News

Cooperation in the Apocalypse: The Science of Human Generosity

Dr. Athena Aktipis

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Arizona State University

How do people behave in the aftermath of disaster? Do we see the best of human nature or the worst of it? In this talk, we’ll discuss how humans help one another in disasters – both large and small - and what that can tell us about human nature. We’ll tour societies around the world to uncover the science of generosity, from the supposedly uncooperative Ik people of Uganda, to ranchers in the southwest United States who have a reputations for extreme self-reliance. We’ll also ask whether helping others in times of need is a viable survival strategy, using data from computational models to answer the question of whether generosity helps people survive in harsh and unpredictable environments. In The Human Generosity Project, we use many methods to triangulate to questions about cooperation in apocalyptic conditions. Come learn about human nature in times of disaster -- your survival may depend on it.

Let Me Tell You a Tale: My Career Among the Monuments

We asked Brian Fagan, now long retired, to talk about his unusual archaeological career, which spans nearly 60 years, from its beginnings in African archaeology to his long-term concern with communicating archaeology to broader audiences. His experience ranges from digging 1,000-year-old Zambian farming villages to Stone Age hot springs and salt works, and his publications from textbooks to a history of beds, to say nothing of round the world tours and consulting with mattress manufacturers. He tells a story of his complex journey through the perils and challenges of reaching out to wide audiences and why it’s important.

Cooperation and parental investment in the Agta foragers

Talk by Dr. Abigail Page, MRC Research Fellow in Evolutionary Demography, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Cooperation in breeding and parental investment has long been of interest in hunter-gatherer populations and other small-scale societies like the Agta from Palanan, who are primarily fisher-foragers from the Philippines. Human children require an massive amount of investment to ensure they survive to adulthood, and as such are frequently cared for by non-parental caregivers (alloparents), yet few studies have conducted systematic alternative hypothesis tests into why these alloparents help. The focus in the human cooperative breeding literature, unlike the comparable topic of food sharing, has been mainly on who cares and the consequence of this care in terms of its adaptive value to the mother.This talk will explore whether the predictors of kin selection, reciprocity, learning-to-mother and costly signalling hypotheses explain non-parental childcare among Agta hunter-gatherers from the Philippines. This research indicates that reciprocity and relatedness are both positively associated with the number of interactions with a child (our proxy for childcare). However, importantly this talk will emphases that despite shared genes, close and distant kin interactions are also contingent on reciprocity, therefore we cannot assume that just because kin are cooperating only due to shared genes. This talk will then go on to test another common assumption that highly skewed sex ratios in hunter-gatherers are the product of sex-selective infanticide and/or neglect, by exploring parental investment and mortality data in the Agta. This research highlights that sex ratios can be biased due to a number of random and non-random mechanisms, which must be explored before the adaptive value of males is assumed above that of females.