Category Archives: Invited Talk

Corruption, Competition & Scales of Cooperation at Nuffield College, Oxford University

This week I was invited to speak at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS), Nuffield College and Oxford University. I presented a talk on “Corruption, Competition & Scales of
Cooperation: Corruption is Rooted in our Relationships” based on my recent paper “Corrupting cooperation and how anti-corruption strategies may backfire” (more details).

I also discussed the general approach to understanding corruption using cultural evolution and the science of cooperation – corruption is one scale of cooperation undermining another. For example, nepotism is cooperation at the scale of kin, well explained by inclusive fitness, undermining cooperation at the scale of the formal institution. More on this framework can be found at ProMarket or Evonomics. Finally, I presented some work in progress based on this approach, including some work by my students.

Many thanks to Raymond Duch, Sönke Ehret, and Sonja Vogt for hosting.

Evolutionary Demography Seminar Series at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

I was delighted to accept an invitation from Rebecca Sear to present some recent work on “Cultural Evolution and the Collective Brain” at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Evo Demo Seminar Series. A fun evening chatting to people asking similar questions.

“Trusting and the Law” conference at the Lorentz Center, Leiden, Netherlands

I gave a keynote presentation at the Lorentz Center conference on “Trusting and the Law“. This was my first legal conference. The audience included judges, lawyers, and legal scholars. I presented a talk on “Economic Psychology and the Science of Cultural Evolution”, where I discussed some of the “invisible cultural pillars” that uphold legal institutions. It was fascinating to discuss differences in the approach to “evidence” in science and the law.

Cultural Transmission and Social Norms Workshop” at the School of Economics, The University of East Anglia, UK.

I was invited to present my work on innovation and cultural evolution at the “Cultural Transmission and Social Norms Workshop” hosted by the School of Economics at The University of East Anglia, UK. I presented “Innovation in the Collective Brain: The Transmission and Evolution of Norms and Culture”, beginning with an introduction to cultural evolution for the audience of primarily economists. I then discussed innovation as a product of our “collective brains“.

This research is summarized in this news post and in the original paper.

Muthukrishna, M. & Henrich, J. (2016). Innovation in the Collective Brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1690). [Telegraph] [Scientific American] [Video] [Evonomics] [LSE Business Review] [Summary Post] [Download] [Data]

2016 CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences

On Thursday, I was at the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC to receive this year’s CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences. The award ceremony was held in the Regency Ballroom of the beautiful Omni Shoreham. The press release with more details can be found here: http://www.proquest.com/about/news/2016/Winners-of-2016-CGS-ProQuest-Distinguished-Dissertation-Awards.html.

It was an unexpected honor, but also validation of my research agenda and approach to science. My acceptance speech was a brief summary of my dissertation and Dual Inheritance Theory and Cultural Evolution more generally.

Media

UBC Alumni profile: Michael Muthukrishna’s quest to understand the human puzzle

LSE Q&A with Dr Michael Muthukrishna, Assistant Professor of Economic Psychology

“Evolution of cognition and longevity: Adaptation to a new technological environment” meeting at the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution, National Museum of Natural History, Paris, France.

I was invited to present my work on human evolution and the evolution of brains at the “Evolution of cognition and longevity: Adaptation to a new technological environment” meeting at the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution, National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France. I presented “The Cultural Brain Hypothesis & Information Grandmother Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion and alters life history”, where I discussed the Cultural Brain Hypothesis (my dissertation; paper currently under review). I also presented some work in progress on the Information Grandmother Hypothesis.

The Cultural Brain Hypothesis is a more parsimonious explanation for the relationships that have been shown between brain size, group size, adaptive knowledge, social learning, and aspects of life history. The Cumulative Cultural Brain Hypothesis is a set of predictions derived from the evolutionary processes that lead to these relationships for the conditions that lead to an autocatalytic take-off between brain size and adaptive knowledge – the uniquely human pathway. The Information Grandmother Hypothesis extends this theory to explain the evolution of menopause and lifespan.

Speakers were biologists of all kinds. Speakers included:

Herve Chneiweiss (UPMC)
Barbara Demeneix (MNHN)
Donata Luiselli (University of Bologna)
Jean-Marie Robine (GDR INSERM/EPHE)
Kaare Christensen (Danish Aging Research Center)
Eline Slagboom (Leiden University Medical Center)
Claudio Franceschi (University of Bologna)
David Hill (University of Edinburgh)
Paolo Garagnani (University of Bologna)
Eileen Crimmins (USC Davis School of Gerontology)
Dorly Deeg (VU University, Amsterdam)
Carol Brayne (CFAS)
Carole Dufouil (INSERM)
Dominique Grimaud-Herve (MNHN)
David Raichlen (University of Arizona)
Viviane Slon (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
James R Carey (UC Davis)

Project Zero – Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA

I spent the last week back at Harvard University discussing research on cultural evolution and innovation with the Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA), part of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The LILA group include people from industry and the military. Every year the group invites two academics to discuss their research and how it might be applied to problems faced by members of the group. This year, Mary Ann Glynn and I were invited. It was an intellectually enriching opportunity to apply my work to current challenges in corporations and other organizations.

The ideas presented in my two talks were beautifully captured in the graphics below:

The Science of Cultural Evolution: What Makes Humans So Different

Sources of Innovation: The Secret of Human Success

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, CA

I spent the weekend at a productive interdisciplinary workshop on “Religion, Ritual, Conflict, and Cooperation: Archaeological and Historical Approaches” at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS is located on the top of one of the beautiful hills around Stanford.

We discussed the challenges and successes in inferring religious belief and practice from the archeological and historical record and new theoretical models and tools for exploring religious history, including the Database of Religious History (DRH).

Other attendees included:

David Carballo (Boston University)
Chris Carleton (Simon Fraser University)
Jesse Chapman (Stanford University)
Mark Csikszentmihalyi (UC Berkeley)
Megan Daniels (Stanford University)
Russell Gray (Director, Max Planck Institute for the History and the Sciences)
Conn Herriott (University of Jerusalem)
Ian Hodder (Stanford University)
Joseph Manning (Yale University)
Jessica McCutcheon (University of British Columbia)
Frances Morphy (Australian National University)
Howard Morphy (Australian National University)
Ian Morris (Stanford University)
Ara Norenzayan (University of British Columbia)
Beate Pongratz-Leisten (NYU)
Neil Price (Uppsala)
Benjamin Purzycki (University of British Columbia)
Ben Raffield (Simon Fraser University)
Katrinka Reinhart (Stanford University)
Celia Schultz (University of Michigan)
Edward Slingerland (University of British Columbia)
Charles Stanish (UCLA)
Brenton Sullivan (Colgate College)
Edward Swenson (University of Toronto)
Robban Toleno (University of British Columbia)
Robyn Walsh (University of Miami)
Joseph Watts (University of Auckland)

Database of Religious History at Department of Statistics, University of British Columbia, Canada

I was invited to present the Database of Religious History at the Department of Statistics Seminar Series. Nancy Heckman, Head of the Statistics Department, watched our award winning video on the database and was interested in possible connections with researchers in statistics. I presented some of the technical design aspects of the database as well as our statistical approach to analyzing the data.

Afterwards, I had lunch with several members of the department, including Nancy Heckman, Ruben Zamar, Cindy Greenwood, and Davor Cubranic, as well as with Andrew Trites, Director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit and North Pacific Universities Marine Mammal Research Consortium and Fisheries Centre Co-Director. I hope that collaborations with the Department of Statistics will allow us to find new ways to share and analyze our rapidly growing data.

Cultural Brain Hypothesis at Arizona State University, Arizona

This week I visited Arizona State University, Arizona. Rob Boyd and Joan Silk invited me to present my research on the Cultural Brain Hypothesis at the Evolution of Social Complexity Colloquium Series, sponsored by the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, the Institute of Human Origins and the Consortium for Biosocial Complex Systems.

The Cultural Brain Hypothesis (in prep; co-authored with Maciek Chudek and Joe Henrich) describes the evolution of large brains and parsimoniously explains several empirical relationships between brain size, group size, social learning, mating structures, culture, and the juvenile period. The model also describes the selection pressures that may have led humans into the realm of cumulative cultural evolution, further driving up the human brain size.

The School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Institute of Human Origins has an exceptional group of human evolutionary researchers. While at Arizona State University, I caught up with Rob Boyd, Joan Silk, Kim Hill, Sarah Mathew, Charles Perreault, Michelle Kline, and Matt Gervais.

SSHRC Impact Awards Talk in Ottawa, Ontario

As a Top 5 winner of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s (SSHRC) Research for a Better Life: The Storytellers challenge, I was invited to present our research on the Database of Religious History at the SSHRC Impact Awards ceremony in Ottawa, Ontario.

It was an honor to meet the the Governor General of Canada, His Excellency the Right Honourable David Lloyd Johnston, SSHRC’s Executive Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer, Ted Hewitt, SSHRC’s Associate Vice-President, Future Challenges, Ursula Gobel (who I previously met at SSHRC Congress), CBC host of Ideas, Paul Kennedy, and the winners of the SSHRC Impact Awards – Beverley Diamond, Thomas Lemieux, Nico Trocmé, Wendy Craig, and Kirk Luther.

You can watch my talk below:

The Database of Religious History has been featured in several places, including canada.ca. See my previous News post for more details.

Top Row (Left to Right): Robin MacEwan, Michael Muthukrishna, James O’Callaghan, Ted Hewitt (Executive Vice President, SSHRC), Hon. David Johnston, Ursula Gobel (Associate Vice-President, Future Challenges, SSHRC), Vineeth Sekharan, Marylynn Steckley

Bottom Row (Left to Right): Thomas Lemiux (Insight Award), Nico Trocmé (Connection Award), Beverley Diamond (Gold Medal), Wendy Craig (Partnership Award), Kirk Luther (Talent Award)

Cultural Brain Hypothesis and Cumulative Cultural Brain Hypothesis at St Andrews, Scotland

This week I visited the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Kevin Laland invited me to present my paper (in prep) on the Cultural Brain Hypothesis and the Cumulative Cultural Brain Hypothesis. The paper, co-authored with Maciek Chudek and Joe Henrich, describes an evolutionary model of the evolution of brains and parsimoniously explains several empirical relationships between brain size, group size, social learning, mating structures, culture, and the juvenile period. The model also describes the selection pressures that may have led humans into the realm of cumulative cultural evolution, further driving up the human brain size. I presented the research to Kevin’s lab and to Andy Whiten’s lab. I will also be presenting the paper early next month at the 26th Annual Meeting of Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) in Natal, Brazil.

While at St Andrew’s, I met with Andy Whiten, Luke Rendell, Kate Cross, Ana Navarrete, Daniel Cownden, Daniel van der Post, Cara Evans, James Ounsley, Andrew Whalen, Lewis Dean, and Murillo Pagnotta, among others. Kevin is currently on sabbatical at the University of Cambridge.

SSHRC Storytellers Competition Top 5 Winner, St Catharines, Ontario

As one of the 25 finalists, I spent the last few days at Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2014 at Brock University in St Catharines, Ontario. My talk on the Database of Religious History was selected as one of 5 winners of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Research for a Better Life: The Storytellers challenge. The research was featured on the Federal Government’s official website, canada.ca (image below).

I was invited by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to elaborate on the vision and achievements of the Database of Religious History, complementing the winning video, which you can watch below:

The panel of 4 judges included Shari Graydon, author, journalist and founder of Informed Opinions; Antonia Maioni, president of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences; Pierre Normand, Vice-President, External Relations and Communications at the Canada Foundation for Innovation; and Bruce Wallace, editor of Policy Options magazine and former foreign editor for the Los Angeles Times.

I will be presenting the same talk to a VIP audience at SSHRC’s 2014 Impact Awards ceremony in early November.

Cultural Evolution and How Sociality Influences Cultural Complexity at University of Queensland, Australia

This week I visited my alma mater, The University of Queensland, Australia. Mark Nielsen and Thomas Suddendorf (both of whom I was lucky enough to take classes with as an undergraduate) invited me to present my paper on how “Sociality Influences Cultural Complexity” and my chapter on Cultural Evolution. The chapter, coauthored with Maciek Chudek and Joe Henrich, will be appearing in the new Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. I presented the research to the Evolutionary Psychology group, which I took great pleasure in, being a member of the group as an undergraduate.

While at Queensland, I also caught up with my Honours supervisor, Penny Sanderson, and my former colleagues, Morgan Tear and Matt Thompson.