Events

Life history theory represents one of the most important conceptual frameworks in evolutionary biology, and its role is potentially even more prominent in the evolutionary social sciences. This theory attempts to explain the differences between and within species in fertility, longevity and parental investment via the characteristics of the individuals (somatic, physiological, and behavioral) and characteristics of the environment in which they live. In this talk, we will discuss about the basic phenomena and processes that lead to the emergence of life histories: fitness optimization, evolutionary tradeoffs and environmental factors that affect adaptiveness of behavior. We will discuss evolution of life history trajectories via various developmental events like growth rates, puberty timing (e.g. age at first menarche), mating patterns (short-term and long-term romantic bonding), age of first and last reproduction, number of offspring, parental investment and ultimately longevity. We will describe the so-called "fast-slow" continuum that should explain covariations between life history indicators in the context of local ecological variation. The most prominent conceptual extension of life history, the pace-of-life syndrome (POLS) which explains coevolution of behavior, physiology, and life history traits will be presented as well. We will discuss the empirical findings including those that are consistent but also in opposition to the theory, describing the most important criticisms of life history theory in general: measuring life history in evolutionary psychology, problematic validity of continuum, and transferring hypotheses from inter-populational to inter-individual level. The aim of the talk is to show how life history theory, but also human behavioral ecology in general, can help us in gaining more comprehensive and in-depth insight into human, behavior, formulate new hypotheses about adaptive outcomes of behavior and reflect about potential future behavioral evolution. Furthermore, this exciting and intriguing area of research is based on a multidisciplinary approach and thus helps psychologists to connect with colleagues who conduct research in evolutionary biology, anthropology, demography and sociology: in this way we can obtain more complete, and therefore more valid explanations of intra - and inter-population variations in behavior.

Giovanni Parmigiani is an Italian statistician with degrees from Bocconi University (B.S.) and Carnegie Mellon University (M.S., Ph.D.). He is Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and in the Department of Data Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His work focuses on statistical methods in cancer genomics, contributing to a deeper understanding of inherited cancer risks and supporting informed decisionmaking

Various animal species can engage in socio-communicative interactions with humans, yet the factors that promote such behaviours remain under debate. Domestication, socialization, and species-specific predispositions may all play a role. To better understand how human–animal communication is shaped, it is essential to compare different species kept in similar conditions However, adopting a comparative approach when studying non-human animals, presents several challenges. Researchers must account not only for species-specific sensory and motor differences, but also for animals’ domestication history, motivational tendencies, and ecological background. Designing tasks that are truly comparable across species is particularly complex, raising questions such as whether experimental procedures should be standardized or not. In this seminar, I will address these issues and open a space for debate around the topic, by presenting a series of studies directly comparing the humanoriented communicative abilities of two domestic species—companion dogs and companion pigs— where our aim was to explore the factors that may shape emergence of such abilities

How do people decide whether a sentence “sounds right” in their native language by judging its syntactic well-formedness independently of meaning? Sentence acceptability judgments reflect not only the speaker's grammatical knowledge but also performance factors including information packaging and processing ease. In this talk, I review what we know about the interaction of these factors, including striking cases of “grammatical illusions” and situations where speakers hesitate or cannot reach a clear judgment when these factors conflict. I then present recent experimental evidence showing that speakers use rating scales strategically whereby scale extremes serve as categorical anchors while the midpoint marks maximal uncertainty. These findings highlight sentence evaluation as a dynamic calibration process and shed new light on how people make linguistic decisions under uncertainty