Anthropology & Biology cross-disciplinary workshop part 1: Behavioural science

Organisers: Fiona Jordan & Arsham Nejad Kourki

University of Bristol | 9 September 2020

There is fascinating research on the evolution of behaviour in many disciplines across the University of Bristol, particularly in biology and anthropology. We’re hosting a workshop to bring together postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers whose research interests relate to this broad topic and we warmly invite you to take part. The aim of the workshop is to stimulate dialogue between the two disciplines at a local scale, so don’t worry if you don’t already know much about what your peers in others discipline are doing—come along to find out!

The workshop will be held online and will also be open to non-UoB folk: please email Arsham for a Zoom login.

Timetable

Session 1 | 10:00-10:50

Arsham Nejad Kourki | Levels of Selection and Major Transitions in Sociocultural Evolution

João Pinheiro | Is Cooperating Always the Good?: Analysing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in Curry, Mullins & Whitehouse (2019)

Session 2 | 11:00-12:30

Terhi Honkola | Environment and Linguistic Divergence

Monique Borgerhoff-Mulder | Cultural group selection and the design of REDD+: insights from Pemba

Patrick Kennedy | Can you blackmail your relatives into altruism?

Lunch Break | 12:30-14:00

Session 3 | 14:00-14:50

Molly Beastall | The Effect of Socialisation on the Development of Pacific Beetle Cockroaches (Diploptera punctata)

Sarah Jelbert | Corvid cognition: Tool use in New Caledonian crows

Session 4 | 15:00-16:30

Innes Cuthill | Animal camouflage: evolutionary biology meets perceptual psychology

Tim Caro | Conspicuous coloration in mammals

Laszlo Talas | The cultural evolution of military camouflage

Closing Remarks | 16:20-16:30 | Fiona Jordan

We hope to hold Part 2: Phylogenies sometime later in the term, and will have a call for abstracts advertised in due course.

— Fiona & Arsham