Speaker Series

Spring 2019

• 
• 02-04-2019
• Simine Vazire
• UC Davis, Psychology
• The Credibility Revolution in Psychology

• A fundamental part of the scientific enterprise is for each field to engage in critical self-examination to detect errors in our theories and methods, and improve them. In this talk, I discuss how well psychology, as a science, has been living up to this ideal, and what principles should guide our efforts to improve our science.

• 
• 02-25-2019
• Robbie Burger
• Duke University, Biology & Evolutionary Anthropology
• The allometry of brain size, pace-of-life, and the rise of hyper-dense cities

• Metabolic scaling provides a quantitative framework to link theory and data in order to understand the general constraints on life. These general ‘laws’ in mammals provide a useful benchmark to understand and compare human uniqueness. First, I will present new research towards a metabolic theory of life history and its implications for understanding tradeoffs in brain size and pace-of-life across the diversity of mammals. Second, I will show recent research extending metabolic scaling theory to understand modern human energetics, cultural evolution, and ecological predicament.

• 
• 03-04-2019
• Charles Roseman
• University of Illinois, School of Integrative Biology
• The Morphology of Mind: Reconciling Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Genetics

• Evolutionary psychology, evolutionary developmental biology, and evolutionary genetics use an overlapping set of concepts to explain the origins and diversification of different aspects of organisms. The notion that constellations of traits can be quasi-independent, or modular, is fundamental to all these ways of understanding the living world. Using examples drawn from the study of morphology and animal behavior, I evaluate evolutionary psychological claims about the number of modules that make up our cognitive faculties and the mode and tempo of their evolution. While many of its assumptions are untenable, evolutionary psychology is correct in that some degree of modularity is required for the evolution of complex features such as cognition. I then sketch an outline of another approach to understanding the special case of human evolution that rescues a version of the modularity concept and includes evolutionary processes beyond natural selection.

• 
• 03-11-2019
• Erik Peterson
• The University of Alabama, History
• Darwin, Wallace, and racist birth of anthropology
• 12-1:30pm at 171 Bond Life Sciences Center

• The origins and development of human race preoccupied Charles Darwin. His insistence that all human groups shared a relatively recent common ancestor put him out of step with many of his scientific peers. Soon after the publication of Origin of Species, Darwin found himself involved in a controversy regarding the relative value of different human racial groups. Darwin’s side, the “Ethnologicals,” argued that variation was subordinate to the deep similarities between races. A younger, more outspoken group of “Anthropologicals” dismissed the Ethnologicals as too conservative. They argued that each human group had an independent origin and that Europeans were the most advanced race. Alfred Russel Wallace attempted to heal the rift between these two sides, but his resolution bothered Darwin. Darwin’s frustration over the birth of anthropology led in part to Darwin’s Descent of Man.

• 
• 03-18-2019
• H. Clark Barrett
• UCLA, Anthropology
• What’s universal about human morality?

• Anthropology and psychology have existed for well over a century, and philosophy much longer still. Sadly, however, these communities seem nowhere close to converging on any kind of agreement about the nature of “human nature,” or even if such a thing exists. Nowhere is this more true than in the domain of morality, which some feel is central to our humanness. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in the empirical study of human morality, which has begun to show--yet again--substantial cross-cultural diversity in moral judgments. Still, it seems unlikely that humans could be both the “moral animal” and also completely blank-slate with respect to that morality. Here I consider universality and variation in one particular aspect of human moral judgment: the importance of an actor’s mental states, such as her intentions and motivations, for the moral assessment of her actions. Recent work has shown that mental states are important for moral judgment across human societies, but not always to the same degree and in the same ways. Interestingly, this variation does not appear to depend on peoples’ ability to make mental state judgments, which is relatively well-developed in most human adults. Instead, it seems to have to do with norms or principles of how these enter into moral evaluation, which vary across cultures and contexts. I will summarize recent cross-cultural work in this domain and consider its implications for the search for universals of human moral psychology.

• 
• 04-01-2019
• Carsten Strathausen
• University of Missouri, English
• Sociobiology—The Future of the Humanities?

• This talk traces the history of sociobiology from its beginnings in 1975 to its present state in emerging fields like Literary Darwinism and Cognitive Cultural Studies. Apart from a comprehensive critique of the promise and perils of sociobiology, I want to focus in particular on the methodological and conceptual changes necessary if sociobiology is to have a future in art, aesthetics, and the humanities overall.

• 
• 04-15-2019
• Kevin Zollman
• Carnegie Mellon University, Philosophy
• Signals without Teleology

• "Signals" are a conceptual apparatus in many scientific disciplines. Biologists inquire about the evolution of signals, economists talk about the signaling function of purchases and prices, and philosophers discuss the conditions under which signals acquire meaning. However, little attention has been paid to what is a signal. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap with a definition of signal that avoids reference to form or purpose. Along the way we introduce novel notions of "information revealing" and "information concealing" moves in games. This distinction sheds new light on signaling, especially in biology. In the end, our account offers an alternative to teleological accounts of communication.