anthropology

#498 Kristen Syme: Mental Disorders and Suicide From an Anthropological Perspective

Jul 22, 2021

Dr. Kristen Syme is research associate at the Faculty of Behavioral and Movement Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She received her BA in anthropology from the University of Delaware where she developed an interest in using evolutionary theory to investigate mental health and behavioral phenomena that are diagnosed and treated as diseases and deviations according to the Western medical paradigm. She conducted her MA research on suicidal behavior in 53 cultures and received her MA in 2014. Her research interests broadly concern the evolved interpersonal functions of psychological and behavioral phenomena. Her MA thesis tested two evolutionary models of suicidal behavior against the ethnographic record, and my dissertation research is a continuation of this project. She is presently conducting an exploratory investigation on bargaining strategies and parent-offspring conflict with an immigrant Micronesian population in the Vancouver WA/Portland, OR area. More»
#496 Daniel Hoyer - Figuring Out the Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History

Jul 16, 2021

Dr. Daniel Hoyer currently holds a postdoctoral position working with Dr. Peter Turchin on the Deep Roots of the Modern World, part of the SESHAT: Global History Databank Project, a large-scale, interdisciplinary and comparative project hosted by the Evolution Institute and the University of Oxford. His postdoctoral work focuses on determining the institutional features and structures which underpin economic performance and the provision of public goods in these different places and times. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2014 with a dissertation entitled Buying a Province, Building an Empire: Money, Markets, and Growth in Roman Africa from Augustus to Aurelian on the economic and financial development of the western Roman Empire. He is the author of Figuring Out The Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History. More»
#495 Robin Crompton: The Evolution of Human Bipedalism

Jul 15, 2021

Dr. Robin Huw Crompton is professor of musculoskeletal biology at the University of Liverpool in the Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease. He has developed the Fossil Footprint Archive jointly with Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University. More»
#493 Tim Clutton-Brock: The Evolution of Sociality, and Mammal Societies

Jul 9, 2021

Dr. Tim Clutton-Brock is Professor in the Department of Zoology at Cambridge University. He is known for his comparative studies of the behavioral ecology of mammals, particularly red deer and meerkats. He currently works in three main areas: The evolution of vertebrate breeding systems; Population regulation and the control of population stability in large mammals; Natural and sexual selection in natural populations. More»
#490 Mark Stoneking: Evolutionary Genetics, The Mitochondrial Eve, and Out of Africa Migrations

Jul 2, 2021

Dr. Mark Stoneking directs the Human Population History Group in the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He is also Honorary Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. Dr. Stoneking’s research uses molecular genetic approaches to address questions of anthropological interest concerning the origins, migrations, structure, and relationships of human populations. He, along with his doctoral advisor Allan Wilson and a fellow researcher Rebecca L. Cann, contributed to the Out of Africa Theory in 1987 by introducing the concept of Mitochondrial Eve, a hypothetical common mother of all living humans based on mitochondrial DNA. More»
#484 David Bjorklund - How Children Invented Humanity: The Role of Development in Human Evolution

Jun 18, 2021

Dr. David F. Bjorklund is a Professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in developmental and evolutionary psychology. His books include The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology (with Anthony Pellegrini), Origins of the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Child Development (edited with Bruce Ellis), Why Youth is Not Wasted on the Young: Immaturity in Human Development, Child and Adolescent Development: An Integrative Approach (with Carlos Hernández Blasi), and Children's Thinking: Cognitive Development and Individual Differences, now in its fifth edition. His new book is How Children Invented Humanity: The Role of Development in Human Evolution. More»
#476 Edward Slingerland - Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

May 31, 2021

Dr. Edward Slingerland is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He’s the Director of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), the Director of the Database of Religious History (DRH), and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC). His most recent book is Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. More»
#472 Aiyana Koka Willard: Religion, Cognition, Culture, and Human Universals

May 21, 2021

Dr. Aiyana Koka Willard is a Lecturer in the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London. Her research focuses around the culture and cognitive origins of supernatural and religious beliefs. She is particularly interested in how thinking about minds and causal reasoning is related to supernatural beliefs. Her current research focuses on witchcraft, karma, and evil eye beliefs. More»
#459 Bear Braumoeller - Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age

Apr 22, 2021

Dr. Bear F. Braumoeller is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University. He previously held faculty positions at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is or has been on the Editorial Boards of five major journals or series, and he is a past Councilor of the Peace Science Society. In the summer of 2016 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway. Dr. Braumoeller’s research is in the areas of international security and computational social science. His current research focus is on the relationship between international order and international conflict. He is the author of The Great Powers and the International System (winner of the 2014 International Studies Association Best Book Award and the 2014 J. David Singer Book Award) and Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age (Oxford University Press, 2019). More»
#458 Lesley Newson & Peter Richerson - A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution

Apr 19, 2021

Dr. Lesley Newson is honorary post-doc at University of California, Davis. She studies the cultural evolutionary process known as “modernization” which most human populations are now experiencing. Her first degree was in biology. After that she worked for over 20 years as a science writer and television producer before getting a PhD in psychology. More»