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Behavior, Evolution, and Culture Speaker Series Mondays
Fall Quarter 2004 Ovulatory Shifts in Women's Desires
Ovulatory cycle research reveals a hidden side of female desire.
Near ovulation, women feel increased attraction to extra-pair mates,
and they place a premium on "sexy" characteristics in men.
Their primary mates respond with increased jealousy. Ovulatory shifts
in women's desires are expressed conditionally--for example, they
are stronger in women mated to high investing but low attractiveness
men. These findings suggest antagonistically coevolved strategies
in men and women, and they provide support for the good genes hypothesis
of multiple mating by women. 11 October: Ted Bergstrom UCSB Department of Economics On the Economics of Polygyny
About
80% of all societies recorded by anthropologists are polygynous (men
have many wives). Even our own society is less monogamous than
claimed. This paper attempts to explain such mysteries
as why bride prices and dowries are not ``opposites'', why polygamous
societies are usually characterized by positive bride prices and dowry
is mainly confined to monogamous societies, why polyandry (women
having multiple husbands) is rare, but not extinct, and why the more
you have to pay for a wife the better you will treat her. Click here to download the paper
in PDF format 18
October: Andrew Shaner Department of Psychiatry, VA Greater
Schizophrenia: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Schizophrenia should not exist. It
crushes sexual relationships and reproductive success and thus should
have been eliminated long ago by selection. Yet it persists at a global
prevalence far too high to be due to new mutations at a few loci.
This has convinced scientists that many loci must be involved. But
what evolutionary basis might there be for mutations at so many loci
to produce the same disorder? In
a paper to be published in Schizophrenia Research, my coauthors and
I propose an answer using one of the most recent and provocative developments
in evolutionary theory: costly signaling theory and its application
to sexually selected traits such as bright feathers and mating calls.
According to costly signaling theory, only individuals with the best
genes can grow the most attractive versions of sexually selected traits.
Consequently, these traits serve as fitness indicators. Individuals
who prefer mates displaying the most fully developed forms of these
traits increase the fitness of their offspring. Based
on this theory, we propose that schizophrenia persists because it
is the unattractive extreme of sexually selected fitness indicator
-- that it is analogous to a small, dull peacock’s tail. We
suspect that the indicator trait itself-the human equivalent of a
peacock’s tail -- is the uniquely human capacity for verbal
courtship (e.g., telling stories and jokes to potential mates) and
the symptoms of schizophrenia are aberrant and unsuccessful versions
of verbal courtship. This speculation helps illustrate our hypothesis,
yet is unnecessary for our explanations and predictions. These depend
only on a few general properties of sexually selected traits. In
this talk, I review sexual selection and fitness indicators, introduce
our new model of schizophrenia, discuss its explanatory power, explain
how it resolves the evolutionary paradox, discuss its implications
for gene hunting, and identify some empirically testable predictions
as directions for further research. Click
here to download the paper in PDF format 25
October: Emotions, boundedly rational agents and the fast and frugal
perspective Herbert
Simon has warned us that an explanatory account of human rationality
must identify the significance of emotions for choice behavior. Customarily
emphasizing the cognitive dimensions of decision making, relatively
few researchers have paid close attention to specifying the complex
ways in which emotion may shape human thinking and decisions. Accordingly,
this paper is an attempt to follow Simon’s suggestion and specify
how emotions can enter into the theory of bounded rationality. To
accomplish our task, we capitalize on Rom Harré’s work on causal
powers, from which we propose a strategy to study the significance
of emotion in decision-making processes. In an attempt to elaborate
on an explanation of behavior by mechanism, we discuss a version of
bounded rationality recently put forward by Gigerenzer, Todd, and
the ABC Research Group (Gigerenzer et al. 1999; Gigerenzer & Selten
2001), the so-called adaptive toolbox of fast and frugal heuristics.
Coupled with insights from evolutionary psychology and neuroscience,
this version of bounded rationality gives us a better grasp of the
functional role of emotions within the human decision machinery. Click here to download
the paper in PDF format 1
November: Do animals
really maximise their inclusive fitness? Most fieldworkers and empirical biologists studying whole organisms use as a working hypothesis that organisms have been designed by natural selection to maximise their inclusive fitness. They have used this approach to great effect since the work of Hamilton (1964) became widely known in the 1970s. On the other hand, population geneticists have mostly consistently denied that natural selection causes any quantity to be maximised, and have in general been critical of Hamilton's work. It is an established part of the Modern Synthesis that the basis for natural selection must be found in population genetics models, which in mathematical terms are expressed in equations of motion. The modern way to represent design, used in economics though little in biology, is through optimisation programs. Recent unpublished work is outlined which, by making formal links between the mathematics of motion and optimisation programs, begins to provide a rigorous justification for the maximisation of inclusive fitness. Previous work relating to non-social behaviour can be found in the following references (available at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~grafen/): Grafen, A. 1999.
‘Formal Darwinism, the individual-as-maximising-agent analogy,
and bet-hedging’. Proceedings of the Royal Society (London)
B, 266, 799-803. 6
November (Saturday): Fall
2004 UCLA / UCSB Conference on Human Nature To be held at UCSB. Speakers include UCLA’s Daniel
Fessler and UCSB’s Jim Roney. For more details, visit http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/
under “Evolution, Mind, and Behavior Program” 8
November: Fiona Cowie California Institute of Technology
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
Language Genes, Language Organs and Language Evolution
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November Francis
Steen UCLA
Department of Communication Studies The role of consciousness in learning from simulations I argued in Steen & Owens (2001) that play is a behavioral and cognitive simulation whose biological function is learning. In this presentation, I address the question of how such learning takes place, focusing on the role of consciousness. I present some preliminary data from an experiment on strategy-learning in a solitaire game, and a cognitive model of the large-scale architecture of the mind required to support learning from simulations.
Francis
F. Steen and Stephanie A. Owens (2001) Francis F. Steen
(2005) 22
November: William Rice UCSB Department of Ecology, Evolution
& Marine Biology Reproductive interactions between the sexes: arms-race or mutualistic coevolution? The empirical foundation for sexual conflict theory is the unequivocal data from many different taxa demonstrating that females are harmed while interacting with males. But the interpretation of this keystone evidence has been challenged because females may more than compensate the direct costs of interacting with males by the indirect benefits of obtaining higher quality genes for their offspring. A quantification of this trade-off is critical to resolve the controversy. Here I present results from 3 experiments that show that, at least in the D. melanogaster model system, indirect benefits do not off-set direct harm to females due to their interactions with males. I also present evidence, using hemiclonal analysis, that an ongoing arms race between the sexes can be directly measured in this model system.
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November: Michael Sockol UC Davis Department of Anthropology
The
origin of the human family, Hominidae, has been a primary focus of
paleoanthropologists for more than a century. Indeed, the desire to
understand our origins is ubiquitous in human society. Of continuing
interest to anthropologists is the nature of the shift to bipedal
locomotion in our earliest hominid ancestors. Though debate exists
about whether bipedalism serves to define Hominidae, it is clear that
becoming bipedal was the critical first step in the emergence of the
human form, preceding all other major morphological adaptations. Yet,
while the end result is apparent in the fossil record, the process
by which bipedalism arose is unclear. Numerous hypotheses have been
proposed for the shift to bipedal locomotion. Many have been discarded
while others have withstood the test of time. One such hypothesis,
commonly referred to as the “energetics hypothesis”, posits
an energy savings associated with bipedalism in an ecological context.
I review the current state of our knowledge of the shift to bipedal
locomotion in early hominids and give reasons for considering the
energetics hypothesis as crucial to understanding that shift.
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December: Dan Blumstein UCLA Department of Organismic Biology, Ecology
and Evolution
The evolution, function and meaning of alarm communication
in marmots Many
prey species signal when they encounter a predator. For over a decade
I've used anti-predator communication as a model for understanding
the evolution of complex communication in general. I will summarize
results, primarily focusing on my work with marmots--large, alpine
ground squirrels found throughout the Northern hemisphere. I will
talk about recent work on the evolution of alarm communication in
rodents as well as in marmots, and the current adaptive utility of
alarm communication. Surprisingly, it seems that alarm calls first
evolved as a form of detection signalling primarily directed to predators.
Calling has subsequently been exapted to have a conspecific alarm
function. Much of my work has focused on the meaning of alarm calls.
While marmots don't seem to have functionally referential communicative
abilities, they do encode risk in a variety of ways. Much recent work
has focused on the somewhat paradoxical question of why calls might
be individually specific. Evaluating caller reliability seems to be
the key to selecting for the ability to distinguish among callers. Click here to download the paper in PDF format
Winter Quarter 2005 10
January:
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January: 24
January: David Reznick UC Riverside Department of Biology The evolution of placentas in the Poeciliid fishes: An empirical study of macroevolution
Click here to download the paper in PDF format
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January:
Intuitive ethics: How a few evolved intuitions give rise to culturally variable virtues Click here to download the paper in PDF format 7
February: Richard McElreath UC Davis Department of Anthropology Applying evolutionary models to the laboratory study of social learning Click here to download the paper in PDF format
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February: Dwight Read UCLA Department of Anthropology Where Does Culture Fit In? I will use the Netsilik as an example amenable to the first position and argue that the Netsilik cultural framework of infant naming and sealing partners provided a cultural basis for implementing methods of resource procurement that were necessary for survival in their extreme, Arctic region. At the same time I will argue that the cultural framework is more complex than simply reflecting necessary patterns of behavior in that the cultural framework not only provides a cultural basis for implementing the required behaviors, but the cultural framework has its own dynamics and thereby adds another dimension that structured their particular behavioral means for coping with the environmental constraints to which they had to adapt. The
Tiwi, I argue, provide a stark contrast to the Netsilik and exemplify
the way in which the cultural framework can have far reaching consequences
for social organization and
behavior that only makes sense by reference to the cultural system(s)
in which the behavior is grounded, rather than by reference to behavior
as the means to interact with their environment or as arising from
the consequences of individual interaction, per se. In brief, the
Tiwi had an extremely complex social system structured by a kinship
framework that appears to bear little relevance to what was required
to procure resources on Melville and Bathurst Islands. Click here to download the paper in PDF format
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February:
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February: Neil Tsutsui UC Irvine Department of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology Genetics and social organization of an invasive ant in its native and introduced ranges Click here to download the paper in PDF format 7
March: Joanna
Mountain Stanford University Department of
Anthropological Sciences Deep common ancestry of African click-speaking populations
Click here to download the paper in PDF format
Click here to download a relevant news article in PDF format
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March: Kang Lee UC San Diego Department of Psychology Little Liars: Development of Verbal Deception in Different Social Contexts In this talk, I will present three sets of studies that examined children’s lying: (a) to conceal their own transgression, (b) to be polite, and (c) to be modest. I will use the results of these studies to illustrate that (a) lying is a behavior that develops early and rapidly, (b) preschoolers are already capable of managing their nonverbal behaviors when lying, which makes their lies difficult to detect, and (3) cultural factors influence both children’s moral understanding of lying and their actual behavior. However, there exists a complex relationship between children’s moral understanding: One factor is whether both are consistently promoted and sanctioned in a culture. When they are not, there is no relationship between the two. When they are, there is a small to moderate correlation between the two.
Spring Quarter 2005 4
April: Mark Kleiman UCLA Department of Public Policy Dominance
hierarchies and public policies 1. Dominance hierarchies help resolve conflicts over resources with a minimum of actual combat by giving the higher-ranking individual priority. To some extent, then, the hierarchy ranking is going to reflect who would come out on top if there were actual combat. 2. In complicated human societies, the structure of the dominance hierarchy(ies) is partly a matter of deliberate choice, including deliberate choice through public policy. As Aristotle pointed out, a democratic regime doesn't just mean that public decisions get made by the many rather than by a few or by one; it means greater social equality as well. 3. In designing social institutions relating to dominance, there are two big questions: a. How steep
the gradient should be. 4. Being on top of the dominance hierarchy means more access to resources. That makes it desirable, and worth fighting for. And in fact individuals in all dominance-hierarchy-forming species do fight for dominance. 5. But if access to resources were all that counted, then resource-rich environments would reduce the intensity of dominance conflict. Is that true? 6. Being lower on the hierarchy in a resource-rich environment can mean more access to resources than being higher up in a resource-poor environment. (We all eat better, sleep more comfortably, and have better medical care than Louis XIV did.) 7. Economists normally assume that people care about the resources available to themselves and not where they stand in dominance hierarchies. That's what makes the Pareto Principle seem plausible. 8. But some resources are naturally scarce; not everyone can have preferential access to mating opportunities, for example. 9. It turns out empirically that, holding resource access constant, position in hierarchy is an important contributor to health and other measures of well-being. (Whitehall studies.) 10. That makes evolutionary sense. 11. It also turns out empirically that, while cross-sectionally within a society wealth correlates with happiness, that doesn't hold longitudinally as a society gets richer or cross-sectionally among societies, above a national income of something like 1/3 of that currently enjoyed in the U.S. (Hedonics literature, e.g., Easterlin, Kahnemann) 12. Ideally, dominant status should accompany pro-social behaviors. One advantage of market-driven societies is that people gain status by accumulating wealth rather than by accumulating the means of violence. 13. On the other hand, awarding dominance to money can lead to an unhealthy concentration on money-making. As Keynes said, in a poor society getting the smartest people to concentrate on making money is a good way to expand total resources available. But now that we're rich enough so that the benefits of getting richer are limited, maybe we ought to start rewarding more attractive human traits than diligent and well-directed greed. If you value art and science, you ought to be thinking about how to arrange things so that producing art and science is a good way to acquire dominant status. 14. Awarding dominance to money also promotes Veblenesque conspicuous-consumption behavior, and commodity fetishism. Conspicuous consumption is largely signaling behavior: spending is a market signal for wealth, so the more closely dominance runs with wealth, the greater the incentive for conspicuous waste. Marketing means convincing people that it's important to have whatever it is you're trying to sell. Being inundated with marketing (other than Citigroup ads) should make people value "stuff" more relative to, e.g., leisure or culture or virtue or happiness. 15. Increasing scale through rising population, cheap communication, e-commerce, and globalization tends to increase income inequality, at least at the top of the scale, because the greater the size of the potential market the greater the rewards for outstanding performance. (Cook and Frank's "winner-takes-all" effect. 16. Given how unhealthy, and how bad for your children, it is to be at the bottom of the pecking order, we need to ask whether, and how, that problem can be allieviated. -- Gentler status
gradients 17. That would be worth doing even at some cost in economic efficiency, narrowly considered. But social exclusion has big external costs, so relieving the problems at the bottom of the pecking order might turn out to have big benefits, even in strictly economic terms. 18. It would seem logical that a more equal income distribution would make money less important in awarding status. But is that true? 19. If money gets less important in awarding status, does the total steepness of the hierarchy gradient decrease, or is money just replaced by something else with the gradient held constant or even increased? 20. Norms of informality, whether Quaker or hippie, seem designed to reduce status gradients. Do they work? Here's a website for the Whitehall studies: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/whitehallII/ And here's a
link to the main Easterlin paper:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V8F-3YGTSKK-T/2/964f8cb37c7ea0eb05ed82b7b18ae978
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April: Daniel M.T. Fessler UCLA Department of Anthropology Cringing before others' eyes: A cross-cultural investigation of the evolution of shame
Cross-cultural comparisons can a) illuminate the manner in which cultures differentially highlight, ignore, and group various facets of emotional experience, and b) shed light on our evolved species-typical emotional architecture. In many societies, concern with shame is one of the principal factors regulating social behavior. Three studies conducted in Bengkulu (Indonesia) and California explored the nature and experience of shame in two disparate cultures. Study 1, perceived term use frequency, indicated that shame is more prominent in Bengkulu, a collectivistic culture, than in California, an individualistic culture. Study 2, comparing naturally occurring shame events (Bengkulu) with reports thereof (California), revealed that shame is associated with guilt-like accounts in California but not in Bengkulu, and subordinance events in Bengkulu but not in California; published reports suggest that the latter pattern is prominent worldwide. Study 3 mapped the semantic domain of shame using a synonym task; again, guilt was prominent in California, subordinance in Bengkulu. Because shame is overshadowed by guilt in individualistic cultures, and because these cultures downplay aversive emotions associated with subordinance, a fuller understanding of shame is best arrived at through the study of collectivistic cultures such as Bengkulu. After reviewing evolutionary theories on the origins and functions of shame, I evaluate these perspectives in light of facets of this emotion evident in Bengkulu and elsewhere. The available data are consistent with the proposition that shame evolved from a rank-related emotion and, while motivating prestige competition, cooperation, and conformity, nevertheless continues to play this role in contemporary humans.
Click here to download the paper in PDF format
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April: Raymond Gibbs UC Santa Cruz Department of Psychology Embodied metaphor in language, thought, and culture
Metaphor
is traditionally viewed as a special use of language. But recent research
from cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics suggests that metaphor
is ubiquitous in language and a fundamental part of human conceptual
systems. I will argue in this talk that metaphor is also deeply rooted
in recurring aspects of embodied experience that serves as the grounding
for significant parts of language, thought, and culture. Particular
attention is given to recent experimental evidence showing that metaphor
use arises from embodied simulations that people engage in during
in-the-moment reasoning, speaking, and understanding.
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April: Sang-Hee Lee UC Riverside Department of Anthropology Old Is Young: Longevity in Human Evolution
Increased longevity, expressed as number of individuals surviving to older adulthood, represents one of the ways the human life history pattern differs from other primates. We assessed changes in longevity with the ratio of older to younger adults (OY ratio) in four hominin dental samples from successive time periods, and determining the significance of differences in these ratios. While there is significant increased longevity between all groups indicating a trend of increased adult survivorship over the course of human evolution, there is a dramatic increase in longevity in the modern humans of the Early Upper Paleolithic. We then addressed whether longevity increased as a result of cultural/adaptive change in Upper Paleolithic Europe or whether it was introduced to Europe as a part of modern human biology, comparing Western Asia and European samples. We find that the Upper Paleolithic OY ratio is more than double that of the Middle Paleolithic moderns; in contrast, the OY ratios of the two West Asian Middle Paleolithic groups are not significantly different from each other. However, the OY ratios of both West Asian Moderns and Neandertals are significantly higher than the European Neandertal ratio. Considering cultural versus taxonomic differences, we conclude that the increase in adult survivorship associated with the Upper Paleolithic may reflect an important cultural adaptation promoting the demographic and material representations of modernity. Further research is discussed.
Click here to download the paper in PDF format
Click here to download a commentary on the above article in PDF format
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May: Brian Lickel University of Southern California
Department of Psychology Affective Mechanisms for Managing Intergroup Retribution
In this talk, I’ll present data examining how people think about and react to the wrong-doing of ingroup members. In particular, I’ll describe affective reactions of self-blame (shame, guilt, ingroup directed anger) that people sometimes experience when a member of their ingroup harms an outgroup. I argue that these affective reactions exist as a functional response to the problem of group-based or collective responsibility (e.g., blood revenge) and I will describe how the behavior that results from feelings of shame, guilt, or ingroup directed anger may reduce the extent to which a harmed outgroup engages in retaliation after a provocation.
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May: Jennie Pyers UC Berkeley Department of Psychology Building
belief: The relationship between language and theory of mind
False-belief
understanding is the non-egocentric ability to recognize that one's
own thoughts and beliefs can be different from others', and
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May: Piotr Winkielman UC San Diego Department of Psychology Unconscious Emotion
My talk explores the relation between emotion and conscious experience. Conscious feelings are typically viewed as a central and necessary ingredient of emotion. In contrast, I will argue that emotion also can be genuinely unconscious (i.e., occur without the accompanying subjective experience). Theoretically, my argument is anchored in evolutionary considerations that systems underlying basic emotions originated prior to systems for supporting conscious awareness, and in functional considerations that consciousness is often unnecessary for emotions to do their job. These considerations are consistent with evidence from neuroscience and psychology. Neuroscience evidence suggests that subcortical brain systems, including the brain stem and the “limbic system” underlie both basic ‘‘liking/disliking’’ reactions and more complex reactions, such as fear, disgust, or desire. Further, psychological evidence suggests that positive and negative reactions can be elicited subliminally and remain inaccessible to introspection. Despite the absence of subjective feelings in such cases, subliminally induced affective reactions still influence people’s preference judgments, monetary decision and even complex behavior, such as the amount of beverage they consume. Finally, I will discuss the interactions of conscious and unconscious components of emotion, and conditions under which these components become coupled and decoupled.
Click here to download a brief theoretical overview in PDF format
Click here to download a longer empirical paper in PDF format
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May: Douglas Wallace UC Irvine Department of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology Human Origins, Genes and Myths: A Mitochondrial DNA Journey
The investigation of human origins and migrations has been greatly advanced by the analysis of human genetic variation to determine the relationships between different human populations. Such studies have permitted demonstration of the recent African origin of humans, the reconstruction of ancient migrations, and the correlation of human genetic history with linguistic affiliations. The first component of the human genome to be used in these investigations was the maternally-inherited human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which codes for key proteins involved in the conversion of dietary calories in into ATP to fuel work and heat to maintain our body temperature. Variation in the human mtDNA has been found to be encompassed in a single dichotomously branching tree with the different branches of the tree correlating dramatically with the geographic distribution of indigenous peoples from around the world. The mtDNA correlation with human populations is much greater than that seen for either the paternally-inherited Y chromosome or the biparentally inherited autosomes. We now believe that this correlation is because variation in the mtDNA permitted our ancestors to adapt to the increasingly cold environments that they encountered as they migrated out-of-Africa and into temperate Eurasia and arctic Siberia. Hence, selection has stabilized the geographic distribution of mtDNA variation such that mtDNA variation has sustained the distribution of the earliest human incursions around the world. This unique aspect of the mtDNA now makes mtDNA variation a particularly valuable tool for the analysis of deep cultural associations and origins. This is currently proving to be the case in studies on the origins and radiation of Native America languages and myths.
Click here to download a paper in PDF format
Click here to download another paper in PDF format
Click here to download one more paper in PDF format
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June: Morten Christiansen Cornell University Department of
Psychology The Evolution
of Languages and Genes Language is undoubtedly governed by innate constraints. Otherwise, it is difficult to account for the close match between the intricate structure of languages and the mechanisms involved in acquiring and processing them. Innate constraints are also needed to explain the existence of language universals; that is, why languages tend to be structured and used in certain ways and not others. Moreover, no other animal communication system appears to have the same kind of complex linguistic properties as found in human language. But does this necessarily mean that humans have evolved genes specifically to encode innate constraints on language? In this talk, I argue that such 'language genes' are an unlikely outcome of human evolution. Instead, corroborated by a series of language evolution simulations, I suggest that the exquisite fit between humans and language has arisen because languages themselves have evolved to fit human learning mechanisms existing prior to the emergence of linguistic communication. On this account, the apparently 'idiosyncratic' language universals derive from non-linguistic constraints on learning and processing in these mechanisms, many of which have evolved specifically to support complex human cognition. Click here to download a paper in PDF format
Click here to download another paper in PDF format
LINKS TO PREVIOUS YEARS’ BEC SPEAKER SERIES: The Behavior, Evolution
and Culture Speaker Series is generously supported by: UCLA Division of
Social Sciences UCLA Division of
Humanities UCLA Department
of Anthropology UCLA Department
of Speech and Communication Studies
To be added to the BEC list-serv, send a
message to listserv@weber2.sscnet.ucla.edu
BEC holds quarterly conferences with UCSB's
sister program in Evolution, Mind, and Behavior.
For related groups at UCLA, see the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development
, the Program
for Psychocultural Studies and Medical Anthropology , Social Psychology
, and Animal Behavior.
For a variety of web-resources exploring
the interactions between mind and culture, Some papers to be discussed may be in PDF
format, which can be read only if you have previously downloaded the
free Adobe Acrobat
Reader . This page is maintained by Clark Barrett. Email: barrett@anthro.ucla.edu
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