All Episodes

#128 Randy Thornhill: Parasite-Stress, Sociality, Values, Personality, and Politics

Jan 21, 2019

Dr. Randy Thornhill is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist. He is a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and was president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society from 2011 to 2013. He is known for his evolutionary explanation of rape as well as his work on insect mating systems and the parasite-stress theory. He’s the author of several books, including A Natural History of Rape, and The Parasite-Stress Theory of Values and Sociality. More»
#127 Michael Graziano: Consciousness, From Animals To AI

Jan 18, 2019

Dr. Michael Graziano is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University. His scientific research focuses on the brain basis of awareness. He has proposed the "attention schema" theory, an explanation of how, and for what adaptive advantage, brains attribute the property of awareness to themselves. His previous work focused on how the cerebral cortex monitors the space around the body and controls movement within that space. Notably he has suggested that the classical map of the body in motor cortex, the homunculus, is not correct and is better described as a map of complex actions that make up the behavioral repertoire. He's also the author of 13 books, including Consciousness and the Social Brain (2013), and The Spaces Between Us: A Story of Neuroscience, Evolution, and Human Nature (2018). More»
#126 Sarah Hill: Life History Theory, Puberty, Immune Function, and Mating Strategies

Jan 17, 2019

Dr. Sarah Hill is Associate Professor of Psychology at Texas Christian University. She studies a range of topics, applying an evolutionary lens, including the interplay between immune function and mating strategies; the impact of inflammation; poverty, food regulation, and weight gain; hormonal contraceptives and mate choice; and other topics under the rubric of life history theory. More»
#125 Patrick Forscher: Implicit Bias, Stereotypes, and the Science Reform Movement

Jan 14, 2019

Dr. Patrick Forscher is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the J. William Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Arkansas. He studies social disparities and what to do about them. He also has a strong interest in research methods. As such, he has used a wide variety of methods to pursue his research interests, including scale construction, meta-analysis, field research, and conventional laboratory studies. More»
#124 Robert Plomin: Blueprint, Genetics, Environment, Clinical Psychology, and Gene Editing

Jan 11, 2019

Dr. Robert Plomin is Professor of Behavioural Genetics at the Social Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Center at King’s College London, and Research Professor at the Medical Research Council (MRC). He’s one of the leading figures in the entire field of Behavioral Genetics. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Dr. Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. And he’s also the author of many books, including Behavioral Genetics: A Primer (1989), Separate Lives: Why Siblings Are So Different (1992), Nature And Nurture: An Introduction To Human Behavioral Genetics (2004), Nature and Nurture During Infancy and Early Childhood (2006), G Is for Genes (2013), and, the most recent one, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (2018). More»
#123 David Sloan Wilson: Evolution, Contextual Behavioral Science, Religion, and Group Selection

Jan 10, 2019

Dr. David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He applies evolutionary theory to all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life, both in his own research and as director of the Evolution Institute, a unique campus-wide evolutionary studies program that recently received NSF funding to expand into a nationwide consortium. His books include Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society; Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives; The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time and Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others; and a recently edited book, Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science. More»
#122 Mark Blyth: Austerity, The European Union, Inequality, and Global Trumpism

Jan 7, 2019

Dr. Mark Blyth is William R. Roads Professor of International Economics at Brown University. His research interests lie in the field of international political economy. More specifically, his research trespasses several fields and aims to be as interdisciplinary as possible, drawing from political science, economics, sociology, complexity theory, and evolutionary theory. His work falls into several related areas: the politics of ideas, how institutions change, political parties, and the politics of finance. He’s also the author of books like Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century, and Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. More»
#121 Alan Fiske: The Four Relational Models, Virtuous Violence, and Morality

Jan 4, 2019

Dr. Alan Fiske is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He’s a psychological anthropologist studying how natural selection, neurobiology, ontogeny, psychology, and culture jointly shape human sociality. He’s also the author of the books Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations, and Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships. More»
#120 Michael Bang Petersen: Evolution, Emotions, Groups, and Politics

Jan 3, 2019

Dr. Michael Bang Petersen is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, in Denmark. He also directs The Politics and Evolution Lab (PoNE Lab) there. He investigates how the adaptive challenges of human evolutionary history shape the way modern citizens think about mass politics. More»
#119 Terrence Deacon: Incomplete Nature, from Physics to Mind

Dec 31, 2018

Dr. Terrence Deacon is currently Professor of Anthropology and member of the Cognitive Science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. His theoretical interests include the study of evolution-like processes at multiple levels, including their role in embryonic development, neural signal processing, language change, social processes, and focusing especially on how these different processes interact and depend on each other. Professor Deacon's research has combined human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition. He’s the author of The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain, and his most recent book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, explores the relationship between thermodynamic, self-organizing, evolutionary and semiotic processes and provides a new technical conception of information that explains both its representational and normative properties. More»