The 28th Annual HBES keynote address will be given on July 2nd, 2016 by:
Dr. Helen Fisher, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University.
“The Drive To Love And Who We Choose”
Saturday July 2, 2016 8:30-9:30 pm (individual tickets available)
Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher discusses three brain systems that evolved for mating and reproduction: the sex drive; feelings of intense romantic love; and feelings of deep attachment. She then focuses on her brain scanning research (using fMRI) on romantic rejection and love addiction. Also using fMRI data, she discusses four broad basic styles of thinking and behaving associated with four primary brain systems–the dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen systems–to propose an additional aspect of mate choice. And she concludes with discussion of the brain circuits associated with long-term partnership happiness and the future of relationships in the digital age—what she calls “slow love.”
The 28th Annual HBES Plenary speakers will be:
Dr. Athena Aktipis, Department of Psychology, Arizona State University
“Cooperation from cells to societies”
Friday July 1, 2016 8:30-9:30 AM (individual tickets available to the public)
Are there general principles that underlie cooperation across systems? What do these principles tell us about the evolution of multicellular life and human society? In this talk I will discuss my work on human sharing in The Human Generosity Project, which incorporates computational modeling, human subjects experiments and work at 8 fieldsites around the world to understand human sharing. I will also discuss my work on cooperation and cheating in the evolution multicellularity, focusing on the question of how large multicellular bodies can evolve cooperation among trillions of cells despite the constant threat of cellular cheating, i.e., cancer. In both human societies and cellular societies, cooperation at higher levels of organization can be exploited by lower levels of organization, such as cheaters in human societies or cancer cells in a multicellular body. Societies (whether composed of humans or cells) are stable only when the strength of selection at the higher level is stronger than the strength at the lower level. In other words, the forces behind societal cooperation must be stronger than those behind individual exploitation for higher-level systems such as multicellular life and human societies to be viable. In this talk I will discuss similarities and differences between cooperation and exploitation in human and cellular societies, with an eye to how we can leverage this knowledge towards a deeper understanding of fundamental principles shaping the evolution of life.
Dr. Louise Barrett, Professor of Psychology and Canada Research Chair in Cognition, Evolution and Behaviour, University of Lethbridge
“Super-sized minds versus super-charged apes: how to embrace continuity while accepting difference”
Wednesday June 29, 2016 2:40-3:40 PM (individual tickets available to the public)
4E cognition brings body, brain and world together, and offers new ways to conceive of mind in both human and non-human animals. Evolutionary schools of thought in both comparative and human psychology have yet to embrace these ideas fully, remaining committed to an anthropocentric computational model, and emphasising the continuity between humans and other species, where our own capacities are ‘nothing but’ those of other species writ large. Here, I aim to show how Clark’s ideas of ideas of embodied and extended cognition can be adapted to provide a more satisfactory evolutionary psychology that is both grounded in biology and embraces continuity, but which recognises the biocultural nature of the human adaptation. Incorporating ideas of embodied and extended cognition allows us to avoid the standard tropes of reducing human capacities or unfairly anthropomorphising the capacities of other species in an attempt to level the playing field in human/non-human comparisons. It also recognises that some of the views that are often dismissed within the evolutionary human sciences might bear some reconsideration.
Dr. Bernard Crespi, Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University
“Darwin’s DSM and the Emergence of Applied Human Behavior and Evolution”
Saturday July 2, 2016 2:00-3:00PM (individual tickets available to the public)
Academic study of the evolution of human behavior has traditionally remained largely separate from its applications in medicine, societal functioning, and individual well-being. I describe a research program focused on the integration of behavioral-evolutionary approaches and insights with proximate genetic, epigenetic, endocrine and neurological mechanisms, with the goal of enhanced human physical and mental health. In this context, I provide examples from the study of psychiatric conditions, personality variation, religion, genomic conflict, and neuropeptide hormone functions, in each case showing how applications follow directly from theory. These approaches extend the growing field of evolutionary medicine to encompass a broader evolutionary and behavoral approach to understanding and fostering optimal development in all human cognitive and physical endeavors.
Dr. Mark Collard, Professor of Archaeology and Canada Research Chair in Human Evolutionary Studies, Simon Fraser University
“Palaeoanthropology: new developments and challenges”
Saturday July 2, 2016 8:30-9:30 (individual tickets available to the public)
It is an exciting time in palaeoanthropology. In the last couple of decades, we have accumulated a huge amount of new evidence about human evolution. Fieldwork projects have located numerous new sites and greatly increased our sample of hominin fossils and artifacts, while technological advances have enabled us to extract a number of novel types of data from those specimens. In this talk, I will discuss what are arguably the most important of these discoveries. One of the species I will consider is the so-called hobbit, Homo floresiensis. I will also talk about the East African species Ardipithecus ramidus, and the newly discovered species from South Africa, Homo naledi. The fourth and final species I will discuss is Homo neanderthalensis. What I will try to show is that recent findings about these species challenge the existing picture of human evolution in profound ways. If the results in question withstand scrutiny, we will need to revisit some very basic issues, including what makes a hominin a hominin.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer, SENS Research Foundation
“Do We Have Genes that Exist to Hasten Aging? New Data, New Arguments, But the Answer is Still No”
Wednesday June 29, 2016 7:00-8:00 PM (individual tickets available to the public)
In the 60 years since Medawar questioned the assumption that aging is a selected trait with a fitness benefit, mainstream biogerontology has overwhelmingly adopted the view that aging is a product of evolutionary neglect rather than evolutionary intent. Recently, however, this question has come to merit further scrutiny, for three reasons: a variety of new ways in which aging could indeed be “programmed” have been proposed, several phenomena with superficial similarities to programmed aging have been suggested to offer evidence for it and against the mainstream consensus, and above all it has become appreciated that the existence or otherwise of “pro-aging genes” has enormous implications for determining our optimal strategy for the medical postponement of age-related ill-health. Accordingly, it is timely to revisit the arguments and data on this topic. In this talk I will discuss difficulties in reconciling the programmed-aging concept with existing data, flaws in various arguments given by others that existing data prove aging to be programmed, and extensions of these considerations to various phenomena that in one or another way resemble programmed aging. I conclude that, however much we might wish that aging were programmed and thus that the ill-health of old age could be greatly postponed just by disabling some aspect of our genetic makeup, the unfortunate truth is that no such program exists, and thus that our only option for substantial extension of healthspan is a divide-and-conquer panel of interventions to repair the damage that the body inflicts upon itself throughout life as side-effects of its normal operation.
Dr. Vladas Griskevicius, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota
“Can Stressful Childhood Environments Enhance Cognitive Abilities in Adulthood?”
Thursday June 30, 2016 2:00-3:00 PM (individual tickets available to the public)
Can growing up in a stressful childhood environment enhance certain mental abilities? Most evidence thus far suggests the answer is no. People who grow up in stressful environments tend to score lower on tests of intelligence, memory, and other important cognitive abilities. This reduced performance is often assumed to imply that exposure to early-life stress impairs general mental functioning. But rather than impairing cognitive functioning, another possibility is that childhood adversity could be shaping cognition in adaptive ways. I present experimental evidence showing that growing up in unpredictable childhood environments can improve some types of executive functioning in adulthood. Importantly, these positive effects of adverse childhood environments emerged only when adults were tested in uncertain contexts. This catalyst suggests that some individual differences related to early-life experience manifest themselves under conditions of uncertainty. These findings indicate that adverse childhood environments do not universally impair mental functioning, but can actually enhance specific mental abilities in the face of uncertainty.
Dr. Peter Jonason, Personality or Individual Differences, Psychology, Western Sydney University
“Using Life History Theory to clean-up personality psychology”
Thursday June 30, 2016 8:30-9:30 AM (individual tickets available to the public)
The field of personality psychology has been rather resistant to the formulation of large, structural theories meant to organize the field. For over 60 years researchers have focused on amassing data on the cross-temporal consistency, measurement, and predictive validity of personality traits but the field has remained rather descriptive and agnostic to strong theoretical paradigms. This has led the field to (1) focus on mid-level traits (e.g., extraversion, psychopathy), (2) implicitly treat all personality traits as existing at the same level in theoretical space, and (3) investigate an apparent proliferation of traits (e.g., the Sexy Seven). In this talk, I sketch out (my emerging thoughts on) how a two dimensional (i.e., fast and slow), (reasonably) orthogonal hierarchical system of personality and individual differences based on Life History Theory might organize the field. This is done by, for instance, conceptualizing some traits on generality-specificity and distal-proximal dimensions and drawing something of an atomic theory of personality that treats basic units (i.e., lower order traits/facets) of personality like chemical elements from the periodic table of elements. In principle, such a framework might enable quasi-causal statements to have some theoretical heft behind them, to better highlight the importance of psychological adaptations, bridge the gap between socio-cognitive (e.g., Dark Triad) and neurological models (e.g., Approach-Avoidance) of personality, and ultimately impose an order on modern personality psychology.