anthropology

#556 Dan Sperber: Culture, Cultural Attraction Theory, Epistemic Vigilance, and Reason

Dec 3, 2021

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»
#555 Karen Kramer: Life History, Parenting, Population Growth, Dispersals, and Mating Systems

Dec 2, 2021

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»
#541 Charles Foster - Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness

Oct 29, 2021

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»
#537 Christopher Kuzawa: Developmental Plasticity, Life History, and Epigenetics

Oct 21, 2021

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»
#527 Kim Hill: Human Sociality, Human Universals, and Protecting Isolated Societies

Sep 27, 2021

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»
#520 Agustín Fuentes: Race, Gender, Monogamy, and Darwin's Descent of Man (150th anniversary)

Sep 10, 2021

Dr. Agustín Fuentes is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. Dr. Fuentes was awarded the Inaugural Communication & Outreach Award from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of books like Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature, and Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being. More»
#519 Douglas Fry: The Origins and Causes of War, and Peace Social Systems and How to Maintain Them

Sep 9, 2021

Dr. Douglas P. Fry is Professor and Chair in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has written extensively on aggression, conflict, and conflict resolution in his own books and in journals such as Science and American Anthropologist. His work frequently engages the debate surrounding the origins of war, arguing against claims that war or lethal aggression is rooted in human evolution. He’s the author or editor of books like The Human Potential for Peace; Beyond War; War, Peace, and Human Nature; and Nurturing Our Humanity. More»
#517 James Costa: Darwin, Wallace, The Origin of Species, and The Descent of Man (150th anniversary)

Sep 3, 2021

Dr. James Costa is Executive Director of the Highlands Biological Station and Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Western Carolina University, where he has taught courses in genetics, entomology, evolution, and biogeography since 1996. His many interests include insect behavior and ecology, environmental history and philosophy, conservation biology, and the history of science. His research has focused in recent years on Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and the history of evolutionary thought. He has authored numerous research papers, reviews, magazine articles, and 7 books, including Darwin's Backyard: How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory (W. W. Norton, 2017) — a finalist for the American Association for the Advancement of Science/Subaru Prize — and the co-edited volume An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion (Chicago, 2019). More»
#516 Nichola Raihani - The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World

Sep 2, 2021

Dr. Nichola Raihani is Professor of Evolution and Behavior at University College London. Her research considers the evolution of cooperation in nature. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2019. Her first book is The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World. More»
#507 Jessica Thompson: Human Evolution, and Our Impact on the Environment

Aug 12, 2021

Dr. Jessica Thompson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. Dr. Thompson specializes in human evolution, and especially those aspects that can be revealed through the analysis of ancient animal bones found at archaeological sites (zooarchaeology). She leads the Malawi Ancient Lifeways and Peoples Project in Malawi, central Africa, where she has maintained a field site since 2009. This multidisciplinary work combines archaeological science, evolutionary theory, and hunter-gatherer ethnography to develop and interpret the first cultural and paleoenvironmental chronologies in the region that span the transition from the last Ice Age. Her other research, based on collaborative work in Ethiopia, targets the opposite end of the archaeological record, at its origin in the Pliocene. Dr. Thompson is PI of the Osteoarchaeology Laboratory at Yale University. More»