"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.
HEB graduate student Heather Shattuck-Heidorn was one of nine recipients of the Harvard Global Health Institute Planning and Research Fellowship, awarded in July 2014. The Fellowship provides $25,000 in funding for Harvard graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and Harvard-affiliated clinical trainees from across the University to support innovative research in global health.
Heather's research focuses on understanding how the early life pathogen and nutritional...
HEB graduate student Eric Castillo's article titled, "Effects of Pole Compliance and Step Frequency on the Biomechanics and Economy of Pole Carrying During Human Walking" was published in the July 2014 issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology. The article explores why humans around the world use carrying poles to transport heavy loads. Experiments suggest that people can save metabolic energy by tuning their gait cadence to the natural vibration frequency of the weighted pole.
