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The Fall 2009 IPEM Seminar Series is held on Thursdays, 3:30-5:00pm, on the dates indicated below.

The locations are as follows:

  • WSU-Pullman: Murrow 55
  • UW: Kane 019 (live videoconference)
  • WSU-Vancouver: VCLS 117 (live videoconference)

To schedule a time to meet with visiting speakers, please contact Dena Spencer-Curtis (ipem@wsu.edu, 509-335-6799.)

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    September 24, 2009
    John Kantner

    Director of Lobo Mesa Archaeological Project, School for Advanced Research

    Insofar as participation in a religious system provides a form of reputation that facilitates interpersonal interactions among people who are otherwise strangers, this benefit is jeopardized by free-riders who are not true adherents to the moral and belief system of the religion. This presentation will build upon the work of Sosis, Neiman, and Boone by considering how the practice of pilgrimage is a costly signal of religious adherence, for pilgrims typically engage in a variety of costly behaviors that affirm their commitment to the religion while operating as a deterrent to cheaters.

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    October 1, 2009
    Laura Fortunato

    School of Biology, University of St Andrews

    The majority of human societies allow polygynous marriage, and the prevalence of this practice is readily understood in evolutionary terms. Why some societies prescribe monogamous marriage is however not clear: current evolutionary explanations --- that social monogamy increases within-group co-operation, giving societies an advantage in competition with other groups --- conflict with the historical and ethnographic evidence.

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    October 8, 2009
    Sergey Gavrilets

    Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology & Department of Mathematics, University of Tennessee

    Warfare is commonly viewed as a force driving the process of aggregation of initially independent villages into larger and more complex political units that started several thousand years ago and quickly lead to the appearance of chiefdoms, states, and empires. Here, we build a spatially explicit agent-based model of the emergence of early complex societies via warfare.

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    October 15, 2009
    Jon Wilkins

    Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Evolutionary Theory

    When natural selection has its primary effect at the level of the individual organism, it is often reasonable to assume that the result is adaptation to the local environment. However, when selection acts at lower levels (e.g., the level of the gene), the resulting dynamics can produce maladaptive outcomes. Imprinted genes (which have different expression patterns depending on their parent of origin) represent an example of significant selection at a level different from the organism.

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    October 22, 2009
    Hillard Kaplan

    Human Evolutionary Ecology, Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico

    The talk will present a general theory of growth and aging, and then extends it to examine the life history implications of the skills-based foraging niche, characteristic of the human evolutionary past. The theory proposes that the role of knowledge, skill acquisition and transfers in determining economic productivity and resource distribution is the distinctive feature of the traditional human ecology that is responsible for the evolution of prolonged development, menopause and a 70 year lifespan.

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    October 29, 2009
    Kevin Foster

    Harvard University, Center for Systems Biology

     “If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.

    Darwin (1859)

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    November 12, 2009
    Amanda Ching and Kristin Safi

    IPEM Trainee, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington,
    IPEM Trainee, Department of Anthropology, Washington State University

    Demographic transitions in our species history signal important changes in the social and economic organization of populations. This presentation examines causal factors that may influence these changes in population size and dynamics in two recent demographic shifts: the Neolithic Demographic Transition (NDT) and the Current Demographic Transition.

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    November 19, 2009
    Anthony Di Fiore

    Department of Anthropology, New York University

    Agent-based simulation modeling is routinely used in some areas of social and biological sciences research, but (with a few notable exceptions) the approach has not often been applied to the study of primate grouping behavior and social dynamics.  This is somewhat surprising, given that agent-based simulations provide a powerful tool for developing null models of interactions between animals and for addressing at least some of the limitations inherent in trying to test existing socioecological and behavioral models in wild populations.

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    December 3, 2009
    Richard Gomulkiewicz

    Evolutionary Theory, Washington State University, School of Biological Sciences

    Populations unable to evolve to selectively favored states are constrained. A genetic constraint occurs when heritable variation in selectively favored directions is absent (“absolute constraint”) or present but small (“quantitative constraint”). Quantitative—unlike absolute—constraints are presumed surmountable given time. This ignores that a population might go extinct before reaching the favored state, in which case demography effectively converts a quantitative into an absolute constraint.

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    December 10, 2009
    Amanda Parrish, NSF IGERT Trainee

    Biocultural Anthropology, University of Washington

    Individual reproductive success varies within every population, and the greater the variation, the greater the opportunity for sexual selection. But “reproductive success” is a complex issue in human populations, and not easily quantifiable. Here, we apply a model originally designed to study sexual selection in birds (Webster et al. 1995), to help identify and quantify the components of mating success in human groups.