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Behavior, Evolution, and Culture Speaker Series Mondays 12:00-1:30, Haines Hall 352, UCLA Lunch will be provided
starting at 11:45 AM on a first come, first serve basis. Due to budgetary
restraints, all attendees who wish to
partake of the lunch are asked to make a $5 per person donation. Spring Quarter 2008 31 Mar: Carel van Schaik Anthropological Institute & Museum, University of Zurich Dominance styles and male-male coalitions
among nonhuman primates and humans
Naturalistic data on
nonhuman primates show that the degree of despotism among males in primate
groups is predicted by the degree
to which mating access to females can be monopolized. Degree of despotism should affect other
aspects of male behavioral strategies, such as how long top-dominants’ tenure
is, how top-dominance is achieved
and which groups are targeted for dispersal, as well as the feasibility and profitability of different
kinds of male-male coalitions. Primate data support these predictions. This
primate model is then applied to
human foragers. A fundamental difference is caused by the presence of
weaponry. When opportunities for
despotism increase, violent coalitionary takeovers of top dominance and the
formation of elites emerge. *Co-sponsored by The UCLA
Interdisciplinary Relationship Science Program 7 Apr: Sam Bowles Santa Fe Institute The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War Altruism -- benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself -- and parochialism – hostility toward individuals not of one’s own ethnic, racial or other group -- are common human behaviors. The intersection of the two – which we term parochial altruism -- is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because altruistic or parochial behavior reduces ones payoffs by comparison to what one would gain by eschewing these behaviors. But parochial altruism could have evolved if parochialism promoted inter-group hostilities and the combination of altruism and parochialism contributed to success in these conflicts. Our game-theoretic analysis and agent-based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism is viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly. *Co-sponsored by The UCLA Center for Society and Genetics Read the paper 14 Apr: Carol Padden UCSD and Mark Aronoff Stonybrook U Embodied cognition in an emerging
language: Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language
We report here on work we have carried out with colleagues
Wendy Sandler and Irit Meir on an emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language
(ABSL). ABSL developed de novo
in a small closed community of Bedouins which is now in its third generation of
signers. In this talk, we show
how a new human language is assembled over a relatively short period of time. In this language, the
body emerges as a primary signifier, figuring prominently in the form of verbs,
particularly in grammatical notion of subject. Broadly, we find that the iconicity of the body and space around the body
interacts with emerging grammatical structures, including word order and morphology, resulting in a complex
story about the deployment of physical, human resources in the service of natural language grammars. *Co-sponsored
by The UCLA
Center for Society and Genetics 21 Apr: Gary Marcus NYU Psychology Kluge: The
Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
In fields ranging from reasoning to linguistics,
the idea of humans as perfect, rational, optimal creatures is making a comeback – but should it be? Hamlet’s
musings that the mind was “noble in reason ...infinite in faculty” have their counterparts in recent
scholarly claims that the mind consists of an “accumulation of superlatively well- engineered designs” shaped by
the process of natural selection (Tooby and Cosmides, 1995), and the 2006 suggestions of Bayesian
cognitive scientists Chater, Tenenbaum and Yuille that “it seems increasingly plausible that human cognition
may be explicable in rational probabilistic terms and that, in core domains, human cognition approaches an
optimal level of performance”, as well as in Chomsky’s recent suggestions that language is close “to what
some super-engineer would construct, given the conditions that the language faculty must satisfy”. In this talk, I will I argue that this resurgent
enthusiasm for rationality is misplaced, for three reasons. First, I will suggest that recent empirical arguments in
favor of human rationality rest on a fallacy of composition, implicitly but mistakenly assuming that evidence of
rationality in some (carefully analyzed) aspects of cognition entails that the broader whole (i.e. the human mind
in toto) is rational. In fact, establishing that some particular aspect of cognition is optimal (or perfect, or near
optimal) is not tantamount to showing that the system is a whole is; current enthusiasm for optimality
overlooks the possibility that the mind might be suboptimal even if some (or even many) of the components of cognition have
been optimized. Second, I will argue that there is considerable empirical evidence (most well-known,
but rarely given due attention in the neo-Rationalist literature) that militates against any strong claim
of human cognitive perfection. Finally, I will argue that the assumption that evolution tends creatures towards
rationality or “superlative adaptation” is itself theoretically suspect, and ought to be considerably tempered by
recognition of what Stephen Jay Gould called “remnants of history”, or what might be termed evolutionary
inertia. I will close by suggesting that mind might be
better seen as what engineers call a kluge: clumsy and inelegant, yet remarkably effective. *Co-sponsored
by The UCLA
Center for Society and Genetics 28 Apr: Susan Perry UCLA Anthropology Social
learning about foraging strategies in wild capuchin monkeys. White-faced capuchin monkeys are best known for
their innovation and traditions in the domain of social communication; however, social learning appears to
play a role in the acquisition of their foraging techniques as well.
In this talk, I explore several lines of evidence indicating social
influence in food processing techniques. Several foods are processed differently
at different sites that are similar both genetically and ecologically. Within social groups, those monkeys
who spend more time together are also more likely to share the same foraging technique. There is also
evidence that monkeys bias their social learning opportunities to preferentially observe models who
are foraging on rare or hard-to-process foods, thus providing useful information on what to eat and how
to eat it. Developmental studies yield evidence for a conformity bias in use of food processing
techniques, even for individuals who have already learned both of two possible techniques. *Co-sponsored by The UCLA Interdisciplinary Relationship Science
Program 5 May: Debra Lieberman U of Hawaii
Psychology It’s all relative: Altruism, sexual aversions, and
morality Mechanisms
for detecting kin rely on cues that correlated with relatedness in ancestral
environments to adaptively regulate mate selection and altruistic effort. For
siblings, one potential cue, proposed by Edward Westermarck, is co-residence
duration. Another cue that would have been highly predictive of siblingship
is seeing one’s mother caring for a newborn. Data from a series of
investigations show that these two cues regulate the development of
altruistic motivations, sexual aversions, and, as a by-product, moral
sentiments relating to incest. Revisiting the natural experiments that fueled
the discussion over how sexual aversions and moral sentiments develop, I show
that these two cues also explain the data from the Taiwanese minor marriages.
Furthermore, I provide new evidence that childhood co-residence predicts
altruistic tendencies, sexual aversions, and moral sentiments in individuals
raised in the communal fashion of the Israeli Kibbutzim. 12 May: Peter Todd U of Indiana Cognitive Science,
Informatics, and Psychological and Brain Sciences Investigating mate search with simulation
and speed-dating
The choice of a mate is not only one of the most
important decisions in our lives, but also one of the most difficult, fraught
by lack of knowledge of the options to come and inability to return to
options already passed by. How
do we make this challenging sequential choice, at the same time we are trying
to convince someone else to choose us—and more specifically, how do we decide
when our search is over? To find
out, we could follow a set of individuals through multiple relationships over
an extended period of time—or we can speed things up: We can build simulated
mate-seekers who embody plausible decision rules for searching for partners,
and see how they fare in an artificial mating market, comparing their
behavior to that of aggregated humans.
We can also speed up human mate-seekers themselves, by having them
participate in speed-dating events and observing their searches as they meet
and interact with a succession of potential partners. With these methods we are testing a
satisfying search model that adjusts mate aspiration levels lower after
failed relationships and higher after successful ones. We are also able to test other
hypotheses about the kinds of mate choices people make, and how well matched
they end up being. *This talk is co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary
Relationship Science Program 19 May: Katie Hinde UCLA Anthropology Magnitude, Sources, and Consequences of Individual Variation in
Milk Production in Rhesus Macaques Lactation
represents the greatest post-natal cost of mothering in primates and numerous
studies have established
that variation in maternal condition is associated with infant growth,
development, health, and survival.
Presumably the effects of maternal condition are mediated through milk output
during lactation, however this
relationship remains poorly understood. Here I present the first systematic
investigation of the magnitude,
sources, and consequences of individual variation in mother’s milk for an Old
World monkey. Rhesus macaques
produce dilute milk typical of the primate order, however there was
substantial variation between
mothers, as well as within mother, over lactation in milk composition and
yield, and therefore the milk energy
available for the infant. Maternal life history was associated with milk
yield and milk energy density was biased in
favor of sons, especially first-born sons. Infants that had higher available
milk energy at one month of age were
characterized by higher activity levels and greater confidence at 3.5 months
of age suggesting that mother’s milk
may serve as a nutritional cue that calibrates infant behavior and
temperament to maternal and/or
environmental conditions. These results, obtained from a well-fed captive
population, demonstrate that small
differences between mothers can have important implications for lactational
investment and infant outcomes. 26 May: Memorial Day No Speaker 2 Jun: Gyorgy Gergely Central European University,
Budapest, Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences "Beyond Imitative Learning:
The case for Natural Pedagogy Evolutionary
Mechanisms of Cultural Knowledge Transmission in Humans"
The dominant view holds that it is the capacity for imitative
learning that serves the evolutionary function of cultural transmission in humans. I’ll argue,
however, that presently proposed models of imitative learning face the problem of ‘relevance-blindness’
as they lack appropriate selection mechanisms to differentiate
relevant (to be re-enacted and learned) from
non-relevant, incidental to be disregarded) aspects of observed behaviors. ‘Relevance-blind’ imitative copying
would be a wasteful and inefficient transmission mechanism likely to lead to distorted reproduction and
eventual extinction of useful cultural innovations over the generations. consequent need for
their efficient intergenerational transmission created evolutionary
pressure leading to the selection of a new type of
‘relevance-guided’ social-communicative learning mechanism of mutual design: the system of ‘Natural
Pedagogy’ (NP) (Gergely & Csibra, 2006). On the naïve
“teacher’s” side, NP involves an instinctual inclination to
ostensively manifest - and guide the ignorant “learner’s” inferences to identify
– relevant cultural information to
be fast-learned. On the naïve “learner’s” side, NP involves evolved
sensitivity to ‘ostensive’ (e.g.,
eye-contact, contingent reactivity, or infant-directed speech) and
referential (e.g., gaze-shift or pointing) cues that are
interpreted to signal the other’s communicative intention to manifest new,
relevant (and generalizable) cultural
knowledge about a referent (and its kind). Such cues trigger a receptive
learning attitude to fast-learn ostensively
manifested contents even
when they are cognitively
opaque to the learner. I’ll
present evidence to support the NP hypothesis from our infancy studies
testing the basic assumptions
of the theory about the nature of early cultural learning in humans in a
number of different knowledge
domains. LINKS TO PREVIOUS YEARS’ 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
Interdisciplinary Relationship Science Program The Cotsen
Institute of Archaeology
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 . |
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