All Episodes

#168 Anthony Biglan: The Nurture Effect, Child Development, and Nurturing Societies

Apr 25, 2019

Dr. Anthony Biglan is a Senior Scientist at Oregon Research Institute and the Co-Director of the Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium. He has been conducting research on the development and prevention of child and adolescent problem behavior for the past several decades. His work has included studies of the risk and protective factors associated with tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use; high-risk sexual behavior; and antisocial behavior. He and colleagues at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences published a book summarizing the epidemiology, cost, etiology, prevention, and treatment of youth with multiple problems, called Helping Adolescents at Risk (2004). He is a former president of the Society for Prevention Research. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Prevention. He’s also the author of The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World. More»
#167 Rani Lill Anjum: Philosophy of Causation, Scientific Models, and Medicine

Apr 22, 2019

Dr. Rani Lill Anjum is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) School of Economics and Business, and Leader of the CAPS – Center for Applied Philosophy of Science since 2018. She spent two years at the University of Nottingham, working with Professor Stephen Mumford on dispositions and causation from 2007 to 2009. Together they developed a new theory of causation. After Nottingham, she got funding from FRIPRO NFR for a 4-year research project, Causation in Science (CauSci), hosted by the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) from January 2011. In May 2014 she was offered a permanent contract as Research Fellow at HH NMBU. In December 2014 her new research project Causation, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences (CauseHealth) got funded by FRIPRO and started up in the spring 2015 at NMBU. In 2018 she established NMBU CAPS – Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science. Dr. Lill Anjum has coauthored 4 books with Dr. Stephen Mumford: Getting Causes from Powers (2011), Causation: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery (2018), and What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality (2018). More»
#166 Daniel Nettle: The Evolution of Personality, Individual Variation And Behavioral Flexibility

Apr 19, 2019

Dr. Daniel Nettle is Professor of Behavioural Science at Newcastle University, where he is a member of the cross-disciplinary Centre for Behaviour and Evolution. He studies a number of different topics relating to behaviour, ageing and wellbeing. He mainly studies humans, but sometimes other animals (especially starlings) too. Dr. Nettle is the author of several books, most notably, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile (2005), Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are (2007), and Tyneside Neighbourhoods: Deprivation, Social Life and Social Behaviour in One English City (2015). More»
#165 Stephen Law: Naturalism, Liberalism, And The Religious And The Atheists

Apr 18, 2019

Dr. Stephen Law is formally Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College, and before that Research Fellow at The Queen’s College Oxford. He is currently editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal THINK. He has published several books, including The Philosophy Gym, A Very Short Introduction to Humanism, and Believing Bullshit. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and Commerce and in 2008 became the provost of the Centre for Inquiry UK. More»
#164 Herbert Gintis: Sociobiology, Game Theory, Cooperation, And Social Institutions

Apr 15, 2019

Dr. Herbert Gintis is External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He and Professor Robert Boyd (Anthropology, UCLA) headed a multidisciplinary research project that models such behaviors as empathy, reciprocity, insider/outsider behavior, vengefulness, and other observed human behaviors not well handled by the traditional model of the self-regarding agent. Professor Gintis is also author of several books including Game Theory Evolving, The Bounds of Reason, A Cooperative Species, Game Theory in Action, and Individuality and Entanglement and also coeditor, with Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, and Ernst Fehr, of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies, and with Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr of Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. More»
#163 Sarah Brosnan: Morality, Reciprocity, Fairness, and Property in Primates

Apr 12, 2019

Dr. Sarah Brosnan is a Professor in the departments of psychology and philosophy and the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. She is also a member of the Brains & Behavior program and the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. She directs the Comparative Economics and Behavioral Studies Laboratory (CEBUS Lab) and does research with nonhuman primates at both the Language Research Center of Georgia State University and the Michale E. Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research of the University of Texas Anderson Cancer Center. She studies the mechanisms underlying cooperation, reciprocity, inequity, and other economic decisions in nonhuman primates from an evolutionary perspective. She looks at the decisions individuals make and how they make them, how their social or ecological environments affect their decisions and interactions, and under what circumstances they can alter their behaviors depending on these conditions. More»
#162 Philip Goff: Materialism, Consciousness, And The Nature of Reality

Apr 11, 2019

Dr. Philip Goff is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University, UK. His main research focus is trying to explain how the brain produces consciousness. He thinks we need to radically rethink our understanding of matter in order to explain consciousness, in something like the way Einstein radically rethought the nature of space and time. Dr. Goff also has a sideline in political philosophy, focusing on issues pertaining to taxation, globalization and social justice. He’s also the author of the book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. More»
#161 Ian Gilligan: The Evolution of Clothing and Agriculture

Apr 8, 2019

Dr. Ian Gilligan is Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology of the University of Sydney. He graduated in psychology (UNSW) and medicine (Sydney University) before studying prehistoric archaeology (Sydney University) and biological anthropology (PhD ANU). He specializes in the origin of clothing and the role of textiles in the transition to agriculture. He also has an interest in traditional clothing in Aboriginal Australia, particularly in Tasmania during the last ice age. In addition, he explores the wider psychological and philosophical aspects of wearing clothes. He’s also the author of the recent book Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory: Linking Evidence, Causes, and Effects (2018). More»
#160 Richard Haier: The Neuroscience of Intelligence, Group Differences, And AI

Apr 5, 2019

Dr. Richard Haier is Professor Emeritus in the Pediatric Neurology Division of the School of Medicine at University of California, Irvine. He is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence since 2016. In 1994, he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," an editorial written by the American psychologist Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal, which summarized findings from intelligence research. His work on the parieto-frontal integration theory (P-FIT) with Rex Jung examines the neuroanatomy of intelligence based on neuro-imaging research. He’s also the author of the book “The Neuroscience of Intelligence” (2016). More»
#159 Ian Crawford: Astrobiology, Space Exploration, and Big History

Apr 4, 2019

Dr. Ian Crawford is Professor of Planetary Science and Astrobiology at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research activities mostly lie in the fields of space exploration (especially lunar science and exploration), and the science of astrobiology (the search for life in the Universe). More»