TOPIC FIELDNOTES
Imitation, teaching, expertise, and learning from other people.
The speakers examine the pursuit of status, noting that while status can be acquired through negative behaviors, an open information structure encourages achieving it through beneficial contributions and intellectual insights. Pinsof also reflects on his early dislike of traditional schooling contrasted with his deep fascination for evolution and psychology.
↗ 1:43:44 – 1:48:16Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof discuss how modern education systems fail to foster genuine curiosity or insight, instead acting as a mechanism for signaling desirable employee traits such as conformity and rule-following to the marketplace, referencing Brian Kaplan's work.
↗ 1:48:17 – 1:52:47Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof discuss how folk psychology and unexamined assumptions of domain generality influence cognitive science. Pietraszewski explains that historical models of the mind, from philosophy to early AI like Samuel's checkers program, often mistakenly assume that mental processes like thinking or decision-making are unitary mechanisms independent of their specific content.
↗ 1:00:14 – 1:07:50Daniel Conroy-Beam shares his academic origins with hosts Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof, describing how an introductory psychology course taught by David Lewis at the University of Texas led him to evolutionary psychology and his subsequent work in David Buss's lab.
↗ 2:12 – 12:02Hosts Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof introduce guest Sheina Lew-Levy, a human behavioral ecologist at Durham University. Sheina shares her journey into evolutionary anthropology, starting from an interest in bushcraft and survival schools to discovering foundational literature on hunter-gatherer childhoods that shaped her academic path.
↗ 0:00 – 5:24Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and Sheina Lew-Levy discuss the critical role of anthropology in keeping evolutionary psychology grounded. They explore how cross-cultural field research challenges assumptions about human behavior, such as age-based imitation biases, and why maintaining a connection between psychology and anthropology is vital for understanding human nature.
↗ 24:06 – 28:54The speakers examine how Western formal education systems contrast sharply with natural human learning environments found in small-scale and indigenous societies. Sheina Lew-Levy explains how collaborative learning, funds of knowledge approaches, and cultural communication norms offer valuable insights for rethinking modern educational practices.
↗ 28:54 – 36:10Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and guest Sheina Lew-Levy discuss why children in Western industrialized societies experience frequent meltdowns and display arbitrary bedtime preferences, contrasting this with hunter-gatherer communities where children have greater daily autonomy and lower frequencies of meltdowns.
↗ 1:12:17 – 1:18:39The speakers examine how peer groups and mixed-age interactions help children learn self-regulation and social norms. Sheina Lew-Levy explains that observational research in hunter-gatherer communities reveals that a large percentage of children's learning happens horizontally from other kids during play.
↗ 1:18:39 – 1:24:17Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and guest Sheina Lew-Levy discuss how children encounter death and mortality in daily life, ranging from hunting exposure to diverse cultural beliefs about reincarnation and the afterlife. They also examine peer learning, single-age classrooms versus neighborhood friendships, and how age-based structures shape different societies.
↗ 1:36:20 – 1:42:49Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof discuss the immense complexity of human psychological machinery, comparing systems like food learning and alliance tracking to building a robot. They explore how empirical research maps out cognitive functions, addressing criticisms of evolutionary psychology and highlighting productive areas of study like emotional research.
↗ 1:24:16 – 1:27:51Brenda Bowser discusses ethical considerations in anthropological fieldwork, including community benefits, health promotion, and asking permission before entering a research site. She reflects on decades of research in Konambo starting in 1992, noting generational shifts such as increased literacy and Spanish fluency, while highlighting the importance of continuous learning and avoiding tropes about vanishing cultures.
↗ 2:12:38 – 2:20:09Cristina Moya shares her background as an undergraduate at Berkeley piecing together evolutionary social science courses before pursuing graduate studies at UCLA. She describes the vibrant intellectual environment created by faculty members studying human behavior and evolution, which shaped her identity as an evolutionary anthropologist.
↗ 20:33 – 24:06The speakers explore the geographic distribution of Quechua and Aymara speakers in rural communities, towns, and larger urban centers. They discuss how everyday interactions, intermarriage, and urban migration influence language use, and consider why cultural boundaries persist despite ongoing contact.
↗ 43:52 – 48:14Hosts Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof introduce the podcast and welcome guest Annie Wertz, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They discuss her academic background, including her time at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and explore the unique structure of independent research groups funded by the Max Planck Society.
↗ 0:00 – 10:17The hosts ask Annie Wertz about the origin story of her pioneering research on how infants learn about plants and the natural world. Wertz traces her background back to her early work in cognitive development during the early 2000s and reading infant cognition literature.
↗ 10:17 – 12:00Host Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and guest Annie Wertz discuss Wertz's graduate school entry into evolutionary psychology. Wertz explains how she started interested in folk biology and theory of mind—defined as understanding that other people have mental states like beliefs and desires—before meeting Lita Cosmides at UCSB, which led her to adopt an adaptationist approach to studying the mind.
↗ 12:01 – 18:39The speakers explore the difficulties and mental effort required to truly grasp adaptationist thinking and counterintuitive scientific concepts. Wertz shares her personal experience of understanding and then doubting evolutionary frameworks during graduate training, comparing it to teaching students complex topics like heritability and gene-environment interactions in developmental psychology.
↗ 18:40 – 24:03Guest Annie Wertz explains her background in studying infant core knowledge and violation-of-expectation methods in Santa Barbara. She describes how exposure to biological anthropology, human life history trajectories, and running through mountain landscapes inspired her to investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind gathering plant resources.
↗ 29:11 – 36:06Host Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and guest Annie Wertz discuss Wertz's transition from studying theory of mind in graduate school to investigating human infant cognition regarding plants during her postdoc with Karen Wynn. Wertz explains how frustration with faddish academic topics and an adaptationist approach inspired her to pursue novel research questions about how humans learn about plants.
↗ 36:06 – 45:06Annie Wertz explains the design features of human plant-processing systems, highlighting that omnivorous diets and toxic secondary compounds in plants make individual trial-and-error learning dangerous or fatal. Because many staple plant foods require complex processing and cooking, these conditions create strong evolutionary pressures for social learning mechanisms to acquire local survival knowledge from others.
↗ 56:36 – 1:00:10Guest Annie Wertz and the hosts discuss how human infants possess specialized psychological mechanisms for evaluating plants. Infants display a distinct reluctance to touch unfamiliar real and artificial plants compared to other objects, seeking social information from adults and demonstrating selective learning regarding plant edibility and fine-grained features.
↗ 1:00:10 – 1:08:49In this discussion with host Dave Pietraszewski, guest Annie Wertz explains why traditional Fodorian modularity is an inadequate framework for studying plant-foraging adaptations. Instead of assuming rigid boundaries, the speakers emphasize an adaptationist perspective focused on how the mind solves specific, overlapping adaptive problems related to stationary resources and learning.
↗ 1:12:11 – 1:18:29The speakers discuss how evolution and learning are not mutually exclusive, highlighting that evolved adaptations can specifically design learning systems. Annie Wertz then elaborates on the vast utility of plants in hunter-gatherer societies, extending far beyond food to encompass material culture, medicine, and chemical uses.
↗ 1:18:29 – 1:24:12Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and Annie Wertz discuss how humans process plants for food and material construction, comparing modern specialized labor with ancestral hunter-gatherer repertoires. The speakers explore artifact psychology, highlighting how interacting with natural materials like wood and animal parts reveals evolved behavioral motor repertoires that persist despite modern environments.
↗ 1:24:12 – 1:30:00Annie Wertz explains how infants and children learn about plant edibility through social cues and observation, noting that babies initially display neophobia toward unknown plants to avoid toxins. The speakers discuss the mismatch between ancestral foraging contexts—where children observe processing and multi-age peers—and modern feeding practices, which often trigger food rejections in young children.
↗ 1:30:00 – 1:36:12Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and guest Annie Wertz discuss infant responses to food processing, social inferences about food, and how emotions like disgust, fear, or a distinct cautionary state relate to plant interaction and avoidance.
↗ 1:36:12 – 1:42:38The speakers examine observational learning systems and the lack of explicit teaching in small-scale societies, proposing that media like cooking shows or building videos might satisfy a psychological need for physical interaction with plant environments in modern cultures.
↗ 1:42:38 – 1:48:14Annie Wertz, Dave Pietraszewski, and David Pinsof discuss food neophobia in children, exploring how categorization abilities and subtle visual details influence what toddlers perceive as food. They also share childhood anecdotes about encountering toxic plants like poison oak and discuss plant chemical defenses.
↗ 1:48:14 – 1:53:47The hosts and Annie Wertz reflect on the importance of merging developmental psychology with evolutionary approaches to understand human learning and infant cognition. They conclude by discussing Wertz's lab and wrapping up the podcast episode.
↗ 1:53:47 – 1:57:54Host Dave Pietraszewski asks Dan Williams about his background and what led him to study the evolutionary and strategic functions of belief. Williams shares how reading popular science authors in his youth shaped his worldview, and expresses his initial surprise upon entering academia and discovering that evolutionary approaches to psychology are often stigmatized in the humanities.
↗ 57:02 – 1:00:12The hosts and guest examine the consequences of child-rearing environments, contrasting age-segregated modern schooling with traditional societies where children learn autonomously in mixed-age groups. They discuss how peer interactions shape social regulation, behavior, and the transmission of practical versus abstract skills.
↗ 28:09 – 36:07Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and Coltan Scrivner discuss how emotion regulation helps calibrate cognitive and physiological responses, comparing it to software adjustment. They explore how narrative storytelling in horror and risky play allows individuals to learn emotional control and how evolutionary perspectives help explain emotional rationality.
↗ 1:36:16 – 1:43:26Guest Coltan Scrivner shares details about his website, Substack, and his new popular science book 'Morbidly Curious'. Hosts Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and Scrivner reflect on the value of books in inspiring researchers, the unique freedom of writing for general audiences, and the growth of sophisticated cognitive science in areas like horror and humor.
↗ 1:52:36 – 2:00:25The speakers discuss how cultural traits and technologies both rise and fall, contrasting multi-generational cultural shifts with rapid modern technological adoptions like smartphones and LLMs. Bret Beheim shares a historical artifact of early smartphone technology to illustrate how quickly revolutionary user interfaces became ubiquitous.
↗ 7:09 – 12:06The speakers examine how humans navigate uncertainty, resource scarcity, and cultural distance in cooperative exchanges. Bret Beheim and David Pinsof discuss whether altruism toward outgroups is constrained by the difficulty of estimating long-term payoffs, and how individuals acquire preferences and learn the rules of social and economic interactions through cultural exposure.
↗ 40:22 – 48:08Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and guest Bret Beheim discuss how cultural learning, economic games, and norm adherence interact with cost-benefit calculations. The speakers explore whether following social norms is driven purely by transmitted cultural rules or by rational individual cost-benefit analyses, touching upon evolved norm psychology and social coordination equilibria.
↗ 1:36:22 – 1:40:26Zach Garfield details his research on status hierarchies, punishment, conflict resolution, and social learning, explaining how leadership underpins these downstream behavioral phenomena. He and the hosts discuss the Omo Valley Research Project in southwest Ethiopia, highlighting how agro-pastoralist communities and ongoing socioeconomic transitions provide critical insights into human behavior and market integration.
↗ 19:19 – 24:06Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and guest Hugo Mercier discuss the evolutionary and cognitive nature of reasoning, distinguishing general inference from a specialized mechanism dedicated to finding and evaluating reasons through social feedback and structured learning.
↗ 48:09 – 56:12The hosts transition into examining concrete examples of human agency and decision-making, differentiating between actions that respond to incentives, like changing one's sleep schedule, and involuntary biological processes, such as healing a broken bone.
↗ 34:32 – 36:10The hosts and guest Luke Glowacki discuss his ongoing work with Zach Garfield on the Omo Valley Research Project, highlighting educational support, scholarships, and digital skills workshops provided to students in pastoralist communities in Ethiopia.
↗ 1:44:08 – 1:48:17Guest Michael Graziano talks with hosts Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsoff about balancing his professional career in neuroscience with his creative interests in music composition and writing children's books and novels, while also reflecting on scientific integrity and curiosity.
↗ 2:00:24 – 2:06:34The speakers transition to discussing hunting magic and pre-hunt songs among the Shuar community. Clark Barrett explores how these traditional practices can function as technologies of the self to induce focus and flow states. They also discuss how human technologies and rituals generally operate under a condition of incomplete individual knowledge.
↗ 43:44 – 48:06Host Dave Pietraszewski, guest Patrick Durkee, and host David Pinsof discuss whether predictive models or causal mechanisms drive status and learning. Using examples like ice cream sales predicting shark attacks and children learning to fish, they explore how organisms rely on predictive cues and confounds when true causal interventions are too costly or complex.
↗ 36:03 – 43:38The hosts and guest discuss the slow uptake of evolutionary perspectives in the social sciences, psychiatry, and general education within the United States compared to countries like the UK. They examine how cultural divides, educational gaps, and the occasional misuse of evolutionary concepts hinder mainstream scientific acceptance.
↗ 1:07:44 – 1:12:07Host Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and guest Amy Boddy discuss recommended books in evolutionary medicine, the historical separation between evolutionary medicine and psychology, intuitive psychology or "folk medicine," and how modern scientific and medical practices share similarities with ritualistic behaviors.
↗ 1:36:09 – 1:43:09The speakers discuss the opacity of the world, academic silos and departmental barriers in universities, and Amy Boddy shares how a transformative community college biology course and an inspiring professor led her into the field of evolutionary biology.
↗ 1:43:09 – 1:48:12Rob Boyd joins the conversation to discuss how he and Pete Richardson began studying cultural evolution in the mid-1970s. They explore the landscape of evolutionary theory at the time, including sociobiology, game theory, the influence of figures like Richard Alexander and E.O. Wilson, and how population genetics methods provided tools to model cultural transmission alongside biological selection.
↗ 4:16 – 12:01Rob Boyd and David Pinsof discuss whether the brain contains specialized modules, contrasting evolutionary psychological approaches with neurobiological perspectives and instinctive animal behaviors like beaver dam building and bird nest construction.
↗ 30:06 – 36:07The hosts and Rob Boyd examine the core theoretical disagreements regarding cultural evolution, contrasting the view that humans possess a psychology shaped to acquire cultural practices without full adaptive understanding against traditional adaptationist models.
↗ 39:20 – 48:11Host Dave Pietraszewski and guest Rob Boyd discuss the integration of theory and empirical work in the evolutionary sciences and psychology. Boyd reflects on how his views have evolved over the decades, expressing increased skepticism about cultural group selection and conformist transmission based on recent empirical findings and theoretical limitations.
↗ 2:00:25 – 2:08:36Leda Cosmides discusses historical critiques of radical behaviorism, focusing on Herrnstein's opposition to Skinner and the influential findings of John Garcia's taste aversion experiments with rats. The speakers examine how these studies challenged the equipotentiality assumption and the role of psychological similarity spaces.
↗ 24:05 – 31:04Leda Cosmides describes her undergraduate experiences attending professor office hours, conducting research on pigeons and mental rotation, and interacting with prominent psychologists like Stephen Kosslin. The conversation touches on how cognitive approaches were shifting away from strict behaviorist models.
↗ 31:07 – 36:09Leda Cosmides discusses the necessity of cognitive mechanisms and mental structure to overcome combinatorial explosion problems like Quine's gavagai indeterminacy. With input from Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof, they explore historical figures like Hume and Quine, examining how innate predispositions challenge strict blank-slate empiricism and behaviorist assumptions in psychology.
↗ 43:09 – 48:12The speakers discuss why distinguishing causation from mere correlation is a crucial fitness problem for organisms, rather than an abstract academic puzzle. Tadeg Quillien explains that relying solely on correlational predictive models is unstable when environmental interventions occur, such as installing a garden sprinkler that alters the statistical relationship between rain and wet grass.
↗ 11:02 – 12:03Tadeg Quillien explains how the human mind builds causal models composed of variables and asymmetric relationships, defined primarily through hypothetical interventions and manipulatory actions. The speakers discuss how people can easily reason about unexperienced scenarios, such as moving the moon or the sun disappearing, demonstrating that minds go far beyond simple associationism.
↗ 15:38 – 24:06The speakers examine how people conform to normative standards of Bayesian reasoning, discussing classic psychological experiments by Tversky and Kahneman on diagnostic tests. Tadeg Quillien explains that participants perform much closer to Bayesian optimality when they are provided with a clear causal model explaining false positives.
↗ 32:03 – 36:07Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and guest Tadeg Quillien discuss how causal reasoning operates through implicit models and learned cues, comparing automatic physical predictions with conscious simulations during chess games, and noting how explicit communication can influence counterfactual simulations.
↗ 1:36:20 – 1:41:49Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof brainstorm a novel textbook format inspired by choose-your-own-adventure books, comparing it to the trial-and-error progression of scientific thinking. They conclude the episode by jokingly connecting life choices to listener feedback and media consumption.
↗ 1:49:33 – 1:51:41Host Dave Pietraszewski and guests thank Ray Hames for his extensive contributions to evolutionary anthropology. They discuss the impact of his teaching and mentorship at the University of Nebraska, noting his commanding classroom presence and the inspiration he provided to a new generation of evolutionary scientists.
↗ 1:36:27 – 1:40:38The speakers discuss individual differences in how people relate to scientific principles and overarching theories, comparing the desire to understand underlying mechanisms to the appreciation of magic tricks and whether scientific explanations diminish or enhance wonder.
↗ 6:41 – 12:03Hosts Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof introduce guest Michelle Sugiyama, discussing her research into the evolutionary psychology of storytelling, oral cultures, cultural transmission, and the broader pedagogical functions of arts and leisure in hunter-gatherer societies.
↗ 0:00 – 4:16The hosts and Michelle Sugiyama explore how hunter-gatherer nomenclature, including animal, place, and moon names, encodes ecological knowledge and practical affordances efficiently to aid memory, transmission, and survival.
↗ 4:17 – 12:04Dave Pietraszewski, David Pinsof, and guest Michelle Sugiyama discuss theories of language, contrasting the traditional view of language as an explicit code with Tom Scott Phillips's perspective of language as a technology for social cooperation and coordination. Referencing a Blackfoot creation story shared by Sugiyama, they examine how language and communication emerge to help individuals understand their roles, coordinate tasks, and facilitate teaching within a group.
↗ 12:04 – 17:37The speakers discuss how counterfactual reasoning and fictional narratives serve as thought experiments and mental models for understanding causality and ecological challenges. They compare fictional thought experiments to scientific hypothesis testing and introduce questions about why story producers share these narratives.
↗ 29:36 – 36:10The speakers examine the function of songs in traditional stories, rituals, and child-rearing as mnemonic devices for ecological and zoological knowledge, and debate whether storytelling and song are distinct evolutionary adaptations or cultural inventions built upon existing cognitive capacities.
↗ 53:32 – 1:00:16