DySoC / Exeter / UTK Webinar Series

Evolution and Social Systems

The Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity and Exeter is happy to announce a series of free webinars for Fall 2021 on Evolution and Social Systems. This series is a continuation of the past semester seminars: DySoC/NIMBioS Webinar Series on Cultural Evolution and DySoC/NIMBioS Webinar Series on Human Origins and Cultural Evolution.

Organizers: Thomas Currie (University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, Cornwall ) and Sergey Gavrilets (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics, DySoC Director, University of Tennessee)

Co-organizer: Peter J. Richerson (University of California, Davis)

Human social systems are extraordinarily complex and diverse. Around the world are organized into different societies that are structured and by a variety of different institutions, social norms, beliefs, languages, and other aspect of culture. Understanding how societies function and why societies are the way they are, are topics of interest to a wide variety of different academic disciplines. Evolutionary thinking can help bring together the insights from different disciplines and approaches, and can play an important role in understanding the similarities and differences between human societies and those of other species, the ways that different environmental contexts present different challenges that societies have adapted to, how and why culture and societies change over time, and how different cultural histories have shaped the world we live in today. In this interdisciplinary seminar series we present talks from a variety of researchers, including anthropologists, archaeologists, behavioural ecologists, economists, psychologists, and sustainability scientists. As many of the talks will illustrate, this work is not only of academic interest but is increasingly important in addressing some of the biggest social and ecological challenges we face in the world today.

The seminar series is funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the European Research Council.

• Oct 5, 11:45 a.m. EDT Nathan Nunn (Harvard University)
  Cultural Mismatch
• Oct 12, 11:45 a.m. EDT Kristen Hawkes (University of Utah)
  Sexual selection, carnivory, and life history evolution in the human radiation
• Oct 19, 11:45 a.m. EDT Giulia Andrighetto (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) at CNR, Malardalen University, Vasteras, Sweden )
  Norm change and cooperation under collective risk in a long-term experiment
• Oct 26, 11:45 a.m. EDT Anne Pisor (Washington State University)
  Long-distance social connections, collective-action problems, and climate-change adaptation
• Nov 2, 11:45 a.m. EDT Timothy Njagi (Egerton University, Kenya)
  A comparative perspective on the evolution and sustainability of pastoralist production systems
• Nov 9, 11:45 a.m. EST Monique Borgerhoff Mulder (MPI-EVA Leipzig, UC Davis, Santa Fe Institute)
  How Many Wives? Tracing the Interdisciplinary Career of the Polygyny Threshold Model
• Nov 16, 11:45 a.m. EST Stefani Crabtree (Utah State University & Santa Fe Institute)
  Modern Lessons of applying Socio-Environmental Modeling to the Archaeological Record
• Nov 23, 11:45 a.m. EST Matthijs van Veelen (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
  The evolution of morality and the role of commitment
• Nov 30, 11:45 a.m. EST Heidi Colleran (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
  The impossibility of "natural fertility" in human cultural systems
• Dec 7, 11:45 a.m. EST Naoko Matsumoto (Research Institute for the Dynamics of Civilizations, Okayama University)
  What’s so special about the Jomon?