Guests
Leda Cosmides
Pioneer in the field of evolutionary psychology. Cosmides won the 1988 American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research, the 1993 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, and a J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. In 1992, with John Tooby, she published The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, an edited volume designed to be a state of the art survey of the new field. Cosmides is currently Professor of Psychology at UCSB. She and John Tooby founded and co-direct the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leda_Cosmides
Helena Cronin
Co-Director of the London School of Economics Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. She successfully launched and directs Darwin@LSE. She authored the best selling book: The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today, which was chosen as one of The New York Times’ nine best books of the year for 1992. She is co-editor of Darwin Today, a series of short books by leading figures in the field of evolutionary theory. Each title is an authoritative pocket introduction to the Darwinian ideas that are setting today’s intellectual agenda.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Cronin
James Fowler
Political scientist specialized in social networks, cooperation, political participation, and genopolitics (the study of the genetic basis of political behavior). He is currently Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.
http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/
http://polisci.ucsd.edu/faculty/fowler.htm
Daniel Dennett
Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Breaking the Spell (2006), Freedom Evolves (2003) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995.) His other books include: Content and Consciousness (1969), Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (1998). Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005). He co-edited The Mind’s I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He has authored over 300 scholarly articles, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston. Dennett was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett
Paul W. Ewald
Professor of biology and director, Program in Evolutionary Medicine at University of Louisville. He was the first recipient of the George E. Burch Fellowship in Theoretic Medicine and Affiliated Sciences. He wrote Evolution of Infectious Disease in1994, heralding the emergence of the discipline of evolutionary medicine and Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancer, Heart Disease and Other Deadly Ailments in 2000. He has written articles for scientific journals on topics ranging from territorial behavior to new strategies for designing new vaccines. He also has written numerous articles for popular science press, such as Natural History, National Geographic, and Scientific American. His work has been featured in nationally in Newsweek, The New York Times, Omni, The Atlantic Monthly and Forbes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_W._Ewald
Dr Nicholas K. Humphrey
Professor Nicholas Keynes Humphrey is a British psychologist who until 2008 held a School Professorship at the London School of Economics (LSE) and a half-time Professorship at the New School for Social Research in New York. His work has tackled issues such as consciousness and belief in the supernatural from a Darwinian perspective.
In 1987, Daniel Dennett invited Dr Humphrey to work with him at his Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. They worked on developing an empirically based theory of consciousness and undertook a study on Multiple Personality Disorder.
His book A History of the Mind published in 1992 put forward a theory on how consciousness as feeling rather than thinking may have evolved.
http://www.humphrey.org.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Humphrey
Dr Robert O. Kurzban
Robert Kurzban is the founder of Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP). PLEEP researcher investigate the computational systems designed to solve adaptive problems associated with capturing the benefits associated with dyadic cooperation, social categorization, group cooperation, close personal relationships, and morality. kurzban’s work has appeared in journals across a wide range of disciplines including American Economic Review, Management and Decision Economics, Minnesota Law Review , Trends in Cognitive Science, Psychological Review, Human Nature, Evolution and Human Behavior, Hormones and Behavior, Journal of Theoretical Biology, and general science journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2008, he won the inaugural Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HES).
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~kurzban/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kurzban
Kevin McCabe
Professor of economics and law at George Mason University and is affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES), the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, the Mercatus Center, and the Center for Law and Neuroeconomics. McCabe serves on the board of directors, and as a distinguished research scholar, for the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics (IFREE).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_McCabe
Ian McEwan
Won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany’s Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader’s Digest Author of the Year. His most recently published work is For You, a libretto.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_McEwan
http://www.ianmcewan.com/
Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry and the University of Michigan Medical School and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program. He collaborated with George Williams to write several seminal works on Darwinian Medicine, including Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (1994). His other books include Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment (2001), and Spousal Bereavement in Late Life (co-editor, 2005).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph_M._Nesse
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nesse/
Steven Pinker
Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and Slate, and is the author of 7 books, including The Language of Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker
Matt Ridley
Holds a doctorate in zoology from Oxford University and is a career as a journalist, writing books about science, economics and the environment. These include, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, The Origin of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation; Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters; Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human and Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code. Ridley’s books have been translated into 25 languages. In 2004 he won the National Academies Book Award from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and in 2007 he won the Davis Prize from the US History of Science Society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley
http://www.mattridley.co.uk/
Michael Shermer
Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Lecture Series at Caltech and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Shermer’s latest book is The Mind of the Market on evolutionary economics. A prolific author his previous include Why Darwin Matters (2006) Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown (2005), The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip and Follow the Golden Rule (2004), and a biography of Alfred Wallace, In Darwin’s Shadow (2002). Also, he wrote The Borderlands of Science (2001), Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies, 2000), How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (2000), and Why People Believe Weird Things (1997, 2002). He is a popular and frequent guest on the radio and television.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer
http://www.michaelshermer.com/
John Tooby
Leads a pioneering effort to integrate cognitive science, cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and hunter-gatherer studies to create the new field of evolutionary psychology. Tooby is professor of Anthropology and University of California-Santa Barbara. He is co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tooby
Ulrich Witt
Director Evolutionary Economics Group and Professor for Economics, Department of Economics, University of Jena, Germany and the Max Planck Institute of Economics. He has published books include: The Evolving Economy -Essays on the Evolutionary Approach to Economics (2006), Individualistische Grundlagen der evolutorischen Ökonomik (1987), SMS - A Program Package for Simulation and Gaming of Stochastic Market Processes and Learning Behavior (with J. Perske1982) and Marktprozesse - neoklassische vs. evolutorische Theorie der Preis- und Mengendynamik (1980). He has also edited Explaining Process and Change - Approaches to Evolutionary Economics (1992), Escaping Satiation. The Demand Side of Economic Growth (2001), Evolutionary Economics, (1993), and Evolution in Markets and Institutions (1993).
