HBES 2025 conference report

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HBES 2025 was a success!

From June 4-7, we gathered at Stockton University in Atlantic City, NJ, for 3.5 fantastic days of presentations, posters, and discussions. Thanks to Josh Duntley & the other organizers (Bobbi Hornbeck, Margaret Lewis, Liz Shobe), the Program Committee, the volunteers, the competition judges, the speakers & presenters, the sponsors, and everyone else who made it great!

Plenaries

We enjoyed plenaries from the following researchers:

Michael Platt kicked off #HBES2025 with a tour de force plenary in the neuroscience and consequences of social behavior! In wild monkeys on Cayo Santiago, social ties buffer against the health consequences of the devastating hurricane Maria. He used cutting edge neuroscience to challenge sparse coding models of brain activity in which individual neurons control specific behaviors, and instead show that neurons tend to be recruited for the regulation of multiple behaviors. Plenaries like this are what’s great about HBES: from data on the fundamental importance of social bonds to questions about the nature of computation in the brain all in one talk!

Beverly Strassmann provided a stunning testament to the power of long-term field studies and the human behavioral ecology perspective, with data from 40 years of research among the Dogon of Mali. Her research shows how individual reproductive interests can explain phenomena from the widest scale of religious conversation, to men’s control of women’s sexuality, to conflict among kin, and zooming all the way in to genomic imprinting. Fantastic work!

Jim Roney declared war on the “parsimony-based” approach that he claims dominates hormone research, i.e., attempts to find the “one” true effect of a hormone, which leads to imbalances in research on inputs vs outputs, obscures functions & creates confusion. He argued that we need to adopt a “theoretical frameworks” approach: study how hormones connect situational inputs with coordinated outputs. This reveals how hormones serve as physiological codes for adaptively-relevant situations. His plenary showed how this perspective yields fresh insights. He provides the 1st evidence of estradiol & progesterone coordinating to suppress sexual desire during the “implantation window”, & shows how this makes sense of seemingly conflicting effects of the famously mercurial hormone oxytocin”

Oliver Scott Curry took us on an interstellar tour through the universe of morality. He argued morality is fundamentally about promoting cooperation toward promoting the common good, which lets game theory model “What is good?” as a scientific question. He identified 7 types of cooperation that people around the world find morally good, showed how individual differences in moral intuition arise from variations on these themes, and demonstrated how culturally variable moral norms arise as combining these seven more basic elements.

Norm Li applied a life history framework to declines in fertility worldwide. He reviewed several known sources of fertility decline but called attention to a potentially underappreciated factor: evolutionary mismatch. He presented a series of experiments providing evidence that exposure to some modern challenges –climbing modern status ladders, economic uncertainty, & population density–induces shifts toward slower reproductive strategies.

Siobhán Cully’s plenary gave recommendations on “managing patriarchy in the evolutionary behavioral sciences”. She marshalled a range of evidence on the inadequacy of a “male-centered” view of evolution, i.e., that men hunting is the central driver of human life history evolution. According to Dr. Cully, men don’t exclusively use their caloric surpluses for provisioning, and are often less reliable caregivers. In addition, women’s contributions to culture, provisioning, and technology are underrepresented in the archeological record. She made a number of recommendations to paint a more accurate picture, including being more cautious in our inferences about sex and gender, to be more creative in our methods to capture variation, to focus on knowledge gaps, and to continue engaging in healthy debate.

Elizabeth Cashdan’s keynote surveyed the power of an evolutionary, cross-cultural, and comparative perspective for illuminating the nature and origin of sex differences in spatial cognition. Dr. Cashdan showed evidence that sex differences in spatial cognition are cross-culturally universal but flexible and ecologically contingent, underscoring the importance of experience in shaping cognition.

Conference Awards

Every HBES conference has three Conference Awards: the New Investigator Award to the best graduate student paper/presentation, the Postdoctoral Award to the best paper/presentation by a recent graduate (<5 years post-PhD), and the Poster Award (best poster by anyone). Here are the winners of the 2025 HBES Conference Awards:

  • New Investigator Award: Marco Balducci for “The Gender-Equality Paradox in Intraindividual Academic Strengths: A Cross-Temporal Analysis”
  • Postdoctoctdoral Award: Ahra Ko for “Politics, Pathogens, and Perception: Tracking Adaptive Shifts in the Behavioral Immune System in Real Time”
  • Poster Award: Angela Vasishta, Karthik Panchanathan, & Hannah Rubin for “The Effects of Reputation and Fairness on Homophily and Discrimination in Academic Collaboration Networks”

Society Awards

HBES also announces the Society Awards: the Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution (best researcher <10 years post-PhD), the HBES Fellows (multiple awardees >10 years post-PhD), the Rising Stars (multiple awardees <8 years post-PhD), and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution. Here are the winners of the 2025 HBES Society Awards:

Paper Awards

And finally, there are the Paper Awards: the Margo Wilson Award for the best paper published the previous year in Evolution and Human Behavior (the official HBES journal), and the Don Symons Adaptationism Award for the best paper in the previous three years in any journal that best exemplifies the adaptationist program (this award is privately sponsored). The 2025 winners of the HBES Paper Awards are:

Announcing HBES 2025

Next year’s HBES will be held from May 13-16 at University Mohammad VI Polytechnique in Rabat, Morocco. They have a huge team of evolutionary researchers and brand new facilities in an international tourist destination. This will be a joint meeting with the Cultural Evolution Society (CES): CES meets May 11-13, HBES meets May 13-16, with one day of joint talks (May 13). For more details and an FAQ by the hosts, see our conference announcement. See you there!