All Episodes

#221 Peter DeScioli: The Evolution of Morality, Moral Judgment, and Common Knowledge

Aug 26, 2019

Dr. Peter DeScioli is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stony Brook University. His research investigates how the human mind uses principles of strategy to solve problems in the social world. Much of his work has focused on moral condemnation, especially the functions of morally judging other people, moralistic punishment, and moral impartiality. In another line of work, he studies how people form alliances, how they choose their loyalties to others, and how they display and conceal their loyalties. A third project looks at our sense of ownership by using a virtual environment to observe resource disputes in the laboratory. In recent years, he has been designing online games for experiments about politics, including redistribution of wealth, social safety nets, alliance formation, and political negotiation. More»
#220 Cory Clark & Bo Winegard: The Biggest Issues in Psychology

Aug 23, 2019

Dr. Cory Clark is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at Durham University, UK. Dr. Clark does research in Moral Psychology, Political Psychology, Experimental Philosophy, and Motivated Cognition. More»
#219 Lee Cronk: Modern Cultural Anthropology, and Human Cooperation

Aug 22, 2019

Dr. Lee Cronk is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University. His research and teaching interests include human evolutionary ecology, including behavioral ecology, cultural ecology, and cognitive ecology; signaling theory; culture; and cooperation. Dr. Cronk is also affiliated with the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies, the Perceptual Science Graduate Training Program, and the Program in Evolutionary Biology. He is a member of the Evolutionary Anthropology Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the International Society for Human Ethology. Dr. Cronk is also co-director, with C. Athena Aktipis of Arizona State University, of the Human Generosity Project. He is author or co-author of three books, That Complex Whole: Culture and the Evolution of Human Behavior, From Mukogodo to Maasai: Ethnicity and Cultural Change in Kenya, and Meeting at Grand Central: Understanding the Social and Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation, and co-editor of two more, Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, and Through the Looking Glass: Readings in Anthropology. More»
#218 Sabina Leonelli: Science in the World of Big Data

Aug 19, 2019

Dr. Sabina Leonelli is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter. She pursues an approach to philosophy of science that is grounded on the empirical study of scientific practices, as informed by historical research, ethnographic methods used in the social and anthropological studies of science and technology, and collaboration with practicing scientists. She has a strong interest in topics like Data-Intensive Science and Practices of Data Sharing and Re-Use, Open Science and Open Data, Bio-Ontologies, and Historic and Epistemic Status of Model Organism Research. She’s the author of Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study, and “La ricerca scientifica nell’era dei Big Data” (“Scientific Research in the Era of Big Data”). More»
#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»