collaborative research looking at the genetics and phenotypic manifestations of synaesthesia and schizophrenia in humans. He’s the author of a book that came out last year, Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are. More»
#273 David Puts: Sexual Dimorphism, Sexual Orientation, And Female Orgasm

Dec 26, 2019

Dr. David Puts is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Puts studies the neuroendocrine and evolutionary bases of human sexuality and sex differences, with special focus on behavior and psychology. His research topics include the influence of sex hormones on psychology, behavior, and anatomy; hormonal and genetic influences on sexual differentiation; sexual selection and the evolution of sex differences in voices, faces, bodies, brains, and behavior; the development and evolution of variation in sexual orientation; and the evolution of female orgasm. More»
#272 Peter Ungar: The Evolution Of Teeth, And Our Diet

Dec 23, 2019

Dr. Peter S. Ungar is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Director of Environmental Dynamics at the University of Arkansas. His research focuses on paleoecology and teeth. He’s the author of books like Mammal Teeth, Evolution’s Bite, and of textbooks like Human Diet: Its Origin and Evolution. More»
#271 Alice Eagly: The Psychology Of Gender, and Gender Equality

Dec 20, 2019

Dr. Alice H. Eagly is Emerita Professor of Psychology and of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University. She currently holds the James Padilla Chair for Arts and Sciences and a Faculty Fellowship for the Institute of Policy Research at Northwestern University. Her primary research contributions have been in the area of social psychology, as well as personality psychology and Industrial Organizational Psychology. Her research interests include the psychology of gender, especially sex differences and similarities in leadership, prosocial behavior, aggression, partner preferences, and sociopolitical attitudes. She’s also interested in the content of stereotypes; social role theory as a theory of sex differences and similarities and of the origins of sex differences in social behavior; and attitude theory and research, especially attitudinal selectivity in information processing. More»
#270 Christopher Stringer: The Past and Future of Human Evolution

Dec 19, 2019

Dr. Christopher Stringer is a British physical anthropologist noted for his work on human evolution. He is a Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum. His early research was on the relationship of Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe, but through his work on the Recent African Origin model for modern human origins, he now collaborates with archaeologists, dating specialists, and geneticists in attempting to reconstruct the evolution of modern humans globally. He has excavated at sites in Britain and abroad, and he directed the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project from 2001 until it finished in 2013. Now he’s co-director of the follow-up Pathways to Ancient Britain project, as part of their funding from the Calleva Foundation, which has also contributed to the foundation of their new Centre for Human Evolution Research. As well as many scientific papers, he’s also written a number of books, most recently, Britain: one million years of the human story (2014, with Rob Dinnis) and Our Human Story (2018, with Louise Humphrey). More»
#269 Colin Allen: Minds, Cognition, and Cognitive Ethology

Dec 16, 2019

Dr. Colin Allen is Distinguished Professor, and Director of Graduate Admissions in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Allen's main areas of research concern the philosophical foundations of cognitive science and neuroscience. He is particularly interested in the scientific study of cognition in nonhuman animals and computers, and he has published widely on topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and artificial intelligence. More»
#268 Stephen Sanderson: Gender Roles, Marriage, And Parenthood Across Societies

Dec 13, 2019

Dr. Stephen K. Sanderson is an American sociologist. He was a professor of sociology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Since 2007 he has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside. His areas of focus include comparative sociology, historical sociology, sociological theory and sociocultural evolution. He is a specialist in sociological theory and comparative and historical sociology and is one of the leading sociologists to develop a Darwinian understanding of human society. He has written or edited ten books, including “The Evolution of Human Sociality: A Darwinian Conflict Perspective”, “Evolutionism and Its Critics”, “Human Nature and the Evolution of Society”, and “Religious Evolution and the Axial Age”. More»
#267 Richard Jean So: Cultural Analytics, Literary Studies, And Race

Dec 12, 2019

Dr. Richard Jean So is Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Analytics at McGill University in Montreal. Previously, he served as an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he co-founded the university's first digital humanities lab ("Textual Optics Lab"). He earned his BA at Brown University in English and Economics, and PhD in English at Columbia University. More recently, he has retrained in Computer Science at the University of Washington, and Statistics at the University of Michigan. Broadly, he works in the fields of cultural analytics and American culture, with a particular focus on race and inequality. Increasingly, he also works on the Internet and social media. His first book was Transpacific Community: America, China and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network. More»
#266 Lyn Wadley: Archaeology, And The Evolution of Human Cognition

Dec 9, 2019

Dr. Lyn Wadley is jointly Honorary Professor of Archaeology in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, and the Evolutionary Studies Institute, at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She directs a Wits-recognized programme called ACACIA (Ancient Cognition and Culture in Africa). Her specialty is the African Stone Age: Middle Stone Age (which lasted from approximately 300,000 to 25,000 years ago) and Later Stone Age (the last 25,000 years). She began her career researching social and ecological issues during the past 25,000 years of the Later Stone Age in southern Africa. Data for her interpretations were obtained from sites in Namibia and South Africa. Dr. Wadley’s current research is dedicated to the cognition of people who lived in the Middle Stone Age. More»
#265 Reinout de Vries: Personality, The HEXACO, and Communication Styles

Dec 6, 2019

Dr. Reinout E. de Vries is Associate Professor at the VU University Amsterdam and Full Professor at the University of Twente. Together with researchers like Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee, he has worked on the HEXACO model of personality, showing that it provides a more optimal description of personality than the Big Five model and showing that it is, through its addition of Honesty-Humility, better able to predict a number of counterproductive behaviors than the Big Five model. His main research interests are in the areas of personality, communication styles, and leadership. Recent work has focused on the construction of a six-dimensional Communication Styles Inventory (CSI), a Brief HEXACO personality Inventory (BHI), the relation between Impression Management and Overclaiming and HEXACO personality, and on the relation between self- and other-rated HEXACO personality on the one hand and leadership, proactivity, impression management, and overclaiming on the other. He is currently working on lexical studies on sport personality and leadership and followership styles. More»