Report on HBES 2024

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HBES 2024 was a success!

From May 22-25, we gathered in Aarhus, Denmark for 3.5 days of great presentations and camaraderie. It was the second in-person HBES meeting post-COVID, and it was lovely to see everyone again. Thanks to the local hosts Mathias Clasen, Elena Miu, & Marc Malmdorf Andersen, all the volunteers for helping it to run smoothly, the Program Committee, all competition judges, and of course all the speakers and presenters.

Plenaries

We enjoyed plenaries from the following researchers:

  • Joseph Carroll told us about how to use evolutionary theory in literary interpretations, which led to much interesting discussion
  • Lisa Feldman Barrett gave us three lessons on emotions: 1) your brain’s job is to predict your body’s future needs; 2) your brain constructs experience as it controls your body – experience is driven by predictions within your head; 3) signals (e.g., emotions observed in others) only have meaning in the context of other signals – the emotions you detect partly come from your own head
  • Dorsa Amir showed why evolutionists need to study children: many populations are mostly kids, and we spend a lot of time as kids. Also, kids learn mostly from other kids, so peer culture differs in interesting ways from vertically-transmitted culture
  • Judith Burkart argues why humans are special: we have an ape legacy of large brains which combines with our cooperative breeding to make us even smarter and extra cooperative. We share many things, including food… and information! Teaching is more common in cooperative breeders and skill-intensive niches, both of which apply to humans. Interesting fact: infanticide of healthy infants only occurs in cooperative breeders… like humans.
  • Manvir Singh presented a new view of cultural evolution: some traditions – call them “attractors” – appeal more to humans, and “super-attractors” are complex cultural packages that themselves attract attractors. He illustrated this with interesting data on the cross-cultural consistency of shamanism, music types, and more
  • Jaimie Krems argued that friendship exists within a network of rivalries over friends, so we need to study friendship “beyond the dyad”. Does someone value you more than your rivals? She presented neat data that competition over friends leads to friendship jealousy, venting to derogate competitors, and more
  • Nicolas Baumard presented a very useful way of seeing cultural evolution. Rather than view it as the transmission of cultural units, his “cultural ecology” sees culture as an expression of humans’ extended phenotype. This view incorporates ecological concepts like legacy effects (i.e., individuals leave traces that affect subsequent generations) and succession (cumulative change). Rather than “what cultural units will colonize new minds”, this flips the question to “which cultural legacies do people adopt?”
  • Brian Nosek (our keynote speaker) proposed a new model of Open Science to fix the problems in publishing that are a legacy of pre-digital (and pre-internet) print publishing, including evaluation of works at all stages and evaluation-based reward structures

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 2024 HBES Conference Awards:

  • New Investigator Award: Olympia Campbell for “Genetic markers of cousin marriages and honour cultures”
  • Postdoctoctdoral Award: Konrad Rudnicki for “Investigating the evolutionary roots of gossip: the effects of gossip on cortisol, beta-endorphins, and cytokine levels”
  • Poster Award: Kasia Pisanski and colleagues for “The role of loudness in vocal intimidation”

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 2024 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 2024 winners of the HBES Paper Awards are:

Announcing HBES 2025

Next year’s HBES will be held from June 4th-7th 2025 at Stockton University at their campus in Atlantic City New Jersey, with local host Josh Duntley. Atlantic City is accessible from Philadelphia and Newark NJ, and should have both dorm accommodation and hotels. Details will be announced soon. See you there!