We are interested in understanding how genes influence human cognition and behavior, leading to unique human cognitive specializations, such as language. Advances in molecular and statistical genetics now allow us to identify genes that may be responsible for the emergence of some of these human...
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Autism as the low-fitness extreme of a parentally selected fitness indicatorIn many species, siblings compete for parental care and feeding, while parents must allocate scarce resources to those offspring most likely to survive and reproduce. This could cause offspring to evolve traits that adve...
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Why I am still a single-minded adaptationistI will review why I became an adaptationist and continue to believe that the theory of natural selection as amended by W.D. Hamilton supplies us with all we need in order to understand all aspects of animal behavior, including that of our own species. I...
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We are interested in understanding how genes influence human cognition and behavior, leading to unique human cognitive specializations, such as language. Advances in molecular and statistical genetics now allow us to identify genes that may be responsible for the emergence of some of these human...
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Evolutionary theory is rapidly expanding beyond the biological sciences to include all human-related subjects in academia. Since evolution is fundamentally about organisms in relation to their environment, basic scientific research needs to focus on people from all walks of life, as they go abou...
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Autism as the low-fitness extreme of a parentally selected fitness indicatorIn many species, siblings compete for parental care and feeding, while parents must allocate scarce resources to those offspring most likely to survive and reproduce. This could cause offspring to evolve traits that adve...
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In this talk I explain how culturally heritable differences in wealth between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning process driving cultural evolution increases individuals' economic gains. The key assumptions are that human populations are structured into...
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Models such as Maynard Smith’s Haystack model have shown that high rates of movement (i.e., migration, mixing, dispersal) undermine the evolution of cooperation. However, these models generally assume that movement is unconditional. The present model replaces the assumption of unconditiona...
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Models such as Maynard Smith’s Haystack model have shown that high rates of movement (i.e., migration, mixing, dispersal) undermine the evolution of cooperation. However, these models generally assume that movement is unconditional. The present model replaces the assumption of unconditiona...
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In addition to sexual selection, selection resulting from social interactions in contexts other than mating can be a potent evolutionary force. Such social selection processes are facilitated whenever individual fitness varies as a result of any form of social interactions. The choice of social ...
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