Evolution and Society

Bobbi Low
Professor
University of Michigan

Immersed as many women are in our busy professional daily lives, it's hard to fathom how very odd, in evolutionary terms, our lives are. The patterning ("life history") is odd on many levels: when we tend to marry (or not), how many children we have (or not), when we begin having children if we choose to...and more. Both traditional and historical human groups have very different patterns--and so do women in less-developed nations today. What's going on?

David Buss 
Professor
University of Texas

Humans have evolved multiple mating strategies, including long-term committed mating, casual sex, infidelity, mate poaching, and sexual exploitation.  I present empirical evidence bearing on evolution-based hypotheses about the complexities of human mating strategies.  Since men and women historically confronted different adaptive challenges in the mating domain, the sexes differ profoundly in evolved strategic solutions.  Domains of gender differences include mate preferences, motivations for short-term mating, forms of sexual deception, sexual conflict within couples, and conflict in the aftermath of a breakup. Cultural norms that prescribe and proscribe, social environments such as mating pool sex ratio, and personal contexts such as mate value activate different mating strategies. Discussion draws implications for conflict between the sexes and for mating in the modern world of the internet.

Joshua Duntley

Broadly, forensic psychology is the application of the field of psychology to the legal system.  Evolutionary forensic psychology adds the theoretical tools of ethology, exploring human behavior and social organization from an evolutionary perspective.  Much of the historical success of our species is the result of individuals’ high degree of sociality and cooperation. Our ancestors often gained more through cooperation than was possible through solitary efforts.  But in some contexts, individuals benefited more from inflicting costs on others than cooperating with them, behaviors that we now identify as crimes. To provide an example of the exploration of a topic in Evolutionary Forensic Psychology, the talk will focus on an adaptationist explanation for the crime of homicide.  Homicide Adaptation Theory argues that multiple homicide mechanisms evolved as context-sensitive solutions to distinct adaptive problems. In specific contexts, killing historically conferred unique fitness benefits: preventing premature death, removing cost-inflicting rivals, gaining resources, aborting rivals' prenatal offspring, eliminating stepchildren, and winnowing future competitors of one's children. Because being killed inflicts temporally cascading costs on victims, selection has forged strategies to prevent homicide victimization and address the aftermath of killing, producing co-evolutionary arms races between homicidal strategies and anti-homicide defenses.

Ann Reid
Executive Director
National Center for Science Education

Decades of research show that students learn science best when they are given the opportunity to engage in authentic scientific practices such as forming testable questions, examining and evaluating evidence, recognizing areas of uncertainty, and reaching the best available conclusions based on the evidence. When teaching evolution, such practices become even more vital because so many of us harbor deep and persistent misconceptions about what evolution is and how it works. With examples and audience participation, Reid will illustrate how evolution can be taught effectively, without conflict.

Martha I. Nelson
Staff Scientist
National Institutes of Health

Influenza is commonly cited as one of the greatest threats to humankind.  One hundred years ago, the 1918 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic claimed more lives globally than World War I.  Influenza pandemics are sudden, deadly, and global because they are sparked by a rare dramatic evolutionary event, in which an animal virus incurs a set of mutations that enable it to successfully transmit by aerosols in humans. My research is focused on understanding how and why such rare evolutionary events occur, and specifically how our global system of livestock production facilitates the emergence of novel pathogens. By further understanding viral emergence and evolution, we aim to identify and potentially disrupt high-risk pandemic threats in animals before they jump to humans.

Loukas Barton
Research Archaeologist
Dudek

We can argue about how to define what it means to be human, and about when or where the first humans appeared. But I think we can all agree that we have never encountered a human bereft of human stuff: clothes, gadgets, pets, parks, politics, etc. We evolve in tandem with all of these things. What makes the system unique is how fast it changes, and that the organic and the inorganic evolve together in ways never before possible. The global geological concept of “The Anthropocene”, along with media frenzies for and against the evidence and consequences of global climate change, have brought all of this to mainstream public attention. But so much of this attention rests on very recent memory, and ignores the deep history of what it means to be human. Most of my research has been about the archaeology of evolution in the human biome, and here I’d like to explore several case studies that illustrate the evolution of Us – the Cyborg Chimaera – over the past 100-thousand years.