CES & HBES 2026 mini-episode
2026-05-19 12:00:00.000 +00:00

David, where are we? We are in Rabat, which is the capital of Morocco. Yes, we are. And David, did you realize that this uh week is our one-year anniversary of uh of uploading uh episodes? Wow, I mean I did know that because you told me before we started recording this, but it is cool to be reminded of that fact. Yes, yes. So um so this this week we have a special mini episode. Um next week we'll go back to regular. Yep. But because we're in Robot, we just wanted to do something a little bit different. And we grabbed uh at least one person, maybe two. We'll see who this is, but at least we have Brett Beheim. Um and uh but yeah, but it's been really nice to meet talk to people, people who are listening, uh people giving feedback.

Yeah, um we we never mentioned why we're in robot. Uh right. Why are we in it's in the middle of the night. No, it's not the middle of the night for me. I don't yeah, I don't know. I'm a little jet lag. Feeling a little crummy, yeah. Yeah, and we're all kind of more mentally depleted to why so David, why are we in robot? Okay, we are in robot for the human behavior and evolutionary uh H B E S. H-B E S human behavior and Cultural Evolution Society was before. That's right. Yeah. Uh so we're at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society Conference. Uh which is it the largest gathering of evolutionary social scientists in the world? Um well there's E B and uh I don't know. I don't know which one is bigger or something.

I don't know. Doesn't matter. I I guess um That's a very American thing to be like which one's bigger. Or uh I suppose which one is higher quality. That's also a fraught. I I yeah. It's a it's one of one of the great coming together uh of um evolutionary behavioral science. Yeah, it does feel like a great pilgrimage for for everyone and re reunite reun you can't even speak reunification with friends and like-minded thinkers and and and just a great melting pot of different ideas and perspectives that is really exciting. Yeah and this this is a good HBAS NCS and lots of anthropology Really great, some people that we're going to have on the episode. Hopefully Hanukoko was one of the plenaries. Incredible Hanakoco.

I'm super fan of Hanukoko. Oh my brilliant. Brilliant theoretical biologist that just totally blew my mind. Yeah, we'll have to have around in the future. Why are whales so big and why do they are they so slow lived? Yes. That was one of the many interesting questions that she answered. Yeah. So yeah, uh we had a great time at HBES and um we managed to snag a bit of Brett Beheim. Yeah. We we managed to snag a bit of his time uh after the conference and he shared some really interesting thoughts with us about uh the Neo-Darwinian synthesis and how we can make that happen in the evolutionary social sciences. Yeah. Uh so yeah, enjoy this very brief uh sort of like one year anniversary episode. We'll see you next week for our regular uh programming and uh and yeah thank you again to

everybody who's been so wonderful uh giving us feedback and please keep um letting us know what might be of interest for the future. Please I'm looking forward to next year. I know. Yeah. We'll see you in year two. See you next week. Yeah. Which is next week. I know. All right. bye everybody. Bye. Uh Brett, good to see you. Uh how's HBest going? Were you at Cultural Evolution? Yeah, I was at Cultural Evolution. And now I'm at HBest, so I get a little bit of both this time. Nice. Best of both worlds. Best of both worlds. Do I be mics by the way? Uh we don't know yet. Well I will listen to this I know. Um if you you nobody can see Brett is uh um looming. Yeah, looming Brett. Uh yeah. Now what has been your um favorite talk of your class so far?

Oh man, that's tough. Um I really enjoyed one of the plenaries by Stephen Vasey that was um kind of a meta plenary because he was presenting as somewhat of a new person to the field of cultural evolution and he was coming from a sociology perspective. So he said, you know, uh it might be useful to consider some ideas that normally aren't discussed in evolutionary social science, like the growth of institutions. And he actually was also thinking about this in kind of a planning perspective. Like uh evolutionary social sciences are getting bigger, uh, and cultural evolution in particular is is sort of growing into maybe a mature something, but it's not clear what that something's going to be. And there's examples of things maturing into sustained fields that you know,

things like cognitive science, network science, demography. These aren't really disciplines in the sense that there's like there's a department of well, there's departments of cognitive science, but there's usually not departments of network stuff. For the most part, rather, it's a body of like techniques or ideas that different disciplines draw on. And he advocated for that being maybe a model for cultural evolution. You know, different disciplines might use cultural evolution as a field. Rather than thinking about it as, you know, sometimes people think I sort of like an empire, it's going to take over all the social sciences and bring evolution in, or something like that. And so that was a that was a really exciting plenary because he he gave historical examples

where there were things that kind of fizzled out because they didn't really get the institutions right. Uh and that led to a lot of productive discussions about I mean, should we have a journal? Uh should we have like a summer school that you know, like if if we look at the Population Association of America and we see that as like CES in like forty, you know, seventy years, like what would be the sort of track that follows that? Yeah. Um so that was really exciting to to kind of s sort of zoom out and think about you know the growth of what we're all doing as an intellectual enterprise. You know, this is the basic question about how are people gonna get jobs. Yeah. If you're like, okay, you're gonna convince somebody to get into evolution, you know, you

better be able to give them something that comes out of that, right? Which is are they gonna be able to get a job in an existing discipline where most of the people aren't evolutionarily oriented, right? Yes. And that's tough. Like I can definitely tell you that personally. Yeah. And it's not going to be the case that there's going to be an you know an evolutionarily oriented version of a discipline as a separate discipline. Right? Yeah. So I think we all face that actually, is kind of this this tension where it's like, well, we have an evolutionary orientation, we're trying to study specific problems, but we also have to be able to talk the talk in a in a disciplinary mode, right? Yeah. Uh and so there's like anthropology and then there's evolutionary anthropology, and there's

psychology and there's evolutionary psychology, right? And so on and so forth. Yeah. Um so I really enjoyed that kind of thinking about that as a as a general topic. That was a big big part of the conference. Interesting. And and what's your take on the answers to those questions? Like, should cultural evolution have a journal? Should it have a summer school? Do you think it's better to view it as a set of techniques and methods rather than say a theoretical approach or a discipline. Well, uh Stephen Vasey had a had a nice take on it, which is like looking at fields, uh it's useful to think about what the field kind of owns. Like people look at that field as the authoritative place to go. So demography, I think it's pretty straightforward.

It's like if you're thinking about population structure, age pyramids, um statistics like life expectancy, you know, the actual stuff. Like, I don't think anybody would say, oh, there's another field that is the experts on that besides demography, right? Clearly, they have they have a lot of uh uh authority on that. And social network stuff is the same thing. Like, you know, social network theory is the place to go to study network science. Um cultural evolution, I think it's it might be useful to focus on that question. Like, what are the things that are uniquely valuable about cultural evolution in terms of studying it? So, like transmission, like transmission chain experiments. I mean, that's really something that the field has uh just done a tremendous amount of work

on. And uh I think that's a that's a huge part of uh like kicking things like that. Yep. Um and uh uh I think that's that's generally true for evolutionary approaches. Like there's a few, I mean evol evolution itself, like certain evolutionary concepts like differential reproduction or propagation. Yep. tracking frequencies through time of some phenotype. You know, this feels to me like this could be things where we say this is the authoritative body of knowledge that's used to study that, which is evolutionary approaches to humans. Is a cultural evolutionary scientist studying the cultural evolution society as a cultural evolutionary evolution? layers deep can I go in? People have thought of that joke before.

Dave, maybe you should start a field called the evolutionary psychology of the evolutionary psychology of psychology. That's right. Say that again, sorry. The evolutionary psychology of the evolutionary psychology of psychology. Oh no, I've already been thinking about that. It's artifact psychology. Yeah, I know, that's true. No, it wasn't low hanging fruit. It was you know, it's kind of ironic because if we were talking about some physical science, like you know, the transition from you know some kind of chemical science, and you're saying, okay, we're incorporating like deep learning algorithms and developing molecules, right? Right. That kind of transition could be the subject of this kind of a discussion too.

Right. But we're actually we're talking about the thing that we're actually using to study that, right? That recursiveness is really interesting, right? Because it's like the dynamics of social organizations in a kind of Darwinian way, right? Like it is very meta. So do you see it as like you can bring cultural evolution into political science to see how like political beliefs uh propagate or political parties form or how coalitions form, or you can bring it into linguistics to see how linguistic practices spread, or you could bring it into uh archaeology to see how certain artifacts or uh pottery styles will spread across a region. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think there's something to be useful to be saying in every one of those.

I think there's a parallel here with the modern synthesis actually. Because right now social science as we all know is this this fragmented set of silos that you know occasionally have interdisciplinary attempts, right? Yeah. Um but that was also pretty much true of biology, like 120 years ago, right? Uh that you had like geneticists and field biologists and botanists, and you know there wasn't a conceptual framework that connected everything together. And the modern synthesis itself was this kind of team effort where you had authorities in each of these disciplines basically come together, you know, people like Stebbins and Ronald Fisher. Yeah. And they kind of coalesced around a set of ideas that they then took back to their own

disciplines and advocated for very strongly. And they were clearly successful. And think that that might be a good example of multiple disciplines getting synchronized in a way that they weren't before. Oh man, do we need that for the social science? Right. And it was also around evolutionary ideas, too, right? Yeah, I know. So I mean we already have a model here, right? I think there's a lot that could be done with that. What did they do that we're not doing? Like what can we how can we copy them? I mean, again, I'm not an expert on this, but you know, I wasn't a college PhD, so I did learn a little bit about this. I went to the school Stebbins was at, for example, and Joe Bjansky and people like that.

My guess is that the reason it worked is because every one of these people were already authorities in their discipline. So it wasn't like a new wave of obnoxious upstarts. Yeah. Right? It was more that these are respectable people who all come together and like, yes, we're convinced that you know genetic models of selection are completely consistent with Darwinian sort of gradual transformations, which was a big sticking point, right? Because the Mendelians and the Darwinians were like, no, the models don't work together. And Fisher's like, yes, they do. Right? And so you had a well now I'm like, you know, on my soapbox, which is that uh you also had the modeling framework. You had a set of models that everybody else could sort of build around.

And that was mostly the work of Ronald Fisher and his immediate colleagues. But then you had field biologists and you had uh lab biologists who were also plugged into this. And they were able to say why and how their specific approaches were consistent with the modeling framework. And then, you know, basically as part of this larger program of the monosynthesis. So it was it was a success. Like it was clearly a success in the sense that you know you can get like a biology textbook now that frames everything as this conceptual unity, even though there's parts that are still a little bit, you know, kind of disagreements. So that's the part of science. Social science looks nothing like that right now.

No, it really doesn't. So that's what I think we should do. That's my perspective is we need some kind of a modern synthesis for social science. And like then we saw NCS and hear like one from kind of archaeologists working in or and geographers working in Morocco. I mean it's like stuff yeah stuff I don't really think about and it is true that like Morocco has like a lot to offer. It's like has a as going through like a renaissance of it's nice to have like other parts of the world kind of those gaps filled in as well. Um yeah, it's been good. Awesome. Do you guys have anything to say? Oh, my name is Brian Wood. I'm an anthropologist at UCLA. I happen to do my research in East Africa and Tanzania, and hopefully we can imagine a HBS

taking place in in Dar es Salaam or Nairobi at some point. Well I'd just like to say that as the first HBES to take place on the continent of Africa, this is a very big part of our society's history. And I think just to be a part of this growth of institutions in Africa, I can't think of any better thing to be a part of. And hopefully the repercussions of this will echo in the decades ahead, just as HPES has had a big impact on so many people uh in the US and and in Europe, I think we're we're global now. And and I think that's a fantastic moment to be a part of. And we were talking earlier today and we we have to have you on to talk about fear of elephants. Uh you should all be afraid of elephants, and I can surely tell you why.

Cool. Thank you guys.