September 16th, 2009
Yoel Rak
Tel Aviv
“Lucy’s Place in Nature.”
October 19th, 2009
Ben Marwick
University of Washington
“Pleistocene Exchange Networks as Evidence for Hominin Language Evolution.”
November 23rd, 2009
Jessica Tracy
UBC
“The Nature of Pride.”
One of the major findings in the behavioral and social sciences is the discovery that a small set of “basic” emotions have distinct, universally recognized, nonverbal expressions. This finding promoted widespread acceptance of Darwin’s (1872) claim that emotions are an evolved part of human nature, but also diverted attention away from emotions assumed to lack universal expressions, such as the unique class of “self-conscious” emotions. However, recent research suggests that at least one self-conscious emotion—pride—may fit within the Darwinian framework.
I will present a series of studies demonstrating that pride has a distinct nonverbal expression which is reliably and cross-culturally recognized by adults and children, through an automatic cognitive process. Furthermore, the recognizable pride expression is spontaneously displayed in response to success, by sighted and blind individuals across cultures. These findings suggest that the pride expression is likely to be an innate behavioral response to success, which may have evolved to serve a fundamental social function. In fact, new research suggests that the pride expression may function as a status signal, sending a message that is distinct from other positive and negative emotions, implicitly perceived, and powerful enough to override contradictory contextual information.
Other research on the psychological structure of pride supports this functionalist account. Analyses of the semantic meaning of pride, the dispositional tendency to experience pride, and actual pride experiences suggest that there are two distinct pride facets, consistent with a theoretical distinction between “authentic” and “hubristic” pride. These findings help explain how the experience of pride may serve a complementary adaptive function to its expression. Specifically, each facet of pride is linked to a distinct status-attainment and maintenance strategy (i.e., “dominance” vs. “prestige”), suggesting that the two facets may have evolved separately to motivate the divergent behaviors needed to attain each kind of status. Overall, research from my lab suggests that pride is a complex emotion that is closely linked to self-esteem, narcissism, achievement, and status, and may be an evolved—and certainly a fundamental—part of human nature.
February 8th, 2010
Ellen Dissanayake
University of Washington
“The Artification Hypothesis”
Archaeologists frequently assume that the appearance of “art” provides a window into ancient human minds and social groups, indicating their degree of human intelligence or cultural development. In contrast, Ellen Dissanayake claims that art, considered ethologically as a behavior of “artifying” (rather than as artifacts or products of that activity, such as engravings or paintings on rocks or walls, shell beads, or bone instruments), can be considered as a biologically distinctive and noteworthy characteristic of humans in itself, not simply as a subset or byproduct of their intelligence, symbolizing ability, or cultural level. In her view, artification—intentionally making parts of the natural and manmade environment (shelters, tools, utensils, weapons, clothing, bodies, surroundings, and other paraphernalia) extraordinary or special by marking, shaping, and embellishing them beyond their ordinary functional appearance—is a heretofore undescribed (or overlooked) capacity in the human repertoire. Her hypothesis about its evolutionary antecedents, motivation, and adaptive advantages provides a new approach to the concept of “art” in human evolution.
March 2nd, 2010
Joe Wakano
Meiji University
“Chaotic Dynamics in Spatial Public Good Games”
2:00 pm in WMAX 110
March 4th, 2010
Wataru Nakahashi
Meiji University
“A Mathematical Model for Evolution of Learning Abilities”
4:00 pm in Suedfeld Lounge, Kenny
March 8th, 2010
Mark Turner
Case Western
“The Embodied Mind and the Spark of Human Culture”
Forty years ago, before the term cognitive science came into existence, there was a view broadly heldin logic, philosophy, artificial intelligence, neurobiologythat reason, inference, and some kinds of understanding are transcendent, independent of any incidental platform: computer, brain, anything. According to this formalist view, thought must be computational, and computation can be described formally, and therefore, the core of human thought must in principle be independent of the physical device that performs the labor. On this view, logical operations as such are independent of hardware Today, this previously-attractive notion of the transcendent disembodied mind has almost disappeared from cognitive science. Since brains are built to drive bodies, it is not a surprise that the nature of the body informs the nature of thought. All mammals, presumably, have embodied minds. Yet only cognitively modern human beings have robust culture. A community of embodied minds evidently need not have robust culture. In fact, almost no communities of embodied minds have anything like robust culture. How then do we explain the origins and development of culture? This talk will explore the additional cognitive spark that turns embodied minds into minds that are rich in culture.
March 29th, 2010
Owen Flanagan
Duke University
“The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World”
The Hard Problem is: How is consciousness possible in a material world? How does the brain produce subjective experience? The even harder problem — The Really Hard Problem — is this: assuming that the material world is the only world, what meaning, purpose, or significance does conscious human life have? Humans care deeply about living in a meaningful way, in ways that matter, that are ethical, and that embody truth, goodness, and beauty. What, and how, can anything really matter for an animal who lives four score and ten and is then gone, gone forever? Even our species is guaranteed to be short-lived. Does the scientific image allow for there being such a thing as meaning in a material world?
June 10th, 2010
Arne Traulsen
Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology
“Human Strategy Updating in a Spatial Game”
WMAX 110
Probably the most thoroughly studied mechanism that can explain the evolution and maintenance of costly cooperation among selfish individual is population structure. In the past years, hundreds of papers have mathematically modeled how cooperation can emerge under various dynamical rules and in more and more complex population structures [1,2]. However, so far there is a significant lack of experimental data in this field. Milinski et al. have conducted an experimental test to address how humans are playing a particularly simple spatial game on a regular lattice [2]. The data shows that the way humans choose strategies is different from the usual assumptions of theoretical models. Most importantly, spontaneous strategy changes corresponding to mutations or exploration behavior is more frequent than assumed in many models. This can strongly affect evolutionary dynamics [4] and decrease the influence of some spatial structures.
This experimental approach to measure properties of the update mechanisms used in theoretical models may be useful for mathematical models of evolutionary games in structured populations.
[1] Ohtsuki, Hauert, Lieberman, and Nowak, Nature (2006) [1] Szabo and Fath, Evolutionary games on graphs, Physics Reports (2007) [3] Traulsen, Semmann, Sommerfeld, Krambeck, and Milinski, PNAS (2010) [4] Traulsen, Hauert, De Silva, Nowak, and Sigmund, PNAS (2009)
January 18th, 2010
Mark Johnson
University of Oregon
“Bodily Sources of Mind, Thought, and Language”
From an evolutionary perspective, what we call “mind” and “body” are not two separate realities, but rather are dimensions of complex processes of ongoing interaction between an organism and its environment. Recent research coming out of the cognitive sciences is beginning to show us how our ability to experience and create meaning depends on the nature of our sensory-motor contact with our world and our emotional bonds to it. Our capacity for thinking is embodied, too, and it appropriates patterns of our sensory-motor experience for both concrete and abstract conceptualization and reasoning. Language and all other forms of symbolic expression and communication are thus tied to these bodily sources of meaning and thought.