The Human Biology Association (HBA) is pleased to announce that Dr. Peter Ellison, John Cowles Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, has been awarded the 2019 Franz Boas Lifetime Achievement Award. The Award was established in 1996, and honors members of the Human Biology Association for exemplary contributions to human biology in science, scholarship, and professional service.
"From man’s first encounter with fire to increases in global temperature, heat has played a sizeable role in human development. FM sat down with Richard W. Wrangham and Daniel E. Lieberman ’86—Professors of Biological Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology, respectively—to get an evolutionary perspective on everything from cooking to metabolism to physical activity to the fate of the human species." The full interview is available... Read more about Harvard Crimson: It Takes Two: Richard W. Wrangham and Daniel E. Lieberman
In a recent Nature Human Behavior paper, Professor Joe Henrich, along with colleagues Michael Muthukrishna (Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics), Patrick Francois, and Shayan Pourahmadi, incorporated the possibility of bribery into an institutional punishment public goods game in order to experimentally model corruption in the lab (Muthukrishna et al., 2017). The researchers examined the effects of anti-corruption strategies, cultural background, and structural factors (such as the...
Professor Henrich and his colleagues in the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) recently produced a special issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior (in press) on the evolution of religion and morality. The issue contains a synthetic article detailing CERC's large, cross-cultural study on the prosocial effects of belief in moralizing, punishing gods, as well as seven additional papers focused on each individual field site (Purzycki et al., 2017). The... Read more about Special Issue of 'Religion, Brain & Behavior'
The results of a significant study, which was conducted in part by Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology Richard Wrangham, was recently published in a September 18, 2014 issue of Nature. The study collected data from a number of chimpanzee research sites and showed that there is no correlation between violent behavior and human impact in those sites. Authors of the study went on to conclude that violent and lethal behavior in chimpanzees is a natural part of their behavior.
