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Invited Speakers
Keynote
| Richard D. Alexander |
| Emeritus Professor & Emeritus Curator of the Museum of Zoology,
University of Michigan |
| Evolution and Human Society |
Abstract (pdf) |
Plenary Speakers
| Tetsuro Matsuzawa |
| Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University |
| Chimpanzee mind: studies in the field and the laboratory |
| Fieldwork and laboratory work need to go hand in hand to provide
us with a complete picture of the life and mind of the chimpanzee. I have
called this discipline Comparative cognitive science. A community of 14
chimpanzees of 3 generations inhabits an enriched, semi-natural environment
at KUPRI. My research partner is named “Ai”, a 31-year-old female chimpanzee.
I have been working with Ai since 1977. My colleagues and I have covered
various topics in cognition; visual acuity, form perception, face recognition,
auditory-visual cross-modal matching, short term memory, imitation, deception,
mother-infant interaction and so forth. A community of 13 chimpanzees of
3 generations inhabits the forests at Bossou, Guinea, West Africa. Bossou
chimpanzees are well known to use a pair of stones as hammer and anvil
to crack open nuts. Since 1986, I have explored developmental changes in
tool use technology. The combination of laboratory and field studies has
revealed a unique mode of social learning in chimpanzees, called “Education
by master-apprenticeship”, 1) Infants’ prolonged exposure to adult behavior
based on the strong mother-infant bond, 2) Lack of active teaching (no
formal instruction, and no positive/negative feedback from the mother),
and 3) The infants’ intrinsic motivation to copy the mother’s behavior
and the high tolerance of the mothers toward the infants. Through education
by master-apprenticeship, chimpanzees seem able to pass knowledge and skills
from one generation to the next, thereby maintaining their community’s
cultural repertoire. |
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| Carel van Schaik |
| Director of the Anthropological Institute & Museum, University
of Zurich |
| Alone Among Apes: Cooperative Breeding and Human Cognitive Evolution |
| Despite sharing a recent common ancestor, humans have cognitive abilities
that are markedly different from those of other great apes. The main difference
involves shared intentionality, which is made possible by spontaneous prosociality
(also strikingly absent in chimpanzees). However, evolutionary scenarios
still struggle to explain how this difference arose. Here we suggest human
prosociality may be linked to cooperative breeding. Spontaneous prosociality,
in the form of food and information donation, is also found in the common
marmoset, a member of the only other primate lineage to show cooperative
breeding, and may also be present in other cooperatively breeding mammals.
A comparison of callitrichids with their independently breeding sister
taxon shows an increase in social cognition but not non-social, including
physical cognition, and a similar pattern may hold in other cooperative
breeders. Moreover, cooperative breeders tend to have larger relative brain
sizes than other mammals. Hrdy’s Cooperative Breeding Model suggests that
extensive allomaternal care may also have had a major effect on human cognitive
evolution. When cooperative breeding arose in the hominin lineage, spontaneous
prosociality was added to an already ape-level cognitive system, which
enabled the emergence of shared intentionality by a simple extension of
spontaneous prosociality from donation of food and information to a willingness
to share mental states as well. Various other derived features of human
cognition can also be explained under this model. |
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| Andrew Whiten |
| Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology, University
of St. Andrews |
| The Scope of Culture in Chimpanzees, Humans and Ancestral Apes |
| Culture is often seen as what sets our species apart from the rest,
so pervasive in humans that it largely frees us from the influences of
evolutionary biology that shape other creatures. In recent times, however,
particularly in the last decade or so, more continuity has been recognized.
As long-term field studies have come to fruition and new methods developed,
evidence for cultural transmission of behaviour has become increasingly
common in a wide range of fish, birds, cetaceans and primates. The scope
of culture in our closest living relatives, the great apes, is now known
to be more human-like in several respects than was generally suspected.
In the present talk I review these commonalities and use them to reconstruct
the scope of culture in our most recent common ancestry, drawing on new
evidence concerning (i) the patterning of different traditions in time
and space, across Africa; (ii) mechanisms of social learning, such as teaching,
imitation and emulation; and (iii) the contents of culture, such as tool
use. The new, richer sources of evidence are also deployed here in the
complementary work of identifying and understanding the distinctive cultural
traits that appear to distinguish the two sister-species, such as the human
capacity for cumulative cultural evolution. The results of these comparative
analyses can in turn be coordinated with key aspects of the archaeological
record, significantly revising our understanding of factors that may explain
why our more recent ancestors took such an extraordinary, heavily cultural,
evolutionary pathway. |
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| Wayne Potts |
| Department of Biology, University of Utah |
| Mate choice influenced by histocompatibility genes |
| Disassortative mating preferences based on MHC (major histocompatibility
complex) genotype have been demonstrated in humans and numerous other vertebrates.
The molecular basis of MHC-mediated odor signals has recently been elucidated
revealing a remarkable convergent coevolution between odorant receptors
and MHC molecules; the unique peptide binding properties of a given MHC
allele are matched by odorant receptor subsets. This provides the molecular
logic of how the MHC genotype of individuals can be olfactorally perceived
by others. It also explains how diversifying and balancing selection acting
on polymorphic MHC genes can operate through either pathogens or MHC-mediated
behaviors. Disassortative mating preferences have at least three possible
functions: (1) to produce disease resistant MHC heterozygous offspring,
(2) to produce disease resistant offspring by providing a head start in
the host/pathogen molecular arms race or (3) to avoid inbreeding and associated
genetic diseases. These functions are not mutually exclusive and all three
are supported by direct evidence. This story has captured the public eye
with the advent of commercial dating services that match couples for MHC
compatibility. There are many practical reasons to understand human MHC
mate choice, which has been associated with variability in fertility, child
health and relationship satisfaction. MHC mate choice is perhaps the premier
example of a complex behavior with an established genetic basis where many
of the intervening mechanisms are elucidated, including molecular, neurosensory,
immunological, imprinting and kin recognition mechanisms. I will attempt
to interpret the complex data sets bearing on these intriguing behaviors
and their functions. |
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| Nicholas Humphrey |
| Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School
of Economics |
| The necessity of consciousness: Why human zombies would be an evolutionary
dead end |
| The hard problem of consciousness is to explain where the phenomenal
feel comes from - why it’s “like something” to experience sensations, and
what biological purpose this being- like-something serves. I will propose
an entirely new solution, by arguing as follows: 1. Sensations don’t have
to have a phenomenal feel to them in order to serve their basic role; indeed,
in the early stages of evolution, sensations were surely non-phenomenal.
2. Phenomenality must have been added by natural selection as a quite peculiar
design feature, probably relatively late in evolution (and possibly only
in mammals). 3. It will have been selected because the psychological changes
that the experience of phenomenality brings about in the conscious subject
are highly adaptive. 4 . Arguably these changes were and –are – nothing
less than an enhanced sense of self and a new enchantment with the world
outside. 5. Even if phenomenal consciousness is present in other species,
human beings have built on it in ways none others have. 6. It has allowed
humans to occupy what I call the “soul niche”, that’s to say, the cultural
and biological territory, rich with almost unlimited opportunities, that
must have opened up for our ancestors once they first began to think of
themselves as spiritual beings . |
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| Toshio Yamagishi |
| Center for the Sociality of Mind, Hokkaido University |
| Social preference and strategy in in-group love and out-group hatred |
| In-group favoring behavior — cooperating more with members of one’s
own group than with outsiders — seems ubiquitous in the human society.
From the game-theoretic point of view, this involves no surprise. The “shadow
of the future,” which is more prominent in relations with members of the
same group than with outsiders with whom one may not see again in the future,
is a prerequisite for cooperation among fitness-enhancers. What is surprising,
however, is the finding that such in-group bias exists even in the minimal
group — a collection of individuals who share a seemingly trivial social
category while lacking interpersonal interactions and interdependence of
interest. Aside from the social identity account of this finding which
is based on an arbitrary assumption that all humans aspire to maintain
high self-esteem, two approaches have been proposed to explain the seemingly
ubiquitous disposition toward in-group love and out-group hatred. The first
is the social preference approach, according to which humans are viewed
to be endowed with a domain-general psychological driving force — i.e.,
other-regarding social preferences — that have been selected through some
forms of group selection. The second is the reputation management approach,
which views such behavioral disposition as a reflection of a reputation
management mechanism that regulates human behavior in the domain of social
exchange. In my talk, I will present evidence that 1) cooperation in Prisoner
Dilemma and related games is a function of whether the game is defined
as an instance of social exchange, 2) spiteful behavior toward the out-group
never occurs in the minimal group studies, 3) in-group favoring behavior
does not occur in the minimal group unless indirect or generalized “return”
for one’s cooperation is expected from the in-group. Based on these evidence,
I argue that in-group favoring behavioral pattern that are often observed
in the minimal group studies can be interpreted as a reflection of the
“default strategy” that promotes one’s reputation and makes one to qualify
as a target of “gift-giving” in a system of generalized exchange. |
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