What is status? What is inspiration? What is personality? It all sounds simple and obvious, but in this episode with Patrick Durkee (CSU Fresno), we make "the familiar strange" and think through how an evolved mind may figure out how to invest our time and energy, what inspiration means, and what personality really is.

More about Patrick Durkee: https://www.pdurkee.com/

https://csm.fresnostate.edu/about/directory/psych/durkee-patrick.html

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uj4K4rQAAAAJ&hl=en

In this episode, we talk with Katrine Whiteson (UC Irvine) about her amazing work studying the human microbiome. We cannot stress enough how much we learned from this episode, from how to prevent your gut bacteria from becoming trashed by antibiotics, how to shop for food that will feed your healthy microbes and prevent blood sugar spikes. Other topics include: what's missing form our modern gut bacteria, the relationship between eating, cancer, and immune function, hunting for phages, and much more. A great example of using evolution to better understand our health.

More about Katrine Whiteson: https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6103 https://kwhiteson.bio.uci.edu/

In this episode, we talk to Clark Barrett (UCLA) about all the ways we understand the mind, and all the ways that that understanding may be weirder and wider that our intellectual inheritance would have it. Topics include: lies, hunting magic, predicting the future, spirituality, dreams, Freud, fish with two jaws, embodiment, art, physical intelligence, not discounting other views of the mind, Konrad Lorenz, and the music of the Shuar.

http://www.hclarkbarrett.com/

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vIovbyUAAAAJ&hl=en

https://www.geographyofphilosophy.com/

It stinks to be sick. Our guest, Josh Tybur (VU Amsterdam), is the one of the foremost experts on how our brain--or better yet, our "behavioral immune system"--helps us avoid pathogens while still navigating the necessities of social and physical life: eating, hugging, parenting, mating, and so on. Topics include whether pathogen avoidance actually drives attitudes towards social outgroups, how disgust, sex, and morality all interact (including David's pet theory of kinky sexual practices), and whether evolutionary mismatch is over-used and under-specified (or not). Oh, that whole world-wide pandemic thing.

More about Josh Tybur:

https://www.joshtybur.com/

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ash8oRMAAAAJ&hl=en

Intentions be damned! Whats matter is selection! In this episode, Paul Smaldino (UC Merced) takes us on a tour of his work on social signals, social identities, the perverse incentives of science, the stupidity and yet usefulness of models, and so much else. (Paul also shows us his small model of the solar system in the background).

More about Paul Smaldino:

https://smaldino.com/wp/

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=AwHfbP0AAAAJ&hl=en

https://smalldinosaurs.bandcamp.com/album/dad-songs

Consciousness: is it really that hard of a problem? In this episode, we talk to our favorite mechanistically-minded (and possibly clearest) thinker about consciousness we've had the pleasure to stumble across, Michael Graziano (Princeton). Topics include why consciousness has been so hard to study, what it is, and what future (evolutionary) work on consciousness would look like.

More about Michael Graziano: https://grazianolab.princeton.edu/

https://pni.princeton.edu/people/michael-graziano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Graziano

https://www.press53.com/michael-s-a-graziano

https://www.amazon.com/stores/B.-B.-Wurge/author/B001JS4X0U?

The evolution of war has occupied science. But what about the evolution of peace? In this episode, we talk to Luke Glowacki about his framing of peace as requiring just as much, if not more, explanation, than the evolution of war, and how it comes about via cultural technology interacting with our evolved psychology. Other topics include the distribution of conflict, the Omo valley research project, and how to think about our own species through the lens of other species--including mongeese (mongooses?)

More about Luke Glowacki:

https://www.hsb-lab.org/

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DaCQ-UIAAAAJ&hl=en

https://www.bu.edu/anthrop/profile/luke-glowacki/

Free will: Do we really have it? And what is it, exactly? In this episode, co-host David Pietraszewski takes the role of guest and explains his recent evolutionary, adaptationist approach to the problem of free will, explaining what people are talking about when they talk about free will, why different people have different opinions about whether it really exists in light of science, and what an evolutionary approach has to say about how to study it in the first place. If you love or hate the study of free will--or think it is a forever-unsolvable mystery-- then this episode is for you!

More about David Pietraszewski:

https://cal.psych.ucsb.edu/david-pietraszewski

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rGFYm8AAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao