Dr. Mark W. Moffett is a tropical biologist and research associate at the Smithsonian and used to be a visiting scholar in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, which he used to write his book, The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. More»
Dr. Russell Gray is the director to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He also holds an adjunct position in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland. Dr. Gray’s research spans the areas of cultural evolution, linguistics, animal cognition, and the philosophy of biology. He helped pioneer the application of computational evolutionary methods to questions about linguistic prehistory and cultural evolution. His work has shed new insights on the 200 year-old debate on the origin of Indo-European languages. More»
Dr. Chris Knight is Honorary Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Over many years, he has been exploring the idea that human language and culture emerged in our species not purely through gradual Darwinian evolution but in a cumulative process culminating in sudden revolutionary change. The details of his ‘sex strike’ theory remain controversial, but the general idea that the transition to language was a ‘major transition’ or ‘revolution’ (often termed the human revolution) has been current for many years and is now widely agreed. More»
Dr. Anna Warrener is an assistant professor in the Anthropology department at University of Colorado Denver. Her research focuses on the evolution of the human musculoskeletal system using biomechanical techniques to assess how variation in physical structure affects locomotor performance. She is specifically interested in the human pelvis and how its unique anatomy impacts both locomotion and human birth. Dr. Warrener’s research has been published in PNAS, PLOS ONE, The Anatomical Record and other peer-reviewed journals and has also been featured in the BBC documentary “What Makes Us Human” and on NPR. More»
Dr. Justin L. Barrett is founder and president of Blueprint 1543 and adjunct professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he was formerly director of the Thrive Center and chief project developer for Science, Theology, and Religion Initiatives. His new book is Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing. More»
Dr. Dan Sperber is a researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod, and a professor in cognitive science and philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest. He is Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and member of the Academia Europaea. He has been the first laureate of the Claude Lévi-Strauss Prize in 2009. He is the author of numerous articles in anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and psychology and of several books, including Meaning and Relevance (with Deirdre Wilson), Relevance: Communication and Cognition (with Deirdre Wilson), and The Enigma of Reason (with Hugo Mercier). More»
Dr. Karen Kramer is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah. Her research interests span behavioral ecology, demography, comparative life history and reproductive ecology, the evolution of juvenility, cooperative breeding, intergenerational transfers and the interaction between economic and demographic transitions. The question that unifies her research is why do humans have the unparalleled capacity for population growth compared to closely related species? Her field work in a traditional Maya village in the Yucatan, Mexico has focused on documenting and modeling children’s time allocation, juvenile cooperation, intergenerational resource flows, female energetics, and high fertility in a pretransitional population. Her research among the Pumé, a group of South American mobile hunter-gatherers addresses questions about children’s growth, development and reproductive strategies, and the effects that seasonal resource availability has on fertility and child mortality. She also collaborates with conservation biologists and primatologists working in the Madagascar highlands. More»
Dr. Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, a member of the Oxford Law Faculty (where he is a Visiting Professor), a Senior Research Associate at the Uehiro Institute for Practical Ethics (within the Faculty of Philosophy), and a Research Associate at the Ethox Centre and the Helex Centre (both within the Faculty of Medicine). His main areas of interest are medical law and ethics. Recently he has been focused particularly on questions of identity, personhood, and authenticity, on whether theories of human dignity can do any real work in the law, and on the use of intuitions in moral and legal reasoning. He is the author of many books, including his most recent one, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness. More»
Dr. Christopher Kuzawa is Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He uses principles from anthropology and evolutionary biology to gain insights into the biological and health impacts of human developmental plasticity. His primary field research is conducted in Cebu, the Philippines, where he works with a large birth cohort study that enrolled more than 3,000 pregnant women in 1983 and has since followed their offspring into adulthood (now 30 years old). He uses the nearly 3 decades of data available for each study participant, and recruitment of generation 3 (the grandoffspring of the original mothers), to gain a better understanding of the long-term and intergenerational impacts of early life environments on adult biology, life history, reproduction, and health. A theme of much of his work is the application of principles of developmental plasticity and evolutionary biology to issues of health. More»
Dr. Kim Hill is a professor in the Anthropology department at Arizona State University. Dr. Hill's theoretical interests are human evolutionary ecology, including focal areas such as foraging theory, time allocation, food sharing, life history evolution, parental investment, cooperation, culture and cognition, the emergence and spread of Homo sapiens and unique characteristics of our species. His field experience involves hunter-gatherers and natives of the Neotropics. He has nearly 30 years of fieldwork with Ache (Paraguay), Hiwi (Venezuela), Mashco-Piro, Matsiguenga and Yora (Peru) and has conducted extensive travels to indigenous communities in Latin America. He also worked on foraging problems in Coastal South Africa, and most recently has studied cooperation among Sea Nomads of Southern Mindanao (Philippines). More»
