WINTER 2005 UCLA / UCSB
HUMAN NATURE AND SOCIETY CONFERENCE
Haines Hall 352, UCLA Campus
Tentative
schedule:
10 AM
Breakfast buffet
10:30 – 11:30 Matt Keller* (UCLA Center for Society and Genetics)
11:30 – 12:00 Keller Q&A
Lunch break
1:30 – 2:30 Alan Fiske* (UCLA BEC, CBD)
2:30 – 3:00 Fiske Q&A
3:00 – 3:20 COFFEE
3:20 – 3:50 Stephen Le* (UCLA BEC) + Le Q&A
3:50 – 4:00 coffee refresher
4:00 – 4:45 Joshua New* (UCSB Dept. of Psychology)
4:45 – 5:10 New Q&A
5:15 PM Adjourn
*See
below for title/abstract
Driving
directions to UCLA, and a campus map, can be found here:
All practicing or aspiring evolutionary social scientists affiliated with
some educational and/or research institution are invited to attend.
Stay tuned for updates and abstracts to be posted on the BEC website.
Contact Kevin Haley (khaley@ucla.edu) or
Stephen Le (letuhuy@ucla.edu) with questions.
ABSTRACTS:
An Evolutionary Framework for the Genetics of Mental Disorders
Matthew Keller
From an evolutionary standpoint, the persistence of genetic variants (alleles)
that increase the risk for common mental disorders (CMDs) such as depression
or schizophrenia is puzzling. If CMDs truly are deleterious to fitness-and
there are reasons to believe that many are-why hasn't selection eliminated
alleles that predispose to them? Different models in evolutionary genetics
can help shed light on the persistence of alleles that confer vulnerability
to CMDs. In particular, (1) some alleles may have been closer to neutrality
in the ancestral past than in modern environments, (2) due to balancing selection,
some alleles may have beneficial effects in other genetic or environmental
backgrounds, and/or (3) the alleles may simply be deleterious, but cannot
be eliminated because so many genes affect the underlying mechanisms in question
that the genetic variation that gives rise to CMDs is maintained at a balance
between mutation and selection. These views of CMDs have important consequences
for the current gene mapping gold rush, and may help to explain why the search
for 'disease genes' has been slower and more laborious than researchers had
originally hoped
Constitution, Cognition, Communication, and Cultural Transmission of Social Relationships
Alan Page Fiske
Ethnological and social-psychological evidence indicates that people employ distinct media for constituting each of four basic forms of social relationships. Communal relationships are naturally based on consubstantial assimilation: a sense of shared bodily substance, such as that resulting from birth or commensalism. However, authority relations are constituted primarily through social physics, putting persons in spatial positions above/below or in front/behind, according persons greater or lesser magnitude and number, ordering by temporal precedence, or treating people as if they differed in force. In contrast, people constitute equality by using concrete matching or balancing procedures, such as taking turns, flipping a coin, placing in one-to-one correspondence, or aligning side-by-side; these are operational definitions of equality. Relationships governed by ratios (such as market prices, utilitarian arguments, and cost/benefit calculations) are predominantly conducted in the medium of true abstract symbols, including numbers, prices, and propositional language; money itself is a metasymbol.
There tend to be homologies among (1) the manner in which people constitute a given type of relationship, (2) the cognitive and (3) communicative representations of the relationship, and (4) the channel through which it is culturally transmitted and (5) acquired. This correspondence results from the mutual causal connections among the media used for a given type of relationship. People seem to be innately prepared to use these systems, which appear to be uniquely evocative of relational motives and especially effective in invoking normative commitments. Hence we get solidarity based on descent, or ritual blood sharing; ranking legitimated through massive monuments or birth order; equality accepted when concretely operationalized in ballots and lotteries; and market transactions conducted in digital ledgers and sealed by signing contracts or providing ATM PIN codes.
This theory and a wide
range of supporting evidence are presented in:
Fiske, A. P. 2004. Four modes of constituting relationships: Consubstantial
assimilation; space, magnitude, time and force; concrete procedures; abstract
symbolism. In N. Haslam, Ed., Relational Models Theory: A Contemporary Overview
(pp. 61–146). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
PDF: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/pubs/Fiske_Four_Modes_Constituting_Relationships_2004.pdf
Conference participants will get more out of the talk if they are familiar
with relational models theory; for background, see:
Fiske, A. P. & Haslam, N. 2005. The Four Basic Social Bonds: Structures
for Coordinating Interaction. In Mark Baldwin, Ed., Interpersonal Cognition
(pp. 267–298). New York: Guilford.
PDF: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/RM_PDFs/Fiske_Haslam_Four_Basic_Bonds_2005.pdf
A bibliography of relational models theory is at: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/RM_bibliography.pdf
Stephen Le: TBA
Joshua New: "Category-specificity in spatial and temporal attention"