Brief schedule and summary of EvoS Seminar Series for Spring 2012:

2/6 – Rose Chang: Whining is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Children’s whining is a developmentally normal behavior that tops the list of complaints among the parents of toddlers. There is an untested assumption that parents unknowingly reinforce whining and that it is a form of noncompliance. That children whine discriminately – to people they love – indicates a larger role in attachment relationships than these assumptions imply. Recently research has shown that whines actually share important features with infant cries, and more surprisingly the soothing voice adults use with babies known as motherese. These three vocalizations have a similar acoustic structure, and all are better at distracting listeners and attracting attention than other sounds. While whines, cries, and motherese have some parallels to communication in other species, each stands out in humans for the breadth of people producing and responding to these sounds. Men, women and children all use motherese with infants. Men and women, regardless of parental status, are distracted by and attracted to whines and infant cries. These considerations have led us to consider whines, cries, and motherese as part of a suite of vocalizations that cater to an auditory sensitivity shared by humans, and reflect our evolved history of shared childcare.

Attention parents! Do you have a little whiner? Would you like to contribute to psychological research? Please bring an audio or video file of your child whining to this presentation and it might be used in a future research study. Only audio files will be used, but we can remove the video if you use a digital camera or the like. If you contribute a file, please bring it on a CD or DVD and mark it with your child’s age, and the statement “this audio file may be used in psychological research by Rose Chang” and your signature. If you can, please also include a short file of your child talking normally. Thank you!

2/13 – Lee Dugatkin: The Prince of Evolution

Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin was one of the world’s first international celebrities. He was known as a brilliant scientist, famous for his work on animal and human cooperation, and for his role as a founder of anarchism. Tens of thousands of people followed Prince Peter during two speaking tours that took him around America. Kropotkin’s path to fame was labyrinthine, with asides in prisons, breathtaking 50,000-mile journeys through Siberia, and banishment from most respectable Western countries of the day. In Russia, he went from being Czar Alexander II’s favored teenage page, to a young man enamored with the theory of evolution, to a convicted felon and jail-breaker, eventually being chased halfway around the world by the Russian secret police.  Somehow Kropotkin found the energy to write books on a dazzling array of topics: evolution and cooperation, ethics, anarchism, socialism and communism, penal systems, and the coming industrial revolution in the East,  to name a few. Though seemingly disparate topics, a common thread–Kropotkin’s scientific law of mutual aid, which guided the evolution of all life on earth–tied these works together.  Just like in the animals he watched for five years in Siberia, Kropotkin saw human cooperation as ultimately being driven not by government, but by groups of individuals spontaneously uniting to do good, even when they have to pay a cost to help.

Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin is an evolutionary biologist and historian of science and a professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. He is the author of many books including Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America (The University of Chicago Press, 2009), The Altruism Equation (Princeton University Press), and Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees (Free Press, 1999).  His books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, German and Spanish.  Dr. Dugatkin is an a contributor to Scientific American and The New Scientist and has presented public talks on his books and research at PopTech!, The Idea Festival, The American Museum of Natural History, The Smithsonian Institute and many other venues. His work has garnered full-length articles in The New York Times,  The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and dozens of other newspapers, magazines and journals across the world. Dr. Dugatkin has also spoken about his books and research at over seventy-five major universities around the world,  including Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Oxford University, The University of Copenhagen, Cornell, The University of Chicago, The London School of Economics, and Cambridge University.http://louisville.edu/faculty/laduga01/publications.html

2/27 – Robb Wolf: Darwinian Medicine: Maybe There IS Something to this Evolution Thing

Does the concept of evolution have a place in medicine? If so, why is the foundational tenet of biology, Evolution Via Natural Selection, largely missing from the practice and theory of modern medicine?

Robb Wolf is a former research biochemist and the author of the Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet, and creator of a top-ranked iTunes podcast on health and fitness.  He is also a review editor for the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism, co-founder of the nutrition and athletic training journal, The Performance Menu, and co-owner of NorCal Strength & Conditioning, one of the Men’s Health Magazine “top 30 gyms in America.”http://robbwolf.com/

3/5 – Dan Kruger: Men at Risk: Understanding Sex Differences in Human Mortality Rates With an Evolutionary Life History Framework

Sex differences in mortality rates result from genetic, physiological, behavioral, social, and environmental causes that are best understood when integrated into an evolutionary life history framework. This presentation depicts how sex differences in mortality rates across age and cause can be understood in the context of life history allocation of somatic and reproductive efforts. Excess male mortality is a result
of a trade-off between competitiveness and longevity. Social and environmental conditions intensifying male competition for resources, status, and mates lead to increased male mortality through riskier
behavior patterns and the impact of stress on physiological susceptibility. The fact that sex differences in mortality rates are not genetically determined encourages intervention efforts to reduce excess male mortality. These patterns confirm our expectations derived from evolutionary theory and are consistent with the notion that sex differences shaped by sexual selection interact with aspects of the current environment to result in mortality rates considerably higher for men than for women across the lifespan. These findings have
important implications for behavioral and health patterns. The sex difference in mortality rates is an important indicator of life history and social conditions.

Daniel J. Kruger is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, where he is affiliated with the School of Public Health, Population Studies Center, and the Life Course: Evolutionary and Ontogenetic Dynamics program. He earned his PhD in Social Psychology at Loyola University Chicago and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Psychosocial Epidemiology at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. He has authored and co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed research articles, including papers in all of the major
academic journals focused on evolutionary psychology. His evolutionary research interests include altruism, cooperation, competition, demography, life history theory, literary Darwinism, mating strategies, mortality patterns, public health, risk taking, and applications for social and ecological sustainability. His research is
frequently featured in media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, and many others. For more information, visit his website,
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~kruger/

4/2 – Adam Goldstein: Why Ask, “How?”

In an important paper about scientific explanation entitled “Why ask ‘Why’,” philosopher of science Wesley Salmon looks at the significance and motivation for seeking answers to explanation-seeking why-questions in science. Such questions request the reason for the occurrence of some event of interest. Salmon’s paper is in the tradition of Carl Hempel, according to whom scientific explanation is limited to answering such why-questions. I argue against Salmon’s and Hempel’s view that explanation-seeking why questions are fundamental to science: explanation-seeking how-questions play an equally important role. For example, the question “How did human beings evolve from non-human ancestors?” is clearly not a request for a reason why, but a request for a historical explanation of the sequence of events that led to the present state of things.

Recognizing the importance of these questions has far-reaching consequences for the practice of science and for our self-understanding. One such consequence is that evolutionary science and evolutionary thinking more generally, including but not limited to thinking about natural selection, substantially increase in significance. In particular, the kinds of why-questions that motivate the argument for design and supernatural explanations that purport to give reasons for our existence cease to be as compelling.

In March 2006, Adam Goldstein defended his Ph.D. dissertation at Johns Hopkins, where he was a student in the Department of Philosophy, In his dissertation, “Random Genetic Drift: Chance and Explanation in Evolutionary Biology,” Dr. Goldstein argues that chance events occurring due to random genetic drift can be explained, and he describes the strategy that evolutionary biologists use to do so. This is contrary to those who claim that only evolution due to natural selection can be explained, and in general, to those who believe that explanations require laws of nature. He is planning a book, tentatively entitled Chance Caught on the Wing, in which he would like to extend and strengthen the argument of the dissertation, drawing further consequences about the importance of recognizing that chance events are such a large part of the history of life and the history of our species.

 He holds a Masters in Library and Information Science, which he obtained from Pratt Institute’s School of Library and Information Science in 2006. His informatics research concerns the question, “How can key word indexes and related tools such as ontologies improve information resource and hypothesis discovery?” To explore answers to this question, he is designing an ontology of evolutionary biology which will be used to classify a comprehensive database of bibliographic records of works about evolutionary biology, The Library of Evolution at the Darwin Manuscripts Project. The DMP, of which he is associate editor, is a project of the American Museum of Natural History.

 He is the reviews editor and associate editor of Evolution: Education and Outreach, and teaches philosophy at Iona College, in New Rochelle, New York. https://www.shiftingbalance.org/

4/9 – David Michelson: Where Personality Meets the Page: Evolution and Adaptive Self-Expression in Alice Andrews’s Trine Erotic

Evolutionists in the humanities invoke evolved psychological universals to explain why people tell stories and why stories around the world have similar forms and content. But precious little is known about how such universals relate to individual differences in personality and impinge upon the varieties of fictional experience. This dearth of knowledge is especially evident in our understanding of how authors’ personalities color their creations. To date, no one has examined relations between an author, a novel, and its readers through the lens of recent research in personality psychology. Contrary to critics of evolutionary approaches to literature, who aver that human universals cannot begin to account for singular aspects of individual lives and stories, I will show with an evolutionary personality psychological case study that we can understand how an author’s personality influences her novel. We can do this without guessing about the author’s personality, without oversimplifying her individuality, and without diminishing her novel’s unique aesthetic qualities. Drawing on personality tests, answers to interview questions, and reader responses, I analyze how Alice Andrews’s personality influences the form, content, creation, and reception of her novel Trine Erotic (TE). I also discuss the adaptive function of the novel for Andrews and her readers.  

David Michelson is a doctoral candidate in English with a concentration in evolutionary studies at Binghamton University. Broadly, his research seeks to understand how human universals, cultural influences, and individual personalities affect how different individuals and groups experience and make psychological use of fiction. His dissertation research works to clarify the theoretical and practical importance of the least well understood facet of this model: personality. http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-08-05/

4/30 – Evolved to Cabaret: Costume Designs and Script Analysis for the Musical, Cabaret, from an Evolutionary Perspective

This event is a special performance of sections of the musical Cabaret, this year’s theatre department production. It will include an evolutionary analysis of themes of the music and elements of the costume designs. This analysis will be based on undergraduate honors thesis by SUNY New Paltz student Laura Johnsen, who is also the costume designer for the show as well as an EvoS student and president of the EvoS Club.

http://laurajohnsen.yolasite.com/about-us.php

 Cabaret is a musical based on a book written by Christopher Isherwood, music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb. The 1966 Broadway production became a hit and spawned a 1972 film as well as numerous subsequent productions. It is based on John Van Druten’s 1951 play I Am a Camera, which in turn was adapted from the 1939 short novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. Set in 1931 Berlin as the Nazis are rising to power, it focuses on nightlife at the seedy Kit Kat Klub and revolves around the 19-year-old English cabaret performer Sally Bowles and her relationship with the young American writer Cliff Bradshaw. A sub-plot involves the doomed romance between German boarding house owner Fräulein Schneider and her elderly suitor Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit vendor. Overseeing the action is the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub which serves as a constant metaphor for the tenuous and threatening state of late Weimar Germany throughout the show.