Adam Barnett
Ara Norenzayan Interview on DR
Ara Norenzayan was interviewed recently by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR). Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
Kevin Laland – The Evolution of Culture
Part of the Emerging Science of Culture seminar series, 2011 Both demographically and ecologically, humans are a remarkably successful species. This success is generally attributed to our capacity for culture. But how did our species’ extraordinary cultural capabilities evolve from its roots in animal social learning and tradition? In this seminar Kevin Laland provided a […]
Steve Heine, Joe Henrich, and Ara Norenzayan – The Weirdest People in the World
Part of the Emerging Science of Culture seminar series, 2011 Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard […]
Joan Chiao – Cultural Neurosciences: Bridging Cultural and Biological Sciences
Part of the Emerging Science of Culture seminar series, 2011: The study of culture and biology has long stood stratified within the social and natural sciences, a gap that physicist C.P. Snow (1959) famously called “the two cultures.” To examine the bidirectional influence of culture and genes on brain and behavior, cultural neuroscience is an […]
The Evolution of Religion, Morality, and Cooperation Lecture Series 2012/13
Ongoing – The evolutionary and cognitive sciences have recently experienced an explosion of work on religion, cooperation, and morality, and in particular on their interrelationships. The emerging framework promises to re-energize these long-languishing topics by bringing a fully interdisciplinary approach to these topics that synthesizes the integrative rigor and precision of the evolutionary sciences with the depth of history and ethnography. The series will feature both leading researchers on these topics from Vancouver and experts from across the globe.
LEVYNA Conference – October 2012
October 25th to 27th, 2012 – The first LEVYNA Conference, “Homo Experimentalis: Experimental Approaches in the Study of Religion”, was held in Brno, Czech Republic.
Back to the Future – A Response to Martin and Wiebe
(This piece is a response to Martin and Wiebe’s Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion, with both the original piece and this response published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. The full discussion is currently online here.) A Response to Martin and Wiebe Edward Slingerland Canada Research […]
David Sloan Wilson – Using Evolution to Improve the Quality of Everyday Life
September 11th, 2012 – part of our “Evolution of Religion, Cooperation and Morality” lecture series.
Too Late – Models of Cultural Evolution and Group Selection Have Already Proved Useful
Joseph Henrich Anthropologist and Professor of Psychology and Economics. Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution. University of British Columbia. Apprehending the place of “group selection” in evolutionary thinking requires understanding the use of formal mathematical models. Many scientific disciplines, ranging from engineering to ecology, develop mathematical models to study, analyze and understand complex […]