biology

#894 Paco Calvo - Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence

Feb 1, 2024

Dr. Paco Calvo is a Professor at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab), focusing on the study of minimal cognition in plants. Dr. Calvo’s interdisciplinary work combines insights from biology, philosophy, and cognitive science to explore the fascinating world of plant behavior, decision-making, and problem-solving. By investigating the complex interactions and adaptive responses exhibited by plants, Dr. Calvo has significantly contributed to our understanding of cognition beyond the animal kingdom, challenging conventional perspectives on intelligence and mental capacities. He is the author of Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence. More»
#892 Philip Ball - The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings

Jan 26, 2024

Dr. Philip Ball is a freelance science writer, with a BA in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Physics from the University of Bristol. He was an editor at Nature for over 20 years. He is the author of many popular books on science, including The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens. More»
#886 Randall Beer: Autopoiesis, Enactivism, Dynamical Systems, and Evo-Devo Approaches in Biology

Jan 12, 2024

Dr. Randall Beer is Professor of Cognitive Science and Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington. Dr. Beer's primary research interest is in understanding how coordinated behavior arises from the dynamical interaction of an animal's nervous system, its body and its environment. Toward this end, he works on the evolution and analysis of dynamical "nervous systems" for model agents, neuromechanical modeling of animals, biologically-inspired robotics, and dynamical systems approaches to behavior and cognition. More generally, he is interested in computational and theoretical biology, including models of metabolism, gene regulation and development. More»
#870 Amalia Bastos: Parrots, Dogs, Comparative Psychology, and Convergent Evolution

Dec 7, 2023

Dr. Amalia Bastos is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social & Cognitive Origins Group at Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in how evolutionary pressures have shaped the minds of different species, and which cognitive mechanisms animals employ while interacting with the world around them. Her current work focuses on how chimpanzees perceive third-party social interactions through eye-tracking technology, alongside research on dog cognition. More»
#858 Jessica Nowicki: The Evolution of Prosocial Behavior, Pair Bonding, and Empathy

Nov 9, 2023

Dr. Jessica Nowicki is a Research Scientist at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. She is interested in the mechanistic basis of prosocial behavior in early vertebrates. She uses poison frogs, which display considerable variation in sociality among closely related species, for comparatively identifying neural correlates of pair bonding within the clade. In order to verify the functional involvement of these correlates, she then couples this with functional tests on the strongly pair bonding species, Ranitomeya imitator. More»
#851 Alecia Carter: Thanatology, Animal Personality, Comparative Psychology, and Culture

Oct 23, 2023

Dr. Alecia Carter is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Her current research investigates (1) how primates respond to the deaths of others and what this can tell us about the evolution of cognition and emotion and (2) how individuals access information to make decisions. In particular, she studies how individuals use their social environment to access information, and how their phenotype, their individual characteristics, may limit their use of that information. Her previous research addressed how and why animals' behavior varies from others but is consistent through time. More»
#849 Claudio Tennie: The Differences Between Ape Culture and Human Culture

Oct 19, 2023

Dr. Claudio Tennie is a Tenured Research Group Leader (“Tools and Culture among Early Hominins”) in the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen. In addition, he is an adjunct scientist at the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes. His main research triangulates what (if anything) makes human cognition unique - as well as why (and relatedly, when this happened and how often). In particular, he uses various methods and pathways to study the factors and the prehistorical beginnings that enabled the typical modern human "variant of culture": cumulative culture of know-how. More»
#848 Robert Sapolsky - Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Oct 16, 2023

Dr. Robert Sapolsky is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor and Professor of Biology, of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, and of Neurosurgery at Stanford University. Dr. Sapolsky is the author of several informative and comical books that present cutting-edge psychoneurobiological knowledge in an enjoyable, easy-to-read format. His latest book is Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. More»
#836 Sabine Nöbel: Social Learning, Mate Copying, and Culture from a Biological Perspective

Sep 18, 2023

Dr. Sabine Nöbel is a Postdoc at the Martin-Luther University Halle Wittenberg in the group “Animal Ecology“. Her background is in the behavioral ecology of Poeciliids and Drosophila studying non-genetic inheritance of mating preferences using mate-copying, by which females build mating preferences by observing and copying conspecific females’ mate-choice. She studies how new, socially learnt mating preferences can invade a population and persist across generations. Since May 2019, Dr. Nöbel is the secretary of ESLR (Association of Early-career Social Learning Researchers) Society, an early-career network for all things around social learning and cultural evolution. More»
#832 Ursula Goodenough - The Sacred Depths of Nature: How Life Has Emerged and Evolved

Sep 8, 2023

Dr. Ursula Goodenough is a Professor of Biology Emerita at Washington University in St. Louis where she engaged in research on eukaryotic algae. She has presented the paradigm of Religious Naturalism and the Epic of Evolution in numerous venues around the world. She currently serves as president of the Religious Naturalist Association. She is the author of The Sacred Depths of Nature: How Life Has Emerged and Evolved. More»