Evolutionary Perspectives on the Human Sciences
Kone Foundation is organizing a one-day seminar on the theme of Evolutionary Perspectives on the Human Sciences. The seminar will be held on 21 May 2010 in Sigyn Hall, Turku.
The speakers are:
- Professor Mark V. Flinn (Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA)
- Director Stephen C. Levinson (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands)
- Professor Geoffrey Hodgson (Business Studies, University of Hertfordshire, UK)
-
Professor Ullica Segerstråle (College of Science and Letters, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA).
In addition, there will be presentations from the Kone Foundation-funded projects on Evolutionary Perspectives on the Human Sciences.
Admission to the seminar is free, but prior registration is required. The language of the seminar is English.
Programme
Speakers
Speech abstracts
Project presentations
Registration
Further information
9:00–10:00
Registration and coffee
10:00–10:15
Opening by Chairperson Hanna Nurminen, Kone Foundation
Chairman: Professor Erkki Haukioja, Kone Foundation
10:15–11:00
Professor Geoffrey Hodgson, Business Studies, University of Hertfordshire, UK: Darwinian evolution and the social sciences
11:00-11:20
Professor Klaus Kultti: Men, women and economic well-being
11:20-11:40
Senior Lecturer Erkki Kilpinen: The nature of social reality and the relevance of evolutionary theory
11:40–12:25
Director Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands: The evolutionary revolution in the language sciences
12:25–12:45
PhD, Researcher Outi Vesakoski: Biological evolution and the diversification of languages (Urho Määttä's project)
12:45–14:00
Lunch
Chairman: Professor Risto Alapuro, Kone Foundation
14:00–14:45
Professor Mark V. Flinn, Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA: Hormonal mechanisms for human sociality
14:45–15:05
University Researcher Markus Jokela: Reproductive behavior in contemporary societies: Combining evolutionary theory with social science research
15:05-15:25
Senior Lecturer Karri Silventoinen: Mate selection in humans (Project name: Spouse selection and reproductive success in humans: a population genetic study)
15:25-16:00
Coffee
16:00–16:45
Professor Ullica Segerstråle, College of Science and Letters, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA: Minding our surroundings – views from nonverbal communication, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience
16:45–17:05
Professor Olli Lagerspetz: Westermarck and beyond. Evolutionary approaches to morality and their critics.
17:05–18:00
Conclusion and discussion (Chairman: Professor Risto Alapuro, Kone Foundation)
18:00–18:45
Wine
Speakers
Geoffrey M. Hodgson
Geoffrey M. Hodgson is Research Professor in Business Studies at the University of Hertfordshire and an Academician of the Academy of the Social Sciences.
He has published over 110 articles in academic journals and his books include Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economics Evolution (with Thorbjoern Knudsen, in press), Economics in the Shadows of Darwin and Marx (2006), The Evolution of Institutional Economics (2004), and How Economics Forgot History (2001). He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics.
Stephen C. Levinson
Stephen C. Levinson is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Professor of Comparative Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen.
He is the author of over 150 publications on language and cognition, including the books Politeness (CUP), Pragmatics (CUP), Presumptive Meanings (MIT), Space in Language & Cognition (CUP), and has edited the collections (with D. Wilkins) Grammars of Space (CUP), (with M. Bowerman) Language Acquisition and Conceptual development (CUP), (with P. Jaisson) Culture and Evolution (MIT), (with N. Enfield) Roots of Sociality (Berg).
His current research is focused on the cognitive foundations for communication, and the relation of language to general cognition. He is a fellow of the British Academy and the Academia Europaea.
www.mpi.nl/people/levinson-stephen
Mark V. Flinn
Mark V. Flinn is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri and works in the areas of human biology and evolutionary medicine.
For the past twenty-two years he has studied relations among family environment, psychological development, and child health in a rural community on the island of Dominica. This project currently is examining changes in hormones – cortisol, testosterone, prolactin, DHEA/S, oxytocin, and vasopressin – that are associated with affiliative relationships and interactions among parents and offspring, grandparents and grandoffspring, siblings, mates, and coalition partners.
The objective is to better understand the evolutionary functions and ontogeny of the physiological and psychological mechanisms that underpin the unusual importance in humans of extended kin networks, paternal care, grandparental care, mate bonding, and male bonding and coalitions including respect for each other’s mating relationships.
http://web.missouri.edu/~flinnm/index.html
Ullica Segerstråle
Ullica Segerstråle is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Camras Scholars Program at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
She has written and lectured widely on science and values, the social impact of emerging technologies, the debates about what it means to be human, and planners and users views of good buildings, spaces, and places. She is the author of Defenders of the truth: The battle for science in the sociobiology debate and beyond (Oxford, 2000), editor of Beyond the science wars: The missing discourse about science and society (SUNY Press, 2000), and co-editor of Nonverbal communication: Where nature meets culture (Erlbaum, 1997). She is currently completing Nature’s Oracle, an intellectual biography of the evolutionist Bill Hamilton (“the Darwin of the 20th century”) to be published by Oxford University Press.
www.iit.edu/csl/socs/faculty/segerstrale_ullica.shtml
Speech abstracts
Hodgson: Darwinian evolution and the social sciences
Hodgson’s paper will review past efforts to extend Darwinism to social evolution. While such attempts appeared as early as the 1870s and proliferated until the early twentieth century, the social or cultural units and mechanisms of replication or selection were typically unclear. The most explicit references to the Darwinian selection of social structures or institutions appear in works by David Ritchie, Thorstein Veblen and Albert Keller, in the 1896-1915 period.
Subsequently, evolutionary and related emergentist ideas remained dormant in the social sciences from the 1920s until after the Second World War. With the revival of evolutionary thinking in the social sciences since the 1970s, some lessons can be learned from this earlier period, particularly concerning the problem of specifying the social units of selection or replication
Levinson: The evolutionary revolution in the language sciences
The language sciences are about to undergo dramatic changes. The cognitive sciences have taken their object of enquiry to be the characterization of The Human Mind, and the language sciences have focused on the characterization of The Language Instinct, or Universal Grammar. This abstraction away from variation and diversity is now significantly inhibiting research – after all, diversity at all levels is a unique feature of our communication system compared to all other species. Further, the universals which have been the goal of linguistic research have evaporated in the face of increasing information about linguistic diversity and language change.
The alternative Darwinian paradigm embraces the new facts about cognitive and linguistic diversity, viewing variation as the fuel for evolution, and adopts a diachronic perspective in which we can ask about the relative roles of biological and cultural evolution and their interaction. New findings suggest that language diversity is largely a product of cultural evolution under the constraints of general cognitive capacities rather than being tightly constrained by either Universal Grammar or Greenbergian universals.
Flinn: Hormonal mechanisms for human sociality
The human family seems to follow a typical mammalian pattern: intense maternal care including breastfeeding of an altricial (helpless) offspring, with some support from an assortment of other relatives -- fathers, siblings, aunts and the like. Beyond the shared mammal/primate commonality, however, humans exhibit a suite of highly unusual traits. We are the only species characterized by the combination of: stable breeding bonds, extensive paternal care in multi-male groups, extended bilateral kin recognition, grandparenting, and controlled exchange of mates among kin groups. These unique characteristics are important for theoretical and pragmatic understanding of family relationships, and provide critical insights into the puzzle of human evolution.
In his talk, Professor Flinn will first review a general model for the evolution of human mating, parenting, and kinship patterns based on a process of runaway social selection. Then he will evaluate some of the potential physiological mechanisms that underpin these central aspects of our sociality with results from a 22-year study of hormone profiles in a rural Caribbean community.
Segerstråle: Minding our surroundings – views from nonverbal communication, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience
Against the background of half a century of urban renewal and rational modernist architecture, a number of city planners, social scientists and architects have striven to establish criteria for buildings, spaces, and places that are “good”, not only from a designer’s but also from a user’s point of view. It turns out our reactions to our surroundings are dependent on a multitude of factors: cognitive, emotional, functional, as well as symbolic.
Some of our typical environmental preferences - as documented by empirical studies - can be plausibly explained based on sociobiological or evolutionary psychological theory, but for deeper analysis we need insights from nonverbal communication and neuroscience. In this way we may understand also such things as the therapeutic or energizing nature of particular places and settings.
Project presentations
Men, women and economic well-being
Different risk attitudes of men and women (males and females) are well documented in fields of biology, psychology and economics. We explore theoretically and empirically what impact the differences in risk attitudes have to labour market and marital outcomes.
Project Leader: Klaus Kultti
The Nature of Social Reality and the Relevance of Evolutionary Theory
Social sciences deal with what people do in society. Accordingly, an essential part of their tool-kit has traditionally been theory of action. Of late, however, these disciplines have lacked behind their neighbours when it comes to conceptualizing action. Behavioural sciences, evolutionary cognitive science in particular, are today advancing faster in their understanding of what action is because social sciences have too whole-heartedly embraced an idealized picture of action.
We are proposing that social sciences should draw on the results of their neighbouring disciplines in attempting to account for the materiality and sociality of action. Behavioural sciences emphasize the corporeal, temporal and inherently social character of human action, and thus they have fruitful implications for social sciences. Our project strives to contribute to a re-evaluation of social-scientific action theory by these new and multidisciplinary means.
Project members: Erkki Kilpinen (Project Leader), Antti Gronow, Tuukka Kaidesoja & Kaisa Torkkeli
BEDLAN Biological Evolution and the Diversification of Languages
The aim of the cross-disciplinary initiative is to investigate how the theories and methods of evolutionary biology can help to explain the diversification of languages and dialects. The initiative, which involves researchers from the universities of Helsinki, Tampere and Turku, combines linguistic and evolutionary biological approaches; its purpose is to contribute both to linguistics and to the study of adaptation and speciation in biology.
A central research material will be the extensive Finnish dialect data of the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland, but historical data on other languages, in particular Finno-Ugric languages, English, French, Latin and Greek, will also be used.
Project Leader: Urho Määttä
Reproductive behavior in contemporary societies: Combining evolutionary theory with social science research
Human fertility behaviour has gone through drastic changes over the last century, with declining fertility rates in almost all industrialized countries and many developing countries. These changes are a conundrum for traditional social sciences as well as for more recent evolutionary human sciences. Our project explores to what extent fertility behavior in contemporary societies is guided by evolved psychological adaptations, and why some aspects of reproductive behavior do not correspond to the predictions derived from evolutionary theory. The project will advance our understanding the demographic transition and the psychological and social factors continuing to drive declining fertility rates.
Project Leader: Markus Jokela (University of Helsinki)
Mate selection and reproductive success in humans: a population genetic study
Together with natural selection, sexual selection is the driving force behind evolution. According to the theory of sexual selection, females prefer certain traits when seeking a mating partner, and thus these traits increase reproductive success in males.
We aim to analyze factors affecting mate selection and reproductive success by using large Finnish twin cohorts. Twin study design allows analyze the effects of genetic and environmental factors. In this project we analyze the effect of height, education and life-time incomes on reproductive success and mate selection.
Additionally we will analyze the effect of androstenone on sexual behavior. Androstenone is an odor affecting sexual behavior in many species, but its effect in humans is still controversial.
Estimating the effects of genetic and environmental factors affecting these traits has a central role in this project.
Project Leader: Karri Silventoinen
Westermarck and Beyond: Evolutionary Approaches to Morality and Their Critics
The project addresses the use of evolutionary theory in explanations of morality. What is meant by saying that certain traits of behaviour are ’based on’ evolution? As many of the arguments have remained the same, present debates will profit from understanding their own historical background.
Edward Westermarck (1862-1939) is one focus of interest for the project. Current evolutionary psychology has addressed his theory of incest. Furthermore, his emotivist theory of morality is interesting as moral philosophy today shows a new awareness of the role of emotions. The project also includes selective digitisation of Westermarck’s letter and manuscript material in order to provide scholars with easy and free access to it.
Project Leader: Olli Lagerspetz
Lunch and Coffee
Morning coffee will be served before the seminar, and for lunch will be served game stew with mushroom risotto. A vegetarian option is also available. In the afternoon, coffee will be served. Morning coffee costs €5.10, and lunch costs €16.00. We ask that those attending indicate when registering if they intend to have coffee and/or lunch (see Registration).
Registration
Registration for the seminar begins on 15 March and ends on 5 May. Please sign up for the seminar by email to Executive Assistant Pirre Naukkarinen (pirre.naukkarinen(at)koneensaatio.fi.)Please mention in your message if you will be having morning coffee and lunch in the Sigyn Hall restaurant (see Lunch and Coffee).
Further information
Scientific Secretary Anna Talasniemi (anna.talasniemi(at)koneensaatio.fi).