Cognitations

We usually think of childhood as an extended preparatory period for adulthood, a time when kids just passively absorb the complex cultural knowledge, skills, and languages that we adults pass down to them. But what if we have the story completely backward? What if children aren’t just acquirers of culture, but active, independent producers of it?

Today’s guest, associate professor Sheina Lew-Levy, has spent an immense amount of time investigating human childhood cross-culturally. As a co-author of a recent paper titled “Children as agents of cultural adaptation”, she provides a fresh perspective that casts children as one of the central drivers that shape human culture. 

Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Editing: Jay Richardson
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Artwork: Ella Bergru

We all know the feeling. The urge to be respected, to be someone in the eyes of our peers. All of this arising from a human desire for social status. It is easy to think that this hunger for status is a modern obsession, a consequence and amplifier of inequities in various societies. If we buy into the idea that our ancestors in the deep past were egalitarian, we might think that they were not that interested in status-seeking. Is this really the case? If not, what are the different ways in which people seek status across diverse, seemingly egalitarian, societies? Counterintuitively, can these status pursuits actually lead to higher equality?Today’s guest, Chris von Rueden, Professor at the University of Richmond, has looked across several non-industrialised populations in the quest to answer these questions.Media Recommendations1. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm2. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin3. Parasite (Film)4. Dr. Strangelove (Film)

Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Editing: Tanay Katiyar
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Artwork: Ella Bergru

This episode is sponsored by The European Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA)

Religion is a puzzling phenomenon. On the one hand, it has been a major historical motor, shaping civilizations and guiding billions of lives. On the other hand, the core of religion centers around beings and realms that we simply cannot see, touch, or measure. One might then wonder, how can religious beliefs be both more important to us than ordinary beliefs, and more removed from what we can know to be the case? In his recent book, Religion as Make-Believe, Neil Van Leeuwen offers a provocative answer: religious beliefs have this puzzling aspect because they are, in reality, a kind of imagining, not so different from that which guides child’s play. Media Recommendations1. Movie: Conclave

Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Editing: Tanay Katiyar
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Artwork: Ella Bergru

This episode is sponsored by The European Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA)

There is a specific anxiety that grips almost all of us in the age of generative AI. Whether you are an artist, a coder, or a writer, you are asking yourself: As these AI agents get smarter, are we entering a Golden Age of hyper-creativity? Or are we entering an age of homogenized culture where we all just recycle the same AI-generated ideas?Today’s guest, Bret Beheim, suggests that a surprising place to find a potential answer to this lies in a board game, Go. By analyzing over 100,000 Go Games, Bret has tried to illustrate how human innovation is affected by changes in our surrounding technologies. Media Recommendations:1. Manga series: Hikaru no GoCredits:Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay RichardsonEditing: Jay RichardsonCommunication: Tanay KatiyarMusic: Thelma Samuel and Robin BaradelArtwork: Ella Bergru

Our appearance is very important to us. This is evident when we look at advertisements, online trends such as what the youth call “looksmaxxing”, or simply reflect on the amount of time we spend looking at a mirror in the morning. For decades, theories in evolutionary psychology state that humans are attracted to specific physical features: think of symmetrical faces. The story goes, that humans everywhere should share these appearance/attractiveness preferences as they are signals of health and fertility? Is this really the case? Are these universal preferences? Our guest today, Lynda Boothroyd, has long questioned the universality of these preferences by studying them in communities in Nicaragua.Lynda Boothroyd is a Professor of Psychology at Durham University. Her research focuses on Evolutionary and Cross-Cultural understandings of interpersonal attraction and sexual selection. She has recently focused on body ideals in rural Nicaragua alongside experimental work both in the laboratory and in the field on the impacts of visual experience on body size preferences. She has a multidisciplinary approach to her research, incorporating perspectives from Evolutionary Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Social Psychology and Biological Anthropology, and has incorporated a mixed-methods component in her current work.

Media Recommendations:1. Heartstopper (TV Show)Credits:Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay RichardsonEditing: Jay RichardsonCommunication: Tanay KatiyarMusic: Thelma Samuel and Robin BaradelArtwork: Ella Bergru