University of New England

Annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture

2008 William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture
"The Natural Cook: What Diet Does to Make us Human"
Richard Wrangham, Ph.D.

April, 25 2008 at 7 p.m.
Interactive Classroom
Parker Pavilion
Westbrook College Campus
University of New England,
716 Stevens Avenue
Portland, Maine

Richard Wrangham is Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. His work focusses on the behavior of chimpanzees in the wild, which he has observed in Gombe (Tanzania) and Kibale (Uganda). Prof. Wrangham was one of the first primatologists to study chimpanzee coalitional violence, and his book Demonic Males (co-authored with Dale Peterson) popularized his work on the influence of ecology on the evolution of primate social behavior. He is the recipient Rivers Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Baran-von-Swaine Award. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

One of the special features of human behaviour is that we cook our food. When did our ancestors learn to cook, and what impact did this have on our evolution? This raises important questions about human nature. Might cooking be a crucial component of what it is that makes human beings what they are?

It has recently become apparent that humans are biologically adapted to eating cooked food. This prompts a substantial revision of theories of human evolution. First, cooking has pervasive influences on energy gain, time-budgets and food distribution. These effects can account for diverse features of human adaptation, including important aspects of anatomy and social organization. Second, the origin of Homo erectus 1.6 – 1.9 million years ago seems likely to have resulted from the development of cooking, following adaptation to meat-eating in Homo (Australopithecus) habilis. While much remains to be learned about the biological consequences of cooking and cooked diets, current evidence suggests that cooking is a key aspect of diet that underlies human uniqueness.

Sixth Annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture
Title: "Sexual Conflict in Human Mating"
David M. Buss, Ph.D.

April, 11 2007 at 7 p.m.
CHP Room, Parker Pavilion
Westbrook College Campus
University of New England,
716 Stevens Avenue, Portland, Maine

Sexual conflict permeates social relationships throughout nature, and human beings are no exception. Conflict and competition both within and between the sexes are part of our biological heritage. In this talk, I will explore this ancient legacy, and consider how it has shaped the behavior of modern human beings. Conflicts between the sexes have resulted in evolutionary “arms races” between males and females, as deceptive mating strategies in one sex led to the evolution of defensive maneuvers in the other in a spiraling interaction through evolutionary time. Multiparty conflicts between individuals, prospective or existing mates and same-sex competitors have also exerted a powerful influence on our sexual feelings and behavior.

These conflicts are present at all stages of a sexual relationship—during courting, after mating, and in the aftermath of a breakup—and pose complex adaptive challenges. The evolutionary impact of multiparty sexual conflict has been documented in non-human species. Among the fruit-fly Drosophila melanogaster, for example, seminal fluid proteins produced by one male combat a competitor’s sperm and manipulate the female sexual appetite, but can be toxic to the female. We Homo sapiens possess psychological and strategic equivalents of these chemical manipulations. We further our sexual aims by inducing “bidding wars” among prospective mates, surreptitiously sending sexual signals to potential lovers while deceiving our current mate, destroying relationships between existing couples, punishing mates for indications of straying, driving off poachers, and stalking former mates to prevent them from finding a new partner after a breakup. Discussion will focus on the role of antagonistic arms races in the evolution of sexual conflict.

David M. Buss, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Buss was elected to be a fellow at the Center of Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in 1986.

In 1996, he began teaching psychology at the University of Texas in Austin. His research focuses on such aspects of the human personality as sexuality and its relationship to sexual selection as presented in Darwin's human evolution theory. He has been active on many different boards and directorships, having served on the Board of Directors for the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (1995-1998), the Executive Council for Human Behavior and Evolution Society (1994-1998), and as director of the International Consortium of Social and Personality Psychologists (1990-present). He won the Hoopes Prize for Supervising Award-Winning Summa Cum Laude Honors Thesis at Harvard University in 1984. In 1988, he won the A.P.A. distinguished scientific award for early career contribution to psychology. In 1989, Buss won the distinguished faculty recognition award from the University of Michigan and the G. Stanley Hall Award by the American Psychological Association in 1990. Some of his honors include being placed in the Who's Who in American Education, keynote speaker for several different events, and a lecturer for the Louis Clark Vanuxem at Princeton University in March of 1990. His publications include The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex; The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies Of Human Mating; Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science Of The Mind and The Murderer Next Door.
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/AboutDavid.htm

The 2007 William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture, sponsored by UNE's New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology and co-sponsored by UNE's Department of English.  It is free and open to the public.

5th Annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture
Title:   "The Divided Self: Brains, Brawn and the Superego"
David Haig, Ph.D.

April 28, 2006 at 7:00 p.m.
CHP Room, Parker Pavilion
Westbrook College Campus
University of New England,
716 Stevens Avenue, Portland, Maine.

Biologists have traditionally viewed animals as machines and their brains as fitness-maximizing computers, and have emphasized the competitive struggle between organisms. By contrast, psychologists and novelists have often portrayed minds as subject to internal division, and have often highlighted the conflicts that occur within individuals. Now biologists have begun to recognize conflicts between genes within a single individual, an organism at odds with itself.  I will illustrate this with the example of conflicts between maternally and paternally imprinted genes: genes that are expressed only when inherited from one's mother and those expressed only when inherited from one's father.

Until 20 years ago we had no idea which of our genes came from our father and which came from our mother. We took it for granted that our genes expressed themselves identically and that there was a 50/50 chance that they came from either parent. We also assumed that they worked in cooperation with each other. The biggest breakthrough in genetics in the past two decades has been the discovery of genomic imprinting, which allows us to trace genes to the parent of origin. David Haig has been at the forefront of theorizing these developments. He argues that these "paternally and maternally active genes" comprise less than one percent of our total gene count and are far from being cooperative. In fact, they have been shown to be in competition with one another. If Haig's theory holds true, imprinted genes exemplify an extraordinary within-individual conflict, while shaking up our fundamental ideas of what it means to be an individual.

David Haig, Ph.D. is professor of biology in Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.   He is an evolutionary geneticist with a particular interest in genomic imprinting and relations between parents and offspring.  He was born in Canberra, Australia, and did graduate research the evolution of plant cycles at Macquarie University in Sydney. After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Haig went to Oxford where he further developed his ideas on genomic imprinting and developed an interest in the conflicts between mother and fetus during human pregnancy. He then moved to Harvard, where he was nominated for the Harvard Society of Fellows, and where he continues his interest in conflicts within the genome. He is the author of Genomic Imprinting and Kinship ( Rutgers, 2002) as well as numerous scientific papers.

To see a video of David Haig speaking on his work visit http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haig/haig_index.html

4th Annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture
Title: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Speaker: Daniel C. Dennett, Ph.d
April 29, 2005 at 7:00 PM
CHP Room, Parker Pavilion
Westbrook College Campus
University of New England,
716 Stevens Avenue, Portland, Maine.

What kind of explanation can the natural sciences provide for the variety of religious practices and beliefs? One possibility, of course, is that it is simply the truth, and that all human groups discover this in the same way that they discover that food and water are necessary for survival, but there are other possible explanations that may shed light on the powerful influence of religion in all contemporary societies.

Daniel C. Dennett is the author of Freedom Evolves (Viking Penguin, 2003) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon &Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998). He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over two hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, 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, the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, and the Jean Nicod lectures at Paris in 2001, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. 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.

Dr. Dennett is a Distinguished Fellow in NEI.

3rd Annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture
(Public Talk)
Title: Understanding Ourselves: Characterizing the Human Species in Evolutionary Terms

Richard D. Alexander, Ph.D. Photo by Mark F. O'Brien

Speaker: Richard D. Alexander, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Zoology in the Division of Biological Sciences and the curator of insects at the Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan.
Website

Free Admission
Date: March 26th, 2004
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Place: Parker Pavilion
CHP Room, Parker Pavilion
Westbrook College Campus
University of New England,
716 Stevens Avenue, Portland, Maine.

The late William D. Hamilton has been described as "one of the greatest evolutionary theorists since Darwin." Website.

Professor Alexander is internationally recognized as a pioneer and leading authority on of the study of human nature from the perspective of evolutionary biology. He has made important contributions to the study of self-deception, altruism, morality, and a number of other topics central to our understanding of ourselves, and has also done important research into the social behavior of non-human species. Dr. Alexander is the author of two highly acclaimed books on the evolutionary understanding of human behavior: Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: Univ. Washington Press, 1979) and The Biology of Moral Systems (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1987) as well as a number of seminal scientific papers.

Parker Pavilion

Understanding humanity as a product of evolution is potentially a route to massively reducing of premature death and misery across the face of the earth. Altering human behavior as a result of increasingly accurate and complete self-understanding could help us to reduce aggression, competitiveness, and anti-social behaviors that, directly and indirectly, are responsible for a great deal of human strife and unhappiness. The task, however, will not be easy. One difficulty lies in our feeling that more accurate explanations of ourselves typically do not immediately induce pleasure. Rather, owing to their novelty and strangeness, evolutionary interpretations usually lead initially to displeasure, uneasiness, and an even more vehement rejection of an evolutionary understanding of the human species. In this talk he will continue his effort toward an accurate and complete description of the major features of the human species and how these features have functioned together to make us what we are. He does this under the optimistic assumption that increasingly accurate representations of ourselves will eventually become more attractive than our prior states of ignorance, and the errors resulting from them.

2nd Annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture

"The Blank Slate"
by Steven Pinker Ph.D.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
NEI Distinguished Fellow
7 p.m., Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Ludcke Auditorium
Westbrook College Campus
University of New England,
716 Stevens Avenue, Portland, Maine.
Free Admission

Why does talk of human nature inspire such fear and loathing in so many people?

I suggest that it challenges three deeply held beliefs: the blank slate (the mind has no innate structure), the noble savage (people are naturally good), and the ghost in the machine (behavior is not caused by physical events).

These beliefs are thought to undergird indispensable moral values, and challenges to the beliefs are therefore thought to challenge the values. If the mind has innate structure, then different people (or races, classes, or sexes) could have different innate structures, justifying discrimination and oppression.

Ludcke Auditorium

If evils such as rape, greed, or prejudice are innate, that would make them natural and hence good, or at best unchangeable, making attempts at social change futile. If behavior is caused by physical events in the brain, people could not be held responsible for their actions, unleashing endless Twinkie defenses. And if our values and choices are mere reflexes of an evolutionarily shaped, genetically programmed brain, they would be shams and life would be stripped of meaning and purpose.

I show that the fears are based on non-sequiturs. Egalitarianism is the moral decision to ignore group statistics in judging individuals, not an empirical claim about sameness. The naturalistic fallacy (natural = good) is a fallacy. Responsibility is a moral policy about consequences of behavior, and is no more undermined by genetic or evolutionary explanations of behavior than it is by environmental ones. And the meaning and purpose that people ascribe to life are not compromised by explanations of the ascribing process. Website

1st Annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture

"The Evolution and Biology of Self-Deception"
by Robert L. Trivers, Ph.D.
7pm, Friday, May 10, 2002

CHP Room, Parker Pavilion
Westbrook College Campus
University of New England,
716 Stevens Avenue, Portland, Maine.
Free Admission

The late William D. Hamilton has been described as "one of the greatest evolutionary theorists since Darwin." A distinguished biologist and sociobiologist, Trivers was a friend of Hamilton, and is an NEI Fellow. Trivers has authored seminal theoretical papers on social evolution, the evolution of deception and self deception, reciprocal altruism and parental investment theory that have had a huge impact on biological thinking, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology and ethics. He is the author of Social Evolution (Benjamin Cummings) and the forthcoming Genes in Conflict (Harvard University Press) with A. Burt.

Click here for the William D. Hamilton memorial website.