All Episodes

#178 Stephen Shennan: Darwinian Archaeology, Culture, and The Origins of Agriculture

May 17, 2019

Dr. Stephen Shennan is Professor of Theoretical Archaeology in the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. Dr. Shennan focuses on cultural evolution and Darwinian archaeology, applying theories from evolutionary ecology and cladistics to archaeology. In July 2006, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy. He’s the author of several books, including Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution, Mapping Our Ancestors: Phylogenetic Approaches in Anthropology and Prehistory, and The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. More»
#177 Azim Shariff: The Science of Religion, Morality, And Self-Driving Cars

May 16, 2019

Dr. Azim Shariff is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a social psychologist whose research focuses on where morality intersects with religion, cultural attitudes and economics. Another rapidly expanding part of his research looks at human-technology interactions and the ethics of automation, including self-driving cars. More»
#176 John Brooke: Environmental History, And The Anthropocene

May 13, 2019

Dr. John Brooke is Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Ohio State University Center for Historical Research. He is also the co-chair of the 2011-2012 Program: Disease, Health, and Environment in Global History. In 2007-2008 he served as the president of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. His teaching areas include Early American History and Environmental History. His most recent book, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey, published in 2014, examines the long material and natural history of the human condition. More»
#175 Nicole Barbaro: Mating, Life History, Attachment, And Mate Guarding

May 10, 2019

Nicole Barbaro is currently a PhD student in evolutionary psychology at Oakland University, studying under the advisement of Todd K. Shackelford. She serves as the Student Representative of the Executive Council for the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. She also serves on the Editorial Board as a Review Editor for Frontiers in Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, as well as a Section Editor for the Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Her interests are in human sexual psychology and behavior, including application of life history theory and sperm competition theory. More»
#174 Michael Muthukrishna: Human Culture, The Cultural Brain, And Political Corruption

May 9, 2019

Dr. Michael Muthukrishna is an Assistant Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. His other affiliations include Research Associate of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD, and Technical Director of The Database of Religious History. His research focuses on the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and how culture is transmitted, maintained, and modified. He’s interested in better understanding the dynamic relationship between “cultures” and individuals, where cultures emerge from the interactions of individuals over time, who are in turn shaped by the emergent cultures they constitute. He’s particularly interested in the application of research in cultural evolution to public policy. More»
#173 Belén López-Pérez: Cruel To Be Kind, Empathy, Emotion Regulation, and Happiness

May 6, 2019

Dr. Belén López-Pérez is a Lecturer in Psychology at Liverpool Hope University in the UK, where she also directs the ChildLab. She concluded her PhD in Social psychology at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in 2012, and her Postdoctoral research in Social and Developmental Psychology in the School of Psychology at Plymouth University. Her research interests include empathy and interpersonal emotion regulation across the lifespan, as well as happiness and wellbeing. Her current research projects are focused on interpersonal emotion regulation in childhood and developmental differences in emotion goals (i.e., what people would like to feel in different contexts). More»
#172 Joseph Carroll: Literary Darwinism, Postmodernism, and The Humanities

May 3, 2019

Dr. Joseph Carroll is a scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He is currently Curators’ Professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, where he has taught since 1985. Dr. Carroll's Evolution and Literary Theory was one of the first literary studies to "take the cue from important developments in disciplines such as evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and sociobiology," seeing evolutionary biology as an alternative to poststructuralism and rejecting poststructuralism's textualism (the notion that world is made of words) and indeterminancy (the self-subverting character of "discourse"). He’s also the author of Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature, Reading Human Nature, Graphing Jane Austen, has also produced an edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, co-edited volumes 1 and 2 of The Evolutionary Review, and co-edited Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. More»
#171 Peter Smith: Bullying, Cyberbullying and Children's Development

May 2, 2019

Dr. Peter K. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research interest is children’s social development. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Association of Psychological Sciences, and the Academy of Social Sciences. More»
#170 Steven Hales: Philosophy of Luck, Relativism and Perspectivism, And Evolutionary Psychology

Apr 29, 2019

Dr. Steven Hales is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University, US. His areas of specialization include epistemology and metaphysics. He’s the author of books like Metaphysics, A Companion to Relativism, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, and This Is Philosophy. More»
#169 Bo Winegard: The Psychology of Group Differences and Political Bias

Apr 26, 2019

Dr. Bo Winegard is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Marietta College. He generally approaches psychological puzzles from an evolutionary perspective, applying Darwin's theory of natural selection to the human mind. He focuses mostly on status, group differences, individual differences, bias, methods, and political psychology. He’s also the cohost, together with Cory Clark, of the Psyphilopod podcast. More»