– by Keelah Williams In the United States, Americans stereotype Black individuals as being more likely to commit certain types of crime than White individuals. But is this really about race alone? Or might people sometimes use race to infer the kinds of environments others might inhabit and the behavioral predispositions those environments might incentivize? […]
– by Peter DeScioli Why do humans make so many laws? In a new article, I argue that the human ability to make laws evolved by natural selection. I hope to entice you with a few snapshots. Laws may seem unlikely to come from evolution. There are so many laws, and they differ so much […]
– by Michael Guttentag Law has played a pivotal role in the emergence of human sociality. If this conjecture is correct many questions naturally follow. When and why did the turn to law emerge? How could law have played a role in the distant past if powerful sovereigns are a comparatively recent development? What distinctive […]
– by Douglas Hurt Yarn As social group members, you and I might come into conflict over resources if the physical or social environment creates scarcity. If we chose to compete over our conflicting claims, we are disputing. We could fight over it, but the legal institutions of functional modern states discourage physical aggression and […]
– by Andrew Delton “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth” (Darwin, 1859, Origin of Species). As we stand beside a river and gaze at such a bank, […]
HBES 2023 Palm Springs was a success! Catherine Salmon & Jessica Hehman hosted a fantastic conference that brought us together in-person for the first time since 2019 (Boston). In addition to 3.5 days of talks, there were five excellent plenaries and a keynote: Michelle Scalise Sugiyama started us out with an enlightening discussion of how […]
The Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) is currently conducting elections for all offices. Votes will be collected from April 15 to May 15, 2023. We kindly ask you to cast your vote and use the opportunity to check/update your account. 1) HBES 2023 Election: To cast your vote: i) Go to HBESwebsite at http://www.hbes.com ii) Login with your […]
– by Andrew W. Delton. Photo credit by Arnulfo Cari Ista: author Adrian Jaeggi leads a member of the Tsimane community through a task measuring helping “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms […]
– by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama For most of our species’ existence, culturally shared knowledge has been stored in memory and transmitted orally. This presents an impediment to the emergence of cumulative culture: how to encode, retrieve, and transmit accumulated knowledge in a portable, readily accessible format that resists corruption. Ethnologists have long observed that, in […]
– by Tony Volk In 1993, Jay Belsky and his colleagues noticed that girls who lacked fathers and/or grew up in harsher environments seemed to also have early puberty. In one of the first evolutionary developmental hypotheses since Bowlby, they proposed that girls might be maturing faster in harsh environments as a way of reproducing […]