Kevin Brabazon is the main United Nations Representative for Generations United (www.gu.org) - which serves in an advisory capacity to the Economic and Social Council and an Associate Professor at New York University, teaching in statistics, information technology, and management science. He is a professor in intergenerational studies at Dowling College and an editor of Intergenerational Approaches in Aging: Implications for Education, Policy and Practice and author of other publications in the intergenerational and economics fields. He was involved in developing intergenerational services at NYC Department for the Aging for several years, and a USA network of services for grandparents raising grandchildren for the Brookdale Foundation.
Barbara Marx Hubbard has been called “the voice for conscious evolution of our time” by Deepak Chopra and is the subject of Neale Donald Walsh’s book The Mother of Invention. A prolific author, visionary, social innovator and educator, she is founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. Its purpose is to accelerate our conscious evolution.Currently she is developing on-line courses on conscious evolution and co-creation on the Shift Network reaching thousands of students worldwide. She is activating The Wheel of Co-creation as a model for social synergy and whole system shift, with examples developing in Cairo, Egypt, in Monterrey, Mexico, as well as in Chicago and Tampa, Florida. Her seminal book Conscious Evolution is available in an updated version. Other titles include The Hunger of Eve: One Woman’s Odyssey toward the Future and her most recent book is “Evolutionary Testament of Co-Creation: The Promise Will Be Kept, an evolutionary vision of the future inspired by the Gospels, Acts and Epistles. She is a Fellow of The Club of Budapest, and is a member of many progressive organizations, including the Evolutionary Leaders Group and the Transformational Leadership Council. She also co-founded the Association for Global New Thought (AGNT), and The World Future Society.
GrrlScientist is the pseudonym of an evolutionary ecologist and ornithologist who writes about evolution, ecology and behaviour, especially in birds.After earning a degree in microbiology (thesis focus: virology) and working at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, she earned her PhD in zoology from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she studied testosterone and behaviour in white-crowned sparrows. She then was a Chapman Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where she studied the phylogeography, speciation and distribution of lories and other parrots throughout the South Pacific Islands.A discarded scientist, she returned to her roots: writing. She wrote her eponymous science blog for The Guardian Online for longer than six years, and also wrote for ABS-CBN, Science, Nature, Nature Blog Network, and ScienceBlogs. In addition to writing for the non-profit Think Tank, The Evolution Institute, she contributes to Forbes and writes podcasts for BirdNote Radio. She curates most of her writing on Medium. She is very active on twitter @grrlscientist and sends out a weekly TinyLetter to share her writing with subscribers.
Lloyd Black is a doctoral student in the Evolution, Cognition, and Culture program of the Anthropology department of the University of Connecticut. His interests include the evolution of religious beliefs, particularly regarding afterlife notions.
I've been an amateur naturalist since I was a child, but that tendency was nurtured by growing up literally on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. I collected insects, fossils, and minerals I found there and amassed a little library of nature guides and books on wildlife. My great aunt would exclaim in Spanish, “Ay, Dios mio (Oh, my Lord),” upon opening my closet and seeing cigar boxes full of dried bugs. College courses on human-environment interactions expanded my interests to include people as part of ecological systems—an interest nurtured by my stepfather, an archaeologist, and by my graduate mentor and colleagues.Beyond the compelling nature of ecology as a field, I was inspired by the opportunity to teach (which I really enjoy), to study amazing environments and organisms, and to make a difference. Ecological issues usually take a back seat to other concerns, yet are crucial to our survival and prosperity.I hope my research provides some comparative perspective on sustainability efforts, which are often studied in isolation. I also hope it brings ecologists and economists together to work on basic theory that might contribute to better understanding and management of socio-environmental systems—because ecologists and economists are both studying our “house” (eco – comes from oikos, Greek for "house"), and because both involve the study of how organisms use limited means (e.g., the currency of energy in ecology and that of money in economics) to try to meet unlimited wants.
I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Environmental Science and Policy. I use approaches from evolutionary ecology to study the social and cultural processes that shape individual behavior in environmental contexts. I’m particularly interested in how behavior and policy interact to shape sustainability. I use theoretical models, behavioral experiments and observational data collection using surveys and interviews to examine these issues.
The spread of the human species is largely due to the development of complex culture early in our evolutionary history. Culture, like genes, is inherited, exhibits variation, and can be favored by natural selection and influenced by other evolutionary forces. Unlike genes the transmission of culture can come from many individuals and occurs magnitudes faster. To fully understand human evolution and behavior, culture alongside genes must be a part of the same formula. My mathematical modeling, ethnographic fieldwork, empirical studies, and experiments are motivated by cultural evolutionary theory to answer two major questions:
Carl Lipo is an archaeologist studying cultural change of human populations. Lipo uses evolutionary theory as a means of developing methods for studying cultural transmission and the process of natural selection acting on cultural systems. His work has explored community patterning among prehistoric potters of the Mississippi Valley, patterns of inheritance among stone tools producers in North America and the conditions that led the populations of Easter Island (Rapa Nui, Chile) to construct their famous monumental statues. In addition to the study of artifact variability and geochronology, Lipo has interests in remote sensing as a means of efficiently and non-destructively studying the archaeological record. This work includes the use of magnetometry, resistivity, conductivity, thermal imagery, photogrammetry, LiDAR and ground penetrating radar.
In November 2013, I joined the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw as an Assistant Professor. I hold a Ph.D. from the VU University, Amsterdam. In the past, I worked for various NGOs and international organizations on socio-economic issues.
I am an environmental social scientist with an interdisciplinary background and a foundation in evolutionary theories of human behavior. I integrate concepts and methods from evolutionary anthropology, institutional economics, psychology, and sociology to explore the emergence and spread of collective action and conservation at multiple scales.My goal is to make a small contribution to our understanding of what a more sustainable world might look like and how we can get there. To that end, I am broadly interested in understanding the dynamics that lead to the adoption of conservation behaviors and the emergence and spread of norms and institutions that support more sustainable lifestyles.
Karl Stiger is an independent scholar working in the field of paleontology.
Brian Malley's research focuses on the cognitive science of religion, in particular, the ways in which scriptures are conceived, used, interpreted, and deployed socially.
Dustin is the co-founder of the non-profit sustainability education organization GlobalESD.org, and a researcher / education outreach coordinator at the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Together with his wife, Susan Hanisch, Dustin works through teacher-researcher collaborations and student-led community science projects to advance teaching and learning at the intersection of evolution, behavior, and sustainability science. By linking scientific perspectives on social change with students and classrooms seeking to make the world a better place, the aim of this work is to foster a more global discussion about where we are going in the light of where we all have come from.
Dustin tweets about evolutionary approaches to sustainability education from @GlobalESD and about teaching evolution in early education from @EvoKidsGlobal
Dr. Madhusudan Katti is Associate Professor in the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program for Leadership in Public Science and the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University. He grew up near Mumbai and completed his B.Sc. in Zoology there before moving north to Dehradun to earn his M.Sc. in wildlife sciences at the Wildlife Institute of India. He moved to the US to earn his Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego, studying the winter ecology of migratory leaf warblers (Phylloscopus species).
Dr. Katti’s research program is embedded in a framework of Reconciliation Ecology where he now applies the tools of evolutionary ecology to understand how human actions shape the distribution and diversity of birds and other taxa in urban ecosystems, and how other species respond to anthropogenic landscapes. He uses a comparative approach to study how the dynamics of social-ecological systems shape urban biodiversity in cities worldwide, and to develop better policies and practices for nature conservation in partnership with local communities. His current research engages local communities and the broader public in studying how human activities and histories of colonization and segregation shape the distribution of nature and biodiversity in urban areas, and the historical legacy effects of differential access to nature for disadvantaged human communities. He is actively engaged in rethinking and redesigning his own research and the teaching of urban ecology, reconciliation ecology and conservation biology within a broader framework of decolonizing science.
Peter N. Peregrine is an American anthropologist, registered professional archaeologist, and academic. He is well known for his staunch defense of science in anthropology, and for his popular textbook Anthropology.
Ethan is a graduate student and researcher in the School of Economics at the University of Maine. He is interested in experimental methods for exploring cooperation, and how it determines outcomes for organizations. He does much of this work in the context of food systems, since consumers and producers who are motivated by local food often rely on cooperation in a number of important ways.
Dr. Pieter Francois is a Lecturer in Digital History at the University of Hertfordshire. His work focuses on travel and migration in the nineteenth century and on the evolution of social complexity, ritual and warfare. Together with Professor Peter Turchin (UConn) and Professor Harvey Whitehouse (Oxford) he founded the Seshat: Global History Databank project in 2011 (https://new.evolution-institute.org/project/seshat/). In 2013 he won the British Library Labs competition with his Sample Generator for Digitized Texts. He is also the Research Coordinator of the Cultural Evolution Lab at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford.
Jennifer Raff is an anthropological geneticist and assistant professor in the anthropology department at the University of Kansas. Her research centers around understanding human prehistory through analyzing the genomes of ancient and contemporary populations. Currently, she focuses on the prehistory of North American populations and addresses questions about the initial peopling of the continent, as well as region-specific histories in the North American Arctic and mid-continental United States. Raff is also keenly interested in public scientific literacy and has written on numerous topics including pseudoarchaeology, race and genetics, and vaccines on her outreach blog, Violent Metaphors. She also tweets daily about various topics in science and combat sports. Follow her @JenniferRaff.
Dr. Amanda M. Dettmer is a primate neuroscientist who examines the early life organization of risk and resilience to health disparities across the life span, with a particular focus on stress sensitivity as a mediator. She studies rhesus macaque models of human development to answer questions from a translational perspective, and to understand human traits in an evolutionary context. Her research centers around three themes: 1) the roles of chronic hormones, maternal traits, and group dynamics on predictors of optimal and suboptimal infant and adolescent development; 2) the long-term hormonal and behavioral changes that occur in the transition to motherhood, as well as in the transition from primiparity (one infant) to multiparity (multiple infants); and 3) identification of genetic and physiological predictors of, and potential interventions for the treatment of, neuropathologies throughout the lifespan.
Robin Nelson is a biological anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Skidmore College. Her research explores how contemporary Caribbean populations living in urban spaces navigate social and biological kin relationships, and how these networks correlate to variability in growth in children, and overall health status in adults. Her latest research will investigate these dynamics in parent-child dyads in Diaspora Caribbean populations living in Canada. She utilizes mixed methods to better understand how humans understand and make use of these essential relationships.
Dr. Gregory completed his B.Sc. (Hons) at McMaster University in 1997 and earned his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology and zoology from the University of Guelph in 2002. After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Gregory carried out postdoctoral research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Natural History Museum in London, England, before returning to join the faculty at the University of Guelph. His primary research interests include large-scale genome evolution, biodiversity, and macroevolution. He has been the recipient of several prestigious scholarships, fellowships, and awards, including the 2003 NSERC Howard Alper Postdoctoral Prize as “Canada’s most outstanding postdoctoral fellow in the natural sciences or engineering”, a 2005 McMaster Alumni Association Arch Award, a 2006 American Society of Naturalists Young Investigator Prize, the 2007 Canadian Society of Zoologists Bob Boutilier New Investigator Award, and the 2010 Genetics Society of Canada Robert H. Haynes Young Scientist Award. He also received a 2008 University of Guelph Faculty Association Distinguished Professor Award for his teaching. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach. For more information, see www.gregorylab.org.
Rebecca Sear is a Reader at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), teaching demography and researching human reproductive behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. She is trained in zoology, biological anthropology, and statistics, and subsequently worked first in a social science institution (London School of Economics) and then in an institution of global and public health (LSHTM). Having been exposed to a variety of disciplines, she is particularly interested in how the natural, social and medical sciences can be integrated as we try to understand our own species, and aims to conduct research somewhere inbetween these disciplines. She is particularly interested in taking a comparative perspective to understanding human reproductive behaviour, and exploring why such behaviour varies between, as well as within, populations.
Read her academic bio here: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/aboutus/people/sear.rebecca
Kristi Lewton is a biological anthropologist and evolutionary anatomist, and teaches human gross anatomy as an Assistant Professor at Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the evolution of primate locomotor systems in general, and the origins of bipedality in our lineage in particular. She studies the anatomy and biomechanics of human and non-human primate hindlimbs to understand the evolution, function, and development of these structures, integrating both comparative and experimental approaches. She has also conducted paleontological fieldwork surveying for early hominin fossils in Ethiopia and South Africa.
Dr. Katie Hinde, earned a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Washington in 1999, a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA in 2008, and was a post-doctoral scholar in Neuroscience in the Brain, Mind, and Behavior Unit, California National Primate Research Center, UC Davis from 2009-2011. Professor Hinde began as an Assistant Professor in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and is now an Associate Professor at Arizona State University in the Center for Evolution and Medicine and School for Human Evolution and Social Change. Since 2002, Hinde has investigated the first substance a mammal has evolved to consume: mother's milk. In her Comparative Lactation Lab, they investigate how mother’s milk contributes to infant development and behavior in socially complex taxa, particularly humans and monkeys,including not only provision of energy and materials for growth, but also milk constituents that shape immunological, neurobiological, and behavior development. She investigates how variation in mother’s milk and behavioral care influences infant outcomes from post-natal life and into adulthood, and subsequent generations. In addition to dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, Hinde co-edited Building Babies: Primate Developmental Trajectories in Proximate and Ultimate Perspective released by Springer in 2013. Hinde is an associate editor and writer for SPLASH! Milk Science Update, executive council member for the International Society for Research in Human Milk and Lactation, and showcases research on mother’s milk, breastfeeding, and lactation for the general public, clinicians, and researchers at her blog “Mammals Suck… Milk!”
Sarah Mathew is an Assistant Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. She is an evolutionary anthropologist who combines formal models and field studies to explore how humans evolved the capacity to cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals. She has conducted in depth field studies among Turkana pastoralists in Kenya examining why warriors risk their life in warfare, which has illuminated the role of moral sanctioning and cultural evolutionary processes in maintaining cooperation in small-scale societies. Currently she is spearheading an empirical study among the Turkana and other small-scale societies to examine what is the scale of cooperation, group-beneficial norms and moral sanctioning mechanisms. This research program will help provide a more detailed picture of the extent to which the cultural boundary is also the moral boundary, data that will be critical for evaluating theories of how culture enabled human cooperation. She was among thirty one scholars nationwide who were recently awarded the Andrew Carnegie fellowship in recognition of work that would contribute towards a better understanding of the challenges facing democracy and international order.
I am an evolutionary computational biologist - I build statistical models and programs to understand the genomics of adaptive evolution of structured populations post divergence, with applications to conservation of threatened turtle species (Emydidae), and the biological control of predatory lady beetles (Coccinellidae). My dissertation work with Fredric Janzen at Iowa State University focused on the development of likelihood-based methods to study population structure, genetic relatedness, and identity-by-descent probabilities. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher with Jody Hey at Temple University, where I develop Bayesian MCMC-based tools for estimating ancestral demography under the isolation with migration model.
Lee Alan Dugatkin is a Professor of Biology and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. He is a behavioral ecologist and historian of science and his main area of research interest is the evolution of social behavior. Lee has spoken at more than 100 universities worldwide and is the author 0f 150+ articles on evolution and behavior. He is a frequent contributor to Scientific American, Psychology Today and the New Scientist. He is the author of numerous books, including Cooperation Among Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1997), The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness (Princeton University Press, 2006), and Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Lee is also author of two textbooks: 1) Principles of Animal Behavior (W.W. Norton, 3rd edition, 2013) and 2) Evolution (W.W. Norton, 2012, coauthored with Carl Bergstrom).
Holly Dunsworth is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rhode Island where she teaches courses on human origins, evolution, and variation. She performs paleontological work at the early Miocene sites on Rusinga Island, Kenya where some of the most ancient fossil apes are preserved. She also studies living primates, particularly when it comes to their energy use, reproduction, and life history.
Sedeer el-Showk grew up immersed in science and in love with language. He is now a freelance science writer, but received a master's degree in evolutionary biology from the University of Helsinki and is wrapping up a PhD in plant biology. He writes about whatever bit of science takes his fancy on his blog, Inspiring Science, and about evolutionary biology on Accumulating Glitches, part of Nature Education's Scitable blog network.
Ursula Goodenough is Professor of Biology at Washington University. Her research focuses on the molecular and cell biology of eukaryotic algae. She currently serves as president of the Religious Naturalist Association. She is the author of the bestselling The Sacred Depths of Nature.
Robert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management and the co-director of the Paduano Seminar in business ethics at NYU’s Stern School of Business. His “Economic View” column appears monthly in The New York Times. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos. He received his B.S. in mathematics from Georgia Tech, then taught math and science for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nepal. He holds an M.A. in statistics and a Ph.D. in economics, both from the University of California at Berkeley. His papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, and other leading professional journals.His books, which include Choosing the Right Pond, Passions Within Reason, Microeconomics and Behavior, Principles of Economics (with Ben Bernanke), Luxury Fever, What Price the Moral High Ground?, Falling Behind, The Economic Naturalist, The Darwin Economy, and Success and Luck, have been translated into 22 languages. The Winner-Take-All Society, co-authored with Philip Cook, received a Critic's Choice Award, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and was included in Business Week's list of the ten best books of 1995. He is a co-recipient of the 2004 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. He was awarded the Johnson School’s Stephen Russell Distinguished teaching award in 2004, 2010, and 2012, and its Apple Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005.
Paul Crook has a Ph.D. from London University and a Doctorate of Letters from the University of Queensland. He has published widely on Anglo-American history and Darwinian themes. His books include Benjamin Kidd: Portrait of a Social Darwinist; Darwinism, War and History; Darwin’s Coat-Tails: Essays on Social Darwinism and Grafton Elliot Smith: Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture. He is presently investigating the response of British intellectuals to secularization in the 1920s and 1930s.
Geoff McNeely is an anthropologist and entrepreneur who spent the last 20 years "going corporate" as participant observer in both large corporations and small start ups. He has a BA from Occidental College and is preparing to launch the Culture Design Forum to experiment with blending business models and social impact to create a new type of corporate culture.
Cienna Lyon is a student at Ithaca College in New York studying Biology and German and a volunteer science writer for the Paleontological Research Institute. She works in a lab with Te-Wen Lo on genetic research and at the Whalen Center for Music which are both on the Ithaca College campus. She spends her free time playing the french horn in several on campus musical ensembles or getting up to date with all the new paleontological discoveries as becoming a theropod paleontologist is her end goal.
Lesley Newson studies the cultural evolutionary process known as “modernization” which most human populations are now experiencing. She also works at being the mother of one child and the grandmother of two. Her first degree was in biology. After that she worked for over 20 years as a science writer and television producer before getting a PhD in psychology. She is now the honorary post-doc and wife of Peter Richerson at University of California, Davis
Joe Boswell is a writer and a musician trying to figure out how to make a living in a world where words and music are free. He has a degree in English literature, but having learned to bluff philosophy by listening to lots of podcasts, he enjoys picking fights with eminent scientists and philosophers on his blog, AdamsOpticks.wordpress.com.
A union leader for more than eight years, Alphonso Mayfield is an emerging leader in the labor movement who, in a very short time, changed the direction of the labor movement in Florida by bridging the gap between communities and unions.Additionally Mr. Mayfield is an Executive Board member of SEIU International and Secretary Treasurer for SEIU Florida State Council. He is also an Executive Board member of Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy, and Hip Hop Congress. He is also a Board of Trustee of the Florida Democratic Party.Mr. Mayfield has a Bachelor’s degree in Communications from Alcorn State University and is an aspiring Master’s degree candidate in Public Relations from Jackson State University.
Michele Gelfand is Professor of Psychology and Affiliate of the RH Smith School of Business and lead a diverse group of scholars within the Social Decision Making and Organizational Science area at the University of Maryland, College Park. Under her direction, this group studies phenomenon relating to the strength of cultural norms and cultural values, negotiation, conflict, revenge, and forgiveness, and and diversity. More recently, she has branched into the study of subjective culture in the Middle East, and founded a growing research program on tightness-looseness. Her philosophy is to incorporate as many disciplinary perspectives as possible into her work, and she and colleagues work with computer scientists, neuroscientists, political scientists, and increasingly biologists to understand all things cultural. Check out the group here, and find out how to get involved here.
Debra Lieberman is an evolutionary psychologist who studies kinship and emotions. She received her PhD from Santa Barbara and is currently Associate Professor of psychology at the University of Miami.
Professor Kuhle received his baccalaureate from Binghamton University in 1997 and his doctorate in evolutionary psychology from The University of Texas at Austin in 2002. He teaches Evolutionary Psychology, Fundamentals of Psychology, Statistics in the Behavioral Sciences, and Research Methods in the Behavioral sciences. His research focuses on the evolved psychological mechanisms that underlie commitment and jealousy in romantic relationships. He is also interested in the evolution and development of both sexual fluidity and reproductive senescence in women.
Laura is a student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, studying Biology and Business; and the publications assistant at the Paleontological Research Institution also in Ithaca. Her interest in evolution began at a young age, when her geologist parents would take her and her siblings trilobite searching in upstate New York. When she's not in school or working, she assistant teaches at Cornell, and also at a state prison, where she works with current and formerly incarcerated people on prison and re-entry programming.
Melissa Hamilton is a volunteer science writer at PRI, and previous volunteer at the Cayuga Nature Center where she bathed a skink and made salads for bearded dragon. After graduating from Syracuse University and Vermont College, she worked on the clinical team at Gould Farm, a psycho-social rehabilitation community in Western, MA and assisted in restarting the Berkshire National Fish Hatchery. As a writer for children and adults, her poetry and prose have been featured in newspapers, magazines and anthologies. Currently, she provides housing as a landlord for individuals with developmental disabilities in Trumansburg, NY.
I blend social and organizational psychology with the study of biological and cultural evolution to investigate how and why we have developed leadership in large-scale social networks and how this information can be applied to make modern organizations more effective.
I am interested in trying to understand why and when people cooperate with each other. I use naturalistic methods and field experiments to determine the individual and ecological contexts that promote cooperative behaviour. I’m working in Northern Ireland investigating how inter-group conflict between Catholics and Protestants affects within and between group cooperation. My other work includes running RCTs on how social norms affect university tuition fees payment rates and looking at the role of fairness and conformist norms on 3rd party punishment.
I also work at the Behavioural Insights Team on a broad range of topics, from reducing loneliness, improving money management and raising educational attainment.
Karl A. Wilson is the Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at Binghamton University (the State University of New York at Binghamton), and Research Associate at the Paleonological Research Institution. He received a B.A. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The study of the metabolism of proteins in plant systems has been the emphasis of his academic research. However, his interest in paleontology, and the Devonian of New York State in particular, stems from his introduction to fossils at the age of 7, when his father took his Cub Scout den on a field trip to nearby Eighteen Mile Creek, a classic Middle Devonian locality.
Cameron Halladay is an Ithaca College Graduate, an inductee to The New School’s creative non-fiction writing program, an old friend of Ithaca’s Paleontological Research Institution, and an avid, lifelong fan of science.
Dr. David P. Schmitt is a Caterpillar Inc. Professor of Psychology at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. Dr. Schmitt is Founding Director of the International Sexuality Description Project, a cross-cultural research collaboration involving 100s of psychologists from around the world who seek to understand how culture, personality, and gender combine to influence sexual attitudes and behaviors.
Paula Wood has been a User Experience Design professional for over 10 years. Previous clients include Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, T-Mobile, and numerous other Fortune 500 clients. She is currently the design lead at environmental non-profit Earth Economics, where she combines systems design and tactical storytelling to help communicate the true value of nature.
Finn Jackson is a business writer and strategic coach and consultant. He has a degree in physics from Oxford University and an MBA from Imperial College, London. His first book, The Escher Cycle, was published in 2004, with a tenth anniversary ebook edition published in 2014. He is currently working on his second book, a two-volume handbook on leadership in times of change. Visit him at www.finnjackson.com
Joseph Watts is a Research Fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand as well as an External Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. He works on how cultural, cognitive, and evolutionary processes interact to shape the way that people think about and interact with the world. Much of his research uses cross-cultural comparative methods to test theories about the cultural evolution of religious systems in human history.
Jonathan Marks is a biological anthropologist whose most recent book, Tales of the ex-Apes, will be published later this year.Dr. Marks teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and has published widely on human microevolution and macroevolution, and the history and meaning of those sciences. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In the last few years he has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the ESRC Genomics Forum in Edinburgh, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and a Templeton Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Notre Dame. He is the author of What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee and Why I Am Not a Scientist, both published by the University of California Press. Somewhat paradoxically, however, he is about 98% scientist, and not a chimpanzee.
Dr. Craig Stanford is an expert on animal behavior and human origins. He is Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at the University of Southern California and Director of the USC Jane Goodall Research Center. Stanford holds a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and was the long time chair of the USC Department of Anthropology. He is best known for his research and his books on chimpanzee hunting and meat-eating in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, done in collaboration with Dr. Jane Goodall. In addition, he spent a decade studying the ecological relationship between chimpanzees and mountain gorillas in the Impenetrable Forest of Uganda.He has conducted field research on primates and other animals for more than 20 years in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Stanford is the author of 16 scientific and popular books and more than 130 scholarly articles on animal behavior and human evolution. His most recent book, Planet Without Apes, is published by Harvard University Press, and describes the critical situation facing the apes in the 21st century.
Dan received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2014 with a dissertation entitled Buying a Province, Building an Empire: Money, Markets, and Growth in Roman Africa from Augustus to Aurelian on the economic and financial development of the western Roman Empire. He currently holds a postdoctoral position working with Dr. Peter Turchin on the Deep Roots of the Modern World, part of the SESHAT: Global History Databank Project, a large-scale, interdisciplinary and comparative project hosted by the Evolution Institute and the University of Oxford. His postdoctoral work focuses on determining the institutional features and structures which underpin economic performance and the provision of public goods in these different places and times.
Dr. Bernard Crespi's research program uses integrated genetic, ecological and phylogenetic approaches to study social evolution across all levels in the hierarchy of life, from genes, to cells, to organisms, to social systems, and to the brain. He currently focuses on several of the outstanding questions in evolutionary biology, including the evolution of social behavior, the evolution of human health and disease, the evolution of placentation and maternal-fetal conflict, the evolution of trophic interactions, and the roles of genetics, ecology and geography in speciation and adaptive radiation.
Edward has worked as Principle Research Assistant for the Seshat Databank project and a Senior Research Assistant at the University of Hertfordshire in England. Other recent projects included research for "War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies," an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with Peter Turchin, Tom Currie and Sergey Gavrilets, a data sample on 19th Century travel routes for Pieter Francois's Sample Generator project with British Library Labs, and a report for the journal Cliodynamics.
He has been interested in evolutionary science within social-science (he has a Masters in International Politics at University of Wales, Aberystwyth and a Bachelors degree in the same subject from University of Portsmouth) since the turn of the millennium, when the word "meme" was an academic buzzword fostered by Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" and Aaron Lynch's "Thought Contagion" (but had yet to reach the heights of "orly owls" and rick rolling).
However, Edward has a broad interest in any data-lead approach to social science that includes, but is not limited to, evolutionary theory and is currently interested in, among other things, the role historical trade routes, and the process of trade, may have played in state formation. On the SESHAT project his main focus are social complexity and warfare variables.
Sasha Paris is a science writer and publications assistant at the Paleontological Research Institution, and a docent at its Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York. Natural-history exploration and education are both her professional focus and personal passion, with a preference for aquatic or little-known creatures.
Ryan McKay is Reader in Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Principal Investigator of the Royal Holloway Morality and Beliefs Lab (MaB-Lab). He was educated at the University of Western Australia in Perth and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and has held research posts in Boston (Tufts University), Belfast (Queen’s University), Zürich (University of Zürich) and Oxford (University of Oxford). He has also worked as a clinical neuropsychologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, London.
Specialties: Economic growth and development, labor markets in developing countries, economics of immigration
Rumen Iliev is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ford School of Public Policy and an ARTIS fellow. His main line of work has been on the overlap between cognition, morality and culture. He has conducted research on the cognitive properties of sacred values, on the role of perception of causality in moral reasoning, and on context effects in moral choice. A more recent interest of his is automated text analysis and using web data as a tool for understanding cultural dynamics and historical changes of moral values. Currently he is collaborating with Robert Axelrod on developing case-based methods for statistical analysis. Rumen obtained an MA degree in Psychology from Sofia University, and a PhD degree in Cognitive Psychology from Northwestern University.
My research explores the psychological dimension of cultural and political conflicts. I study (a) how people manage to cooperate with members of different ethnic, national or religious groups and (b) why cooperation breaks down into violent conflict. A secondary research interest concerns the psycho-social consequences of exposure to political violence.
Jonathan H. Turner is 38th University Professor of the University of California and Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division at University of California, Riverside, and Research Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B.A in 1965 from UCSB and his M.A in 1966 and Ph.D. in 1968 from Cornell University. He is primarily a sociological theorist, but has been committed in recent decades to brining biological analysis into sociology, and sociology to the general public. He is the author of 43 books and several hundred research articles. His most recent book is On Human Nature: The Biology and Sociology of What Made Us Human (Routledge 2020).
Matthew R. Zimmerman is a PhD student in the Cultural Evolution Lab at the University of California Davis.
Antony Harper is a retired high school science teacher from New Trier High School.
The underlying theme in most of my research is understanding how a limited stock of innate ideas can be recombined and customized to generate the kaleidoscopic variety of human cultures.My early research was on standards of physical attractiveness across cultures. In research in the United States, Paraguay (Ache Indians), Brazil, and Russia I found evidence for both universals and variation in standards of attractiveness.My current research goes in two major directions.First, I am working on some new approaches to the study of kinship. I am interested in how people think about kinship, which means investigating how the bewildering profusion of kinship terminologies around the world may generated by a few (possibly innate) universals of social cognition. And I am interested in how the anthropology of kinship relates to the biology of kinship, which means investigating what the biologists' theory of kin selection looks like when modified to accommodate the human aptitude for cooperation and moral behavior.Second, I am interested in race and racial categorization in Brazil. Brazil is often presented as sharply contrasting with the United States, with a rich vocabulary for describing race, racial mixture, and somatic variation, and no sharp lines drawn between the categories of black and white. My current fieldwork joins ethnography and experimental methods to investigate how far Brazilians' underlying ideas of races, essences, living kinds and the inheritance of race really differ from those of U.S. Americans.
Zoey Reeve has a background in Psychology, Terrorism Studies and Political Science, and is a VOX-Pol Fellow. Her research focuses on the social-evolutionary psychology of radicalization and terrorism in both online and offline spheres.
Mark Pagel builds statistical models to examine the evolutionary processes imprinted in human behavior, from genomics to the emergence of complex systems -- to culture. His latest work examines the parallels between linguistic and biological evolution by applying methods of phylogenetics, or the study of evolutionary relatedness among groups, essentially viewing language as a culturally transmitted replicator with many of the same properties we find in genes. He’s looking for patterns in the rates of evolution of language elements, and hoping to find the social factors that influence trends of language evolution.
At the University of Reading, Pagel heads the Evolution Laboratory in the biology department, where his work raises questions in the philosophy of biology, mind and language and explores such questions as, "Why would humans evolve a system of communication that prevents them from communicating with other members of the same species?" He has used statistical methods to reconstruct features of dinosaur genomes, and to infer ancestral features of genes and proteins.
My background is a combination of evolutionary anthropology, anthropological archaeology, and theoretical ecology. My research addresses the general principles that underlie the evolution of human ecology in the past, present, and future, from hunter-gatherer societies, to contemporary industrialized nation states. I am particularly interested in human universals and the predictability of human uniqueness, despite it's novelty in the evolution of life. I work at multiple scales, from life history theory and behavioral ecology, to population dynamics and biogeography. I am interested in how processes operating simultaneously at multiple spatial, temporal and organizational scales integrate to form the complexity of human systems we see around us, and how this complexity evolved. My research emphasizes theory building and data analysis in equal parts and combines aspects of the physical, life, and social sciences. I am interested both in the theoretical understanding of complex human systems, but also in the applied role anthropological science can play in understanding the potential evolutionary trajectories of human systems into the future, including the conservation and preservation of indigenous societies.I am a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University. For more information and publications please go to http://marcusjhamilton.weebly.com/.
Karl Frost is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology at the University of California, Davis.
My research examines the co-evolution of human social structure, life history, economics, and health. This work combines ethnographic research, cross-cultural analysis, and theoretical and computational modeling. I conduct fieldwork with Tsimane’ forager-farmers in Bolivian Amazonia, and with Tyvan nomadic pastoralists in southern Siberia
I am the holder of the Chaire d'Excellence Recherche "The Evolution of Fairness" funded by PSL* and the co-leader of the Evolution and Social Cognition Group at the Department of Cognitive Science of the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
I am interested in using evolutionary and psychological approaches in social sciences, including economics, philosophy, anthropology and history.
Research interestsInternational Relations History of International Relations Macro-History of the World Order Global Governance Global Conflict, Warfare, and Security Comparative Foreign Policy International Relations Theory
I am currently worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the Tsimane Health and Life History project, run jointly between the University of New Mexico and UC Santa Barbara. I recently completed my doctoral dissertation at UC Davis, working with Pete Richerson, Richard McElreath and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder. I am also a member of the Cultural Evolution Lab group. Ryan Baldini and I have recently developed an extension of the Price equation for human cultural systems we call "evolutionary decomposition", inspired by the recent biodemography work of Tim Coulson and Shripad Tuljapurkar. Together with Adrian Bell, I have traced the historic spread of Polynesian canoe technology, focusing specifically on the environmental and historical antecedents of particular canoe designs. Working with Monique Borgerhoff Mulder I have done survival analysis work on data from East African agriculturalists, which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2009. I have conducted field interviews in various locations in California's Central Valley for a project on the perceptions and interpretations of sustainability, on a project with Mark Lubell in the Environmental Science and Policy program. This research, mostly qualitative, was used in a UC Davis white paper on sustainability and development.
Lars Trägårdh is a historian who has lived in the US since 1970 while maintaining his personal and professional ties to Sweden. After many years as entrepreneur and businessman, he returned to academic studies in 1986. He received his Ph.D. in history from UC Berkeley in 1993 after living and carrying out research for several years in both Germany and Sweden. Later he taught European history at Barnard College, Columbia University for ten years, and was affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Europe at Columbia University. In Sweden he has served as a guest professor at the University of Linköping, and also conducted a research project at Södertörn University College, which resulted in the book Är svensken människa? Gemenskap och oberoende i det moderna Sverige (Is Sweden human? Community and independence in modern Sweden, 2006, pocket 2009) - co-written with Henrik Berggren.Currently he divides his time between the US and Europe. In the US he is working on several long-term projects, including one on “litigation as politics by other means” that is focused on the intersection on law, power and politics in the US and Europe. In Sweden he is affiliated with the Ersta Sköndal University College where he works both on individual projects – one concerning on children’s rights regimes in Sweden, France, and the United States, and another on state and civil society relations – and on a major collective research project on social trust for which he serves as co-director.He has also appeared on Swedish radio and TV and published frequently in Swedish print media, establishing a role as a public commentator on Swedish and American politics and society. Currently he writes an occasional column for the Swedish daily newspaper Sydsvenskan on the intellectual debate in the US, and also contributes to the journal Axess.
Victor W. Hwang is CEO of T2 Venture Creation, a Silicon Valley firm that designs ecosystems to foster entrepreneurial innovation, and primary co-author of The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley.
Ashle has worked in the non-profit sector both in the US and UK for over 6 years, in addition to her role as research assistant for the University of Oxford and Queen’s University Belfast. She holds an MA in Cognition and Culture and an MA in nonprofit management, with an emphasis on cultural institutions. She is a regular contributor to Learning & the Brain.
Deborah Heiligman is the author of 30 books for children and teens, including Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith, a National Book Award finalist.
My work asks how we as humans make our culture and how culture makes us human. How does our culture influence the way we face tough ethical decisions or deal with serious illness? How do we transform culture by the force of both our best efforts and our unintentional actions? I approach these questions as an anthropologist, but I borrow pragmatically from across the social sciences, adapting and developing the tools—qualitative and quantitative, observational and experimental, analytical and agent-based—that are best suited for each specific question. Much of my work focuses on developing novel ways of framing and testing the wealth of hypotheses in the social sciences about two specific questions—how humans stay healthy and how humans cooperate.
Dr. Bethany Heywood is an assistant professor of psychology at Ashford University. The research described here was originally published in Religion, Brain & Behavior and is available here.
Carl Coon (1927-2018) was a retired US diplomat living in Washington, Virginia, and Washington DC. He graduated from Harvard in 1949 (after serving briefly in the US Army at the end of World War II), and joined the US Foreign Service that same year. 37 years of government service saw him posted in a variety of countries stretching from Morocco to Nepal. From 1981-1984 he was US Ambassador to Nepal. He retired in 1985.
Carl wrote essays on the human condition and several books. After retirement, his interests increasingly focused on humanism and he became involved with the American Humanist Association. In 2004, he was elected to the AHA Board and shortly afterwards became AHA’s Vice President. He was the editor of the blog Progressive Humanism.
Curriculum VitaeJulie Seaman is an Associate Professor of Law at Emory University, where she teaches courses in evidence, constitutional law, and freedom of speech. After earning her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1989, she served for two years as a law clerk for federal district court Judge Robert J. Ward and then took ten years off from her professional career to stay home with her three young children. She began teaching at Emory Law School soon after moving to Atlanta in 1998. Her research interests include issues at the intersection of law and neuroscience and the application of social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology to the problem of hate speech in various institutional contexts.Julie holds a B.A. (summa cum laude) in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard University, where she was on the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review.
Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. is co-author (along with Cacilda Jethá, M.D.) of the New York Times bestseller, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray and What It Means for Modern Relationships. His work has been featured just about everywhere, including: MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Times of London, Playboy, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Outside,El Pais, La Vanguardia, Salon, Seed, Big Think, and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish.A featured speaker from TED in Long Beach, CA to The Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House to the Einstein Forum in Pottsdam, Germany, Chris has consulted at various hospitals in Spain, provided expert testimony in a Canadian constitutional hearing, and appeared in many documentary films.
Patricia Adair Gowaty is Distinguished Professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles; Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute; Washington, DC. She is the editor of Feminism and Evolutionary Biology and co-author of the forthcoming The Theory of Mating: Reproductive Decisions Under Ecological and Social Constraints.
Dr. de Waal received his Ph.D. in Biology and Zoology from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, in 1977. He completed his postdoctoral study of chimpanzees while associated with Utrecht University, in 1981, and moved the same year to the USA. He has been a National Academy of Sciences member since 2004, and a Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences member since 1993. Time featured him in 2007 as one of the World's One Hundred Most Influential People. He is also the Director of Living Links at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
Janet D. Stemwedel is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at San José State University. Her explorations of ethics, scientific knowledge-building, and how they are intertwined are informed by her misspent scientific youth as a physical chemist.
Ian Tattersall is an Emeritus Curator in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he co-curated the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins. He is the author of the forthcoming The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack and Other Cautionary Tales of Human Evolution(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Patrick F. Clarkin Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Dr. Clarkin is a biological anthropologist who has conducted research on the impact of social and evolutionary forces on growth, nutrition, and health. Specifically, he has focused on the long-term impact of war, refugee experiences, and poverty on the growth and health of Southeast Asian refugees (Hmong, Lao, Khmer). He is also broadly interested in in the causes and consequences of human conflict and cooperation.
Jag Bhalla is an entrepreneur and writer. His current project is Errors We Live By, a series of short illustrated exoteric essays atbigthink.com. They include errors in how evolution and economics are understood and used. Jag’s last book was I’m Not Hanging Noodles On Your Ears, a sneaky science gift book from National Geographic (www.hangingnoodles.com) which explains his Twitter handle @hangingnoodles..
Brittany Sears is the Operations Manager of the Evolution Institute and Managing Editor of Cliodynamics: the Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida, where she studied host-parasite interactions and co-evolution between tadpoles and their flatworm parasites. Although her work for the Evolution Institute is decidedly more symbiosis-oriented than parasitic, she still enjoys pantomiming anti-parasite behavior and discussing why man flu is real. A list of her publications is available on Google Scholar.
Professor Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis received her Honours BSc degree from the University of Western Ontario in Biology with an area of concentration in the plant sciences. She completed her PhD in the graduate field of ecology and evolutionary biology and in the new Program for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Cornell University. She joined the history department at UF in 1988 and has been teaching a range of courses in the history of science since then. In 2004 she also joined the Zoology department at UF (now merged with Botany to form Biology) where she developed new courses in biology and society and in the philosophy of biology. Her most popular courses at UF include the History of Evolutionary Thought, Science, Exploration and Empire, and the History and Evolution of Infectious Disease. She has also developed a series of graduate seminars in the history of biology and in the cultural history/cultural study of scientific knowledge. She has been a recipient of a range of teaching awards at all levels at UF that include the outstanding university teaching award in 1997. In recognition of her record of teaching and scholarship, she was named the UF Distinguished Alumni Professor for 2009-2011, one of the highest honors given to UF faculty, and in 2012 received the Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize from the History of Science Society for her advocacy of the history of science.
I'm an evolutionary geneticist, working mainly with plants, and studying how ecological processes like environmental stresses and interactions between species shape patterns of biological diversity. I've studied the hyper-specialized pollination mutualism between Joshua trees and yucca moths and adaptation to climate and symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria in barrel medick, a Mediterranean wildflower related to alfalfa. I'm currently working to understand the evolutionary resilience of lodgepole pine and interior spruce in North America as part of the AdapTree Project at the University of British Columbia. I've also done original research on LGBTQ experiences in scientific careers, and I've written about evolution, ecology, and human diversity for ScientificAmerican.com, the LA Review of Books, and the Awl.
Professor Nina Witoszek is currently Research Director at the Centre for Development and the Environment at Oslo University. Prior to her work at SUM, she taught comparative cultural history at the National University of Ireland in Galway (1995-1997) and the European University in Florence (1997-1999). She held fellowships at the Swedish Collegium of the Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Uppsala (1993), Robinson College, Cambridge (1995) and Mansfield College, Oxford (2001) and visiting professorship at Stanford University (2010).Nina Witoszek is also a fiction writer (under the pen name Nina FitzPatrick). She is best known for the infamous collection of short stories, Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia (1991), which won the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Award for fiction in 1991. The prize was subsequently withdrawn when she couldn’t prove her Irish ancestry. Until 2001 her fictional work – including The Loves of Faustyna (1995) and Daimons (2003), as well as several well film scripts – was written together with her late husband Pat Sheeran.Witoszek is the recipient of the Norwegian Freedom of Expression Foundation (Fritt Ord) Award for “bringing Eastern European perspectives to the public debate in Scandinavia.” In 2006 she was chosen by the Norwegian daily Dagbladet as “one of the 10 most important intellectuals in Norway.”
I am a comparative sociologist and sociological and anthropological theorist who has authored or edited 12 books in 19 editions and nearly sixty articles in journals and edited collections. Most of my work has been devoted to the comparative study of the entire range of human societies, especially the study of long-term social evolution. More recently, I have sought to contribute to the unification of the social and natural sciences by drawing on sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, cultural materialism, and social evolutionism Although officially a sociologist, I feel equally at home in anthropology and much of the research and writing I do draws heavily on anthropological literature and cross-cultural data banks assembled by anthropologists. Truth to tell, if I was doing my career over again I would probably become an anthropologist (or perhaps an evolutionary biologist). I also draw on historical literature and data and have a fascination with the societies of the ancient world.I believe that sociology and anthropology need to get back to their emphasis on science and the empirical testing of scientific theories. In this regard, comparative data from sociology, anthropology, history, and archaeology are essential. I favor a comparative science of all human societies.
Carl Zimmer is a columnist for the New York Times, where his “Matter” column appears every Thursday in the Science Times. He began his career at Discover, where he served for four years as a senior editor. Since then, he has written for a wide range of publications, including National Geographic, The Atlantic, Wired, and Scientific American. He is a three-time winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Journalism Award, and in 2007 he won the National Academies Communication Award. Zimmer has written a dozen books, including Parasite Rex and Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. He appears frequently on Radiolab and teaches writing at Yale.
My research covers a wide array of topics in primatology, much of which is field-oriented and interdisciplinary.
In Madagascar, I am conducting a long-term study of the demography, ecology and social organization of the ring-tailed lemur at the Beza Mahafaly Reserve. I am co-founder of this reserve which is part of a cooperative program in research, conservation, education, and development between Washington U, Yale U, and the University of Madagascar. I have worked with botanists, geologists and social anthropologists on this and other conservation/development projects in Madagascar. We are currently involved in monitoring deforestation with satellite images, and attempting to determine its causes and consequences on the lemurs of the region.
In Mauritius , I have worked on the ecology and social organization, and with Washington U. biologists, the genetics of long-tailed macaques who were introduced @ 450 years ago. The forests of Mauritius are extremely degraded and are disappearing rapidly. Along with a botanist, I have described plant density, diversity and the process of invasion of exotic plants in some remnant endemic forests. We plan to continue working on the macaques on this island.
I have recently begun, and have students working in Central and South America, especially Costa Rica and Guyana. We are interested in community ecology and conservation of the primates in these regions.
Finally, I am interested in the evolution of human and nonhuman primate behavior and the ways in which the study of primates can help us understand the biological basis of human behavior, though I am in no way a biological determinist and believe that biological anthropology must be grounded in good, general anthropological theory. My interests also include the history of physical anthropology.
Dr. Lustick is interested in comparative politics, international politics, Middle Eastern politics, and agent-based, computer assisted modeling for the social sciences. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics, political identities and institutions, techniques of hegemonic analysis, the expansion and contraction of states, and on relationships among complexity, evolution, and politics. Dr. Lustick is a recipient of awards from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Sciences Research Council, the Middle East Peace Foundation, and the United States Institute of Peace. Before coming to Penn, Professor Lustick taught for fifteen years at Dartmouth College and worked for one year in the Department of State. His present research focuses analysis of the fate of the “two state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, developing agent-based models for solving complex theoretical and forecasting problems, and understanding the dynamics and vulnerabilities of anti-authoritarian political cascades. He is a past president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association and of the Association for Israel Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Dr. Lanman is interested in applying the methods and theories of both social and cognitive anthropology to issues in the study of religion, atheism, morality, and intergroup relations. His DPhil research yielded both a descriptive and explanatory account of atheism in the contemporary West, which he is writing up as a monograph. At present, he is collaborating with anthropologists and psychologists on an ESRC funded project, entitled Ritual, Community, and Conflict, to ascertain the effects of ritual on ingroup cohesion and intergroup relations across a range of contexts. He is also, along with Co-Principal Investigators Harvey Whitehouse and David Sloan Wilson, working on an interdisciplinary project entitled Religion’s Impact on Human Life: Integrating Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
I’m a ARC Discovery Fellow in the School of Culture, History & Language and ANU College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. I was previously a post-doctoral research fellow in the Psychology Department and Computational Evolution Group at the University of Auckland.My main research focus is the evolution of languages and cultures. I have applied cutting-edge computational phylogenetic methods to language and cultural evolution, and used these methods to test hypotheses about human prehistory and cultural evolution in general. The questions I have explored so far include how people settled the Pacific, how language structure and complexity evolve, the co-evolution of cultural systems in the Pacific, and how cultural evolution can be modeled.