anthropology

#239 Abigail Page: Cooperative Breeding, Social Networks, And Health In The Agta

Oct 7, 2019

Dr. Abigail Page is MRC Research Fellow at the Department of Population Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her research is focused on understanding the relationship between the environment (both social and natural) and behavior, and ultimately how this influences health and wellbeing. Her background is in evolutionary approaches to human behavior (in particular Human Behavioral Ecology), therefore her research seeks to test hypotheses developed from evolutionary theory and ultimately, to understand the function of any given behavior. Dr. Page’s interests are also influenced by Evolutionary Medicine and Applied Evolutionary Anthropology and Demography. More»
#237 Herbert Gintis: Altruism And Self-interest, As Revealed Through Game Theory

Oct 3, 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»
#228 Alex Mesoudi: Studying Cultural Evolution, Migration, And Transmission

Sep 12, 2019

Dr. Alex Mesoudi is an Associate Professor of Cultural Evolution at the Human Behaviour and Cultural Evolution Group at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus, UK. He studies cultural evolution, both in the lab and by constructing models and simulations of it. He’s also the author of the book Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences. More»
#223 Pascal Boyer: Minds Make Societies, Religion, and Conspiracy Theories

Aug 30, 2019

Dr. Pascal Boyer is the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He’s also the author of books like Religion Explained; Memory, Mind and Culture; and Minds Make Societies. 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»
#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»
#210 Dwight Read: Cultural Kin Systems, And The Evolution Of Human Sociality

Aug 1, 2019

Dr. Dwight Read is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). His research interests include mathematical anthropology, the structural logic of kinship terminologies, theory of social organization, cultural evolution, and archaeological classification. He’s the author of books like Artifact Classification: A Conceptual and Methodological Approach, Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane, and How Culture Makes Us Human: Primate Social Evolution and the Formation of Human Societies. More»
#207 Eugénia Cunha: Antropologia Biológica e Forense, e Evolução Humana

Jul 25, 2019

A Dra. Eugénia Cunha é Professora Catedrática de Antropologia no Departamento de Ciências da Vida da FCTUC (Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra). É, desde 2018, Diretora do Instituto de Medicina Legal de Lisboa, Coordenadora do 2º ciclo em Evolução e Biologia Humana na FCTUC, sendo igualmente co-editora de um livro internacional em Antropologia Forense e autora de diversos artigos científicos e de divulgação. A sua investigação foca-se na biologia do esqueleto no âmbito da Antropologia Forense e da Evolução Humana. More»
#191 Susan Blackmore: How Memetics Works

Jun 17, 2019

Dr. Susan Blackmore is a psychologist, lecturer and writer researching consciousness, memes, and anomalous experiences, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. She is best known for her book The Meme Machine, and has written or contributed to over 40 books, mostly on consciousness. More»
#185 Helen Fisher: The Anthropology Of Romantic Love, Attraction, And Attachment

Jun 3, 2019

Dr. Helen Fisher is a biological anthropologist, and a Senior Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute, Indiana University. She has written six books on the evolution, biology, and psychology of human sexuality, monogamy, adultery and divorce, gender differences in the brain, the neural chemistry of romantic love and attachment, human biologically-based personality styles, why we fall in love with one person rather than another, hooking up, friends with benefits, living together and other current trends, and the future of relationships-- what she calls: slow love. She’s the author of books like Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, Why Him? Why Her?: How to Find and Keep Lasting Love, and Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. More»