Cultural Evolution Society 2016 Voter's Manual

Cultural Evolution Society
2016 Voter’s Manual
Prepared by:
Joe Brewer
Culture Designer
Evolution Institute
July 8th, 2016

Table of Contents
Section Heading Page Range
How to Use This Voter Manual 3
Full Disclosure of Election Procedures 4-5
How We Ran the Nomination Process 4
A Note About Lack of Female Presidential Candidates 5
Evolving the Future of CES Elections 5
Get to Know Your Candidates 6-29
Presidential Candidates 7-8
Candidates for Secretary Position 9-10
Candidates for Treasurer Position 11-12
Position 1 — Male from Asian Region 13-14
Position 2 — Female/Male from India Region 15-16
Position 3 — Female from Africa and South America 17
Position 4 — Female from Open Regions 18
Position 5 — Male from Open Regions 19-20
Position 6 — Female from Open Regions 21
Position 7 — Male from Open Regions 22-23
Position 8 — Female from Open Regions 24-25
Male Student Representative 26-27
Female Student Representative 28-29
 
Cultural Evolution Society - 2016 Voter’s Manual "2

How to Use This Voter Manual
The inaugural election will be held online starting on Monday, July 11th and ending six weeks
later on August 22nd. During this time, CES members will have the opportunity to fill out a ballot
to select their preferred candidates for the 13 positions on the Executive Committee.
You can use this manual to do the following:
1. Learn about the selection process for nominating and recruiting candidates for this election.
2. Read personal statements from each of the candidates to make informed decisions about
which candidate you prefer for each officer position.
The section below, titled Full Disclosure of Election Procedures, explains the steps we took to
ensure a fair election while striving to meet an ambitious set of diversity criteria. It is written in the
spirit of radical transparency and inclusion to get this society started with the openness and
integrity that will be essential to our long-term success as a multidisciplinary scientific (and
practitioner) community.
This is followed by another section, called Get to Know Your Candidates, that provides brief bios
and personal statements from the 23 candidates running for office in this election. Use these
materials to become familiar with the excellent lineup of people who have expressed the passion
and commitment to run for one of the officer positions: president, secretary, treasurer, member-at-
large, or student representative.
—————
This manual was prepared by the CES Elections Committee to assist with inaugural elections. We
hope you find it helpful as you vote for the first Executive Council of the Cultural Evolution Society.
CES Elections Committee
Joe Brewer
Marc Feldman
Cristine Legare
Sarah Mathew
Richard McElreath
Peter Turchin (chair)

Full Disclosure of Election Procedures
As we go through the process of birthing the Cultural Evolution Society, we are taking special care
to be as open and transparent as possible about what we are doing to establish strong
foundations for ethical practice and cooperative social norms. Think of it as applying the insights
from our field to the society formation process to create a “cultural genome” that gives us better
chances of success in the long run.
Here is the way we described it in the diversity mandate created to guide the election process:1
We are applying the findings of cultural evolution to the society itself—by
recognizing the need to structure the inaugural leadership around policies and
people who embody the founder effect for the future of science. This is our
challenge in the nomination and election process. And it will become a
mandate for deep diversity (across all four diversity categories) in the formal
bylaws and organizational practices of the society beyond the first election.
The four diversity categories are gender representation, stage of career, regional and cultural
representation, and knowledge diversity. Our objective with this election is to create an Executive
Committee with an equal number of women and men, that brings together researchers from many
different fields relevant to cultural evolution, and that plants seeds for becoming truly global in
membership as we become established geographically in the first few years of our existence.
How We Ran the Nomination Process 
An initial call was put out to the membership asking for nominations—based on officer descriptions
written into the CES Election Manual. We received a large number of names (108 in total) as many2
of you shared who you felt would be a qualified leader in this crucial start-up phase.
It quickly became clear that we would have difficulty ranking and filtering this collection of names.
So we initiated a three step process:
1. Arrange the nominees in a spreadsheet using the four diversity categories above.
2. Begin with officer positions for president, secretary, treasurer, and student representative
to recruit candidates that had received multiple nominations or ranked highly according to
diversity criteria.
http://www.slideshare.net/joebrewer31/a-mandate-for-deep-diversity-in-the-cultural-evolution-society1
http://www.slideshare.net/joebrewer31/cultural-evolution-society-election-manual2

3. After filling these positions on the ballot, re-organize the remaining nominees and filter
them into the eight member-at-large positions based on the goal to have at least one
representative from Africa, Asia, South America, and India.
This took longer than we originally anticipated. But we are very pleased with the results!
A Note About Lack of Female Presidential Candidates 
We are very familiar with the difficulties surrounding gender equality in the professional world. It
became apparent early in the election process that effort was needed to recruit founding members
from all genders—when we observed that a mere 22% of those who had filled out member profiles
were women. The intervention we took was to actively solicit more women to join the society,
increasing the proportion to 37% in a matter of days.
When it came time to construct the ballot, we chose the selection of an equal number of female
candidates by creating male/female member-at-large positions and including qualified women for
each of the officer positions that were gender inclusive. The only failure in this attempt was with the
office of president.
There was such strong support for selecting Peter J. Richerson to run for president that he stood
out immediately as a candidate to run for this position. Our elections committee then chose to
recruit female-only candidates to run against him—with the policy already set out that both
candidates in this special election will become president (with the winner taking office now while
the runner-up becomes president elect for the sake of continuity in leadership). We sought out
several female candidates, all of whom are highly qualified and would be phenomenal leaders in
this key position.
Unfortunately, for many structural and historical reasons, each of these women was in high
demand already and fully committed elsewhere, making them unable to run for office in our society.
We discussed this situation at length and came to the decision that we would recruit a second
candidate with a strong track record on gender equality in science. It was a great pleasure to
secure the candidacy of Dan Sperber for this position. He is recognized globally as a major
intellectual contributor to cultural evolutionary studies and has a strong track record of advocacy
for inclusivity and fairness when it comes to gender equality.
Evolving the Future of CES Elections 
We are delighted by the quality and diversity of strengths embodied by the 23 people running for
office in this inaugural election. Hopefully it is clear that we are taking great care to set off with
momentum while laying solid foundations for the future. Our heartfelt attempts to achieve diversity
have resulted in a great lineup of candidates. Now you can help make this election a success by
participating—be sure to vote! And let us know if you would like to speak with us directly about any
of the proceedings that have occurred thus far in the electoral process.

Get to Know Your Candidates

The remainder of this pamphlet includes biographical sketches for all the candidates and a
statement about their vision for the Cultural Evolution Society. There are 23 candidates in total
running for the following positions:
✦ President :: Chair of Executive Committee
✦ Secretary :: Manages meetings and reports outcomes to society members
✦ Treasurer :: Manages ﬁnancial aspects of the organizations
✦ Member-at-Large :: Ambassadors who represent key diversity objectives for society
✦ Student Representative :: Ambassadors for students and early career members
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Peter J. Richerson
Presidential Candidate
How my research relates to cultural evolution: My research focuses on the processes of
cultural evolution. My 1985 book with Robert Boyd, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, applied
the mathematical tools used by organic evolutionists to study a number of basic problems in
human cultural evolution. My other books with Boyd include Not By Genes Alone: How Culture
Transformed Human Evolution, an introduction to cultural evolution aimed at a broad audience and
The Origins and Evolution of Cultures, a compendium of our more important papers and book
chapters. My recent publications used theoretical models to try to understand some of the main
events in human evolution, such as the evolution of our advanced capacity for imitation (and hence
cumulative cultural evolution) in humans, the origins of tribal and larger scale cooperation, the
origins of agriculture, and the evolution of modernity in the last few centuries. My colleagues and I
also investigate cultural evolution in laboratory microsocieties. More at www.des.ucdavis.edu/
faculty/richerson/richerson.htm.
My vision for the Cultural Evolution Society: Cultural evolution should play a central role in the
human sciences and a non-trivial supporting role in the non-human behavioral sciences. I view the
sciences of evolution as a set of conceptual, mathematical and empirical tools for solving problems
where change through time is an important dimension. The primary mission of the Society should
be to promote knowledge of these tools as widely as possible. One part of this mission is to
support the scholarship of those of us for whom cultural evolution is a central preoccupation.
Another part is to maintain an open relationship with cognate disciplines whose tools we borrow
and whose projects a knowledge of cultural evolution might assist. Examples include history,
archaeology, paleoanthropology, developmental psychology, behavior analysis, evolutionary and
comparative biology, and all of the standard social sciences. I hope and expect that most of our
members will be contributing to these cognate disciplines as well as to cultural evolution narrowly
construed. Some of our members will be practitioners and applied scientists. By means of our
meetings, publications, and other activities we should endeavor to support the work of all our
members. Beyond the traditional role of a scientiﬁc society, the CES should take an active role in
educating other scientists and the public about cultural evolution, for example by making available
online resources to support teaching activities at every level of the curriculum. The Society should
take active steps to promote diversity in its membership and activities. All genders, races, and
cultures should feel at home among us. Vast human diversity is what cultural evolution has
produced and we ought to be happy to embrace it in the activities of the Society! 

Dan Sperber
Presidential Candidate
I have been approached by the Election Committee of the Cultural Evolution Society to be one of
the two nominees for President of the Society. This is a great honor and I gratefully accepted,
comforted in this acceptance by the knowledge that the other nominee is Pete Richerson whose
work I greatly admire. Pete is, I believe, uniquely well-qualified to be our first president. When my
turn comes, I will bring to the job the perspective of a European scholar coming to the study of
cultural evolution from the social and the cognitive sciences.
A word about me: I started my scholarly career as a social anthropologist and did fieldwork in
Ethiopia. Dissatisfied with the state of anthropological theory and favoring a naturalistic
perspective, I turned to theoretical work, with, in particular, three books: Rethinking
Symbolism (1975) On Anthropological Knowledge (1985), and Explaining Culture (1996). I argued
for an “epidemiological” approach to culture paying attention to the many cognitive mechanisms
that play a role in cultural evolution and developed the idea of “cultural attraction.” My interest in
cognitive mechanisms has led me to work in linguistics (resulting in two books, coauthored
with Deirdre Wilson: Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986 and Relevance and
Meaning in 2012) and in cognitive science. My interest in cognitive mechanisms and their role in
culture has been much stimulated by the development of evolutionary psychology, a field to which I
contribute. I am currently emeritus research professor at the French Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, and professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science
and of Philosophy of the Central European University in Budapest.
I joined our society as soon as its foundation was announced, convinced that not just scholars
studying cultural evolution but also scholars in neighbouring fields – biology, ecology, cognitive
sciences, and social sciences – stood to gain from such a joining of forces. I am in full agreement
with the goals of the Society and in particular with the goal of structural inclusivity: gender, stage of
career, regional and cultural representation, and knowledge diversity for synthesis. I will be active in
promoting all these goals. I feel that, given my background, I might be particularly competent in
promoting the pluridisciplinarity of the Society and in working to convince social and cognitive
scientists, who, too often, are reticent, that they can both make crucial contributions and greatly
benefit in their own work by collaborating to the development of a naturalistic approach to the
study of cultural evolution. I am also interested in our taking full advantage of the Web to build a
scientific society innovative in the way it secures communication among its members and with the
wider scientific community.

Fiona Jordan
Candidate for Secretary Position
I am a cultural evolutionary anthropologist and my main domains of interest are in the cultural
evolution of kinship, social organisation, and language. I'm a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the
University of Bristol, an Affiliate Researcher at the MPI for the Science of Human History, and
previously worked at the MPI Psycholinguistics and University College London. Like most
anthropologists, I want to understand cultural diversity. There are two parts to that inquiry: Why do
humans–a single species–have so much variation in behaviour and culture? But: Why don’t human
societies vary more? These are fundamentally questions about cultural evolution and the
transmission of ideas, and my research seeks to approach these questions by combining
methods, data, and theory from biology, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. My core
subfield is cultural phylogenetics: understanding cultural diversity using the same statistical tools
that biologists use to investigate evolutionary and diversity processes in other species. This has
been a fruitful and rigorous approach to understanding the cultural evolutionary processes that
create human diversity in language and social norms. I am particularly interested in kinship and
language, and my primary region of interest is the Austronesian-speaking world.
I think interdisciplinarity is critical to understanding human cultural diversity, and so I like to use my
ability to translate between fields to bring people and ideas together, and to puzzle away at cultural
diversity using a wide variety of tools. The "dark side" of interdisciplinarity is intellectual
homelessness, but the Cultural Evolution Society can change that for those of us in all fields of the
human social sciences. I have been struck by the unrivaled vibrancy and richness of conversations
at one-off meetings and workshops that bring together the cultural evolution community. The
founders of the CES recognised that there is critical mass, that we are well represented at many
key conferences, on editorial boards, and departmental hallways, and it's timely that we have a
home of our own. My excitement for the society is that the CES will allow a step-change in our
research trajectories, particularly in the development of theory and the broadening of the empirical
research base. CES meetings, publications, and initiatives will free up that critical portion of the
conversation where we must justify evolutionary approaches to culture, allowing us to delve deeper
into the conceptual and practical challenges we face, and push forward research into new domains
of enquiry and outwards to engage with communities beyond academia. I am particularly
convinced that a Cultural Evolution journal is critical as a venue for rapid and open-access
dissemination of our expanding field and would look to work together with the President and other
Officers towards that goal.

Peter Neal Peregrine
Candidate for Secretary Position
I am an archaeologist who specializes in the evolution of social complexity, with a particular focus
on the evolution of states. My work is comparative, and I have spent much of my career
developing data sets and methods for doing diachronic analysis of archaeological data. My Atlas
of Cultural Evolution (2001) and related 9-volume Encyclopedia of Prehistory (2001-2002) were the
foundation for the eHRAF Collection of Archaeology, which has become a seminal data source for
the study of cultural evolution though the archaeological record. I have published widely on cultural
evolution and continue research as a contributor to the Seshat project and the Santa Fe Institute’s
ongoing work on the evolution of complexity.
Despite my efforts and those of many hard-working colleagues, cultural evolution remains a
peripheral subject within archaeology, and one that is anathema among most anthropologists. The
Cultural Evolution Society will provide a base for promoting the study of cultural evolution. It will
bring together scholars from disparate disciplines to conduct research demonstrating the potential
and importance of understanding cultural evolution. It will offer opportunities for publishing and
grant-seeking that are difﬁcult for many engaged in the study of cultural evolution. And it will
encourage academic and funding organizations to support the types of interdisciplinary research
that are necessary to address the problems of cultural evolution. The Cultural Evolution Society
represents the our best opportunity to unify and advance the study of cultural evolution.

Tanya Broesch
Candidate for Treasurer Position
My research and the field of Cultural Evolution:
My research spans the fields of psychology, anthropology and philosophy. I take an interdisciplinary
and multi-method approach to understanding the ontogeny of social learning across diverse
societies. My research is driven by the quest to understand how children learn from others and
how this changes in development. I examine infant social learning, early childhood learning, as well
as adult knowledge transmission. Specifically, I look at how variation in early social experience may
alter developmental pathways and learning strategies. I take a micro-analytic approach, examining
decision-making and non-verbal behavior in real time through video recorded observations. I rely
heavily on video recordings of experiments, structured observations as well as natural
observations, to closely examine behavior. Ultimately, I look for converging evidence across diverse
societies to shed light on questions of human development and cultural transmission.
My vision for the Cultural Evolution Society:
If elected, I will integrate existing evidence in the field of developmental psychology with current
theories of cultural evolution to provide a unified framework for understanding human cultural
learning. Developmental psychology has made great strides in understanding social learning over
the first few years of life. My goal is to examine existing evidence conducted in Western, urban
societies to determine whether they are generalizable across diverse human cultural groups and
whether current evidence supports knowledge and predictions from cultural evolution. I will bring a
cross-cultural, developmental perspective to the society.

Alex Mesoudi
Candidate for Treasurer Position
How my research relates to the field of cultural evolution:
My 2011 book, Cultural Evolution, provides an overview of the field of cultural evolution, from
models to experiments, ethnographic field studies to cultural phylogenetics and historical
dynamics. This builds on a 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article which argued that
evolutionary theory provides a synthetic framework for integrating the social sciences, much as
evolutionary theory synthesised the biological sciences in the mid-20th century. My empirical work
has involved lab experiments probing the behavioural processes (e.g. social learning biases) that
people employ in various situations, and which constitute cultural micro-evolution. Much of this
work is in collaboration with archaeologists and anthropologists, with the aim of linking these
microevolutionary processes to macro-evolutionary patterns of cultural change. I have also
constructed models of cultural evolution, most recently looking at the factors that facilitate and
constrain cumulative cultural evolution. More details can be found on my website: https://
sites.google.com/site/amesoudi2/
My vision for the society:
I foresee a truly interdisciplinary and inclusive society that permits and encourages collaboration
between scholars and practitioners from diverse traditional disciplines studying diverse topics.
Cultural evolution is important because of its interdisciplinarity, but this is also why it is so hard.
Cultural evolution researchers come from a range of traditional disciplines, including anthropology,
archaeology, psychology, biology, economics, linguistics, history and sociology. Each have their
own long-established conferences, journals and societies. Having held positions in psychology,
anthropology, archaeology and biology departments, I know the challenges of working across
more than one discipline. I envision a society that adds genuine value to existing disciplines and
provides a space for like-minded experts and novices with different backgrounds to exchange
ideas, methods and data. I am delighted to see the CES already striving to maximise the diversity
of its membership, as well as plan to tackle major real-world challenges such as inequality. I would
also like to push for the formation of a fully open access society journal, and provide resources for
encouraging rigorous, replicable science. I have previously been Treasurer and Steering Committee
member of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA), so I have
experience running finances for large scientific societies.

Kenichi Aoki
Member-at-Large Position 1 — Male from Asian Region
Current affiliation 1: Emeritus professor, University of Tokyo 
Current affiliation 2: Visiting research associate, Meiji University 
Email: kenaoki@meiji.ac.jp 
Home address: Higashi-Itchoda 7-5, Mishima 411-0026, Japan
How my research relates to the field of cultural evolution. My background is in biological
anthropology (B.S. and M.S, University of Tokyo) with methodological input from theoretical
population genetics (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison). The focus of my research has been
on theoretical (mathematical) models of gene-culture coevolution and of cultural evolution per se.
Recently, I have been working with archaeologists trying to understand cultural evolution during the
Paleolithic, in particular how cultural differences between archaic and modern humans might have
contributed to the replacement of the former by the latter (“RNMH” project supported by a grant
from the Japan Ministry of Education, 2010-2014). Three recent publications relevant to these
efforts are:
(1) Aoki K (2015) Modeling abrupt cultural regime shifts during the Palaeolithic and Stone Age.
Theor Popul Biol 100, 6-12.
(2) Gilpin W, Feldman MW, and Aoki K (2016) An ecocultural model predicts Neanderthal extinction
through competition with modern humans. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 113, 2134-2139.
(3) Mesoudi A, Aoki K, eds. (2015) Learning Strategies and Cultural Evolution during the
Palaeolithic, Springer, Tokyo (ISBN 978-4-431-55362-5)
Vision for the society. Unfortunately, I cannot see far into the future, and my vision is limited to
two short-term goals. The first, intra-disciplinary, one is to engender more crosstalk among
researchers working on theoretical models of cultural evolution. In particular, I am interested in
comparing insights obtained from the theoretical (and empirical) study of cultural evolution in
historical and prehistorical times. This goal might be achieved by organizing international
workshops. The second, inter-disciplinary, one is to promote collaboration between cultural
evolutionists on the one hand and field archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers on the
other. Toward achieving this latter goal, we have applied for a major grant to the Japan Ministry of
Education, which if approved will become effective in early July 2016.

Masanori Takezawa
Member-at-Large Position 1 — Male from Asian Region
How my research relates to the field of Cultural Evolution:
Since when I investigated the evolutionary foundations of the communal sharing norm in my
dissertation, I have been working on the problem of the evolution of cooperation using both
evolutionary game theoretical models and laboratory experiments. As I was originally trained as an
experimental social psychologist and didn't receive any formal education of mathematical models, I
spent a hard time for acquiring the skill of evolutionary game theory that is necessary for doing a
research on the evolution of cooperation. I was lucky because my office mate at Max Planck
Institute in Berlin was Richard McElreath, who was writing the textbook on the evolutionary game
theory for math novices at that time. From my own experiences, I know how tough it is for non-
technical person to get used to the math models and what I want to pursue in the Society if
elected is strongly motivated by this experience. In the last several years, I started three projects
with my students related to the field of Cultural Evolution; experimental studies on gene-culture
coevolutionary models of institutions and social norms, laboratory experiments of cumulative
cultural evolution of scientific knowledge and technology, and theoretical models on the role of
transmission fidelity in cumulative cultural evolution (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/
Masanori_Takezawa, http://researchmap.jp/read0150910/).
My vision for the Society that I will pursue if elected:
The field of cultural evolution has greatly expanded in the last decade and succeeded in attracting
researchers from various fields. I believe the main reason for the success lies in the integration of
rich empirical data and solid theoretical models. As everybody knows, modern research in cultural
evolution is founded on the seminal theoretical works in 1970~80's developed by Cavalli-Sforza,
Feldman, Aoki, Boyd and Richerson. Since then, mathematical models have provided the basis for
empirical research and helped researchers from different disciplines communicate each other by
providing a common language. However, math is difficult. Many empirical researchers have
difficulty in understanding formal models of cultural evolution. Special care is necessary for
spreading the common language in the society and achieve the scientific integrity. If elected, I
would like to exert an effort so that the society provides opportunities for non-technical members
to acquire the basic understanding of the modelling techniques. Even if some members don't
explicitly use the math models in their research, such knowledge definitely helps empirical and
theoretical researchers understand and communicate each other, and make the CES a cohesive
scientific society. 

Sumitava Mukherjee
Member-at-Large Position 2 — Female/Male from India Region
My interests are in human preference, judgment and decision making. For many of the actions
taken in society and thinking that permeates different groups of people, the crux lies in how we
think and decide about a course of action of a social scenario/problem. In that light, judgments and
decisions are intermingled in almost all facets of cultural mixes. Another important aspect I am
personally interested in is how do people form preferences and modify or manipulate those based
on current goals, context, people, needs, constraints and complexities. Much of cultural evolution
is bound to influence preferences people might have (both individually and as a group) which
affects judgments and decisions. It is also important to note that it is a bidirectional relations where
judgments and decisions influence preferences too. Understanding the products of cultural
evolution would hence be tied to understanding, measuring and possibly intervening on people's
preferences, judgments and decisions, that blends my interests with the broader aim of the society.
According to me, the vision and work ahead for the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) should be
handled with three perspectives/goals. The first would be to work as a broadcasting medium by
identifying a roadmap with actionable agendas that include writing on cultural evolution and
reaching it through different media to many more people. At the same time, plan for memberships
among those who are interested. If it is not possible to open up membership, then the reach can
be expanded by hosting talks by the founders in different locales spearheaded by the regional
ambassadors/representatives. The second goal would be to identify a set of research directions
that can be picked up from the regional social problems. Regional ambassadors can cooperate
with others on the society board or with researchers from other disciplines locally (for example a
cognitive psychologist can collaborate with an urban planner or a humanities scholar) to think
about city/social development problems. If research is initially tough to roll out, then one can start
with writing more extensively on these social problems and try findings links with socio-cultural
evolution. The Evolution Institute is already doing it and this would mean more collaborative articles
to increase the breadth of reach. The third goal would be advocacy. This would imply taking some
constructive steps to reach the thinking to those who are stakeholders (like citizens) and those who
are in power (like politicians or civic administration). It might be possible to send brief 2-4 page
brochures that can also be disbursed online. After some time, it shall be ideal to host small regional
meetings/seminars that link the researchers, administration and common public and that is when
such initiatives can truly reach out to people.

Shruti Tewari
Member-at-Large Position 2 — Female/Male from India Region
I am a behavioural scientist, D. Phil in Psychology from University of Allahabad, India. My doctoral
research investigates coping with physical disability using the multivariate transactional model of
stress. After a year of teaching, I took up a post-doctoral fellowship (as Research Director) in an
Indo-British Collaborative Project on ‘Impact of collective participation and social identification at
Magh Mela’ at the Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Allahabad in
collaboration with University of Dundee and University of St. Andrews, UK funded by Economic &
Social Research Council (ESRC), UK. We gave empirical support to the notion why and how
crowds are good for us. Shared identity, relatedness and collective self-realisation found to be key
factors lead to positive experience and enhanced social identity. Along with significant theoretical
contributions, the project also attracted public attention including BBC, National Geography
Magazine, Science and other international digital media. Currently, I am working as assistant
professor at Indian Institute of Management, Indore. My research employs mixed-methods,
combining qualitative methodologies with surveys and experiments. I have been teaching courses
on culture & cognition and social cognition for the last four years. Broadly speaking, my research
interests are diverse and inclined to explore the socio-cognitive explanation of individual and group
behaviour in reference to cultural transmission. To date my research has two main areas of focus :
A) To understand the attentional mechanisms underline intergroup behavior; in group favoritism and
out group hatred with a particular focus on process of radicalization and religion, and B) to
understand cognitive mechanisms determining coping with stress.
Coming to my vision on what I will like to achieve with the Cultural Evolution Society, I truly
appreciate the notion that the society aims to connect evolutionary science with public policy
formulation. From the days of my doctoral research, I have observed closely the failure of policy
implementation due to lack of open dialogue across scientists and other stakeholders in the
disability policy sector. In one of my recent chapters (in an edited book on Psychology and Social
Policies in India published by Springer), I have highlighted an urgent need to practice scientific
knowledge in disability policy making and implementation in India. It requires two fold initiatives.
The research should address social and policy relevant issues and these insights should be taken
forward by the public stakeholders. I am trying to unfold the cultural-cognitive explanation
underlying radicalization and extremist behaviour as well, which is one of the serious social issues
we have to address. I believe, by focusing on role of cognitive mechanisms in cultural evolution, we
can provide valid explanations for many of such unresolved social issues. I hope this society will
work effectively to facilitate socially relevant research and to spread the evolutionary wisdom to the
non-academic world. Through my empirical research and active role in connecting it to public
policy formulation, I would like to effectively frontward this vision of the society.

Purity Kiura
Member-at-Large Position 3 — Female from Africa Region
Dr. Purity Kiura is the Director of Museums, Sites and Monuments and a Senior Research Scientist
at the National Museums of Kenya. She is a trained geologist and archaeologist having undertaken
her undergraduate studies in Geology at the University of Nairobi in 1997 and a Masters and
Doctorate degree in Anthropology at Rutgers University, New Jersey in 2005. As a Director she is
in charge of all museums, sites and monuments in Kenya and this involves heritage management
and conservation through surveying, mapping and gazzettment of these sites. In addition her
duties include information dissemination through development of exhibitions and public programs
within the different museums in Kenya. As a Senior Research Scientist her research interests
include human origins and technology as well as human subsistence and settlement patterns. In
addition, she is also interested in the study of modern peoples, landscapes and environments ithin
East Africa.
In addition to the research, coordination of training programs and heritage management, Dr. Kiura
is currently involved with conservation awareness efforts of Kenya’s heritage for economic
investment through various activities;
1. Monitoring and mitigation of prehistory resources especially in areas where there are economic
development activities (e.g. energy exploration, irrigation schemes and other investments)
2. Developing investment products using Kenya’s Heritage for country’s economic development
3. Community participation in the conservation of both Cultural and Natural Heritage.
4. Training and education of youth as heritage managers in areas where Kenya’s heritage is found.
5. Following up on international obligations and convention matters on heritage management
such as UNESCO convention on heritage.
Vision for Cultural Evolution Society
“Cultural evolution” can be described as a process of change in the traits manifested within a
population that is explained by various forms of social learning among species members. These
traits include beliefs, knowledge, customs, skills, attitudes, languages and others and infact shape
a society. A Cultural Evolution Society would be important to enhance human understanding of
what cultural evolution is and its importance within society. My vision as a member of the Society is
therefore to make Cultural Evolution studies more widely acceptable especially in Africa where such
studies are less attractive. In addition, I would be more interested in developing cultural evolution
programs which strive to introduce culture as the basis for the growth of an society and more so its
economic growth just like in the past when economics had plenty of room for the impulses of
human behavior.  

Michele Gelfand
Member-at-Large Position 4 — Female from Open Regions
Michele J. Gelfand is a professor of psychology and Distinguished University Scholar Teacher at the
University of Maryland, College Park. Gelfand’s research deals with cultural influences in conflict,
negotiation, revenge and forgiveness, and the nature and strength of norms across cultures. In this
research, Gelfand uses behavioral, neuroscience, computational, and ethnographic methods to
understand the evolution of culture and its consequences for nations, organizations, teams, and
individuals. She collaborates frequently with political scientists, anthropologists, neuroscientists,
and computer scientists, and has published her work in generalist journals such as Science,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Her
publications have been cited over 14,000 times. Gelfand co-edited the Handbook of Negotiation
and Culture, and the Psychology of Conflict and Conflict Management, and she is the founding co-
editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology series and of the Frontiers of Culture and
Psychology series published by Oxford University Press. She recently co-edited a special issue on
culture for Current Opinion which brought together over 30 papers from different disciplines on
innovations in cultural science. Gelfand is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science,
American Psychological Association, Academy of Management, Society for Industrial/
Organizational Psychology, and elected member of the Society for Organizational Behavior and
Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She received the Annaliese Maier Research Award
from the Humboldt Foundation in 2012 and the Edward Diener Award for Career Contributions in
2016.
In 2015, Gelfand co-organized a workshop at the University of Maryland with David Sloan Wilson
which brought together over 20 leaders of diverse fields, whose research focused on culture and
its evolution. The attendees of this workshop discussed the importance of breaking down
disciplinary silos in cultural science, and the merits of a new interdisciplinary society that could
foster new methods and theory in cultural evolution, and could translate these insights into policy-
ready solutions. Gelfand has helped to develop and grow the Cultural Evolution Society since this
workshop, having served on the board, and is excited to help lead this society through its early
growth. If elected member-at-large, Gelfand would translate her previous leadership experience as
past-president of the International Association for Conflict Management, Past Division Chair for the
Conflict Division of the Academy of Management, and Past Treasurer of the International
Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology to help develop this truly unique society. She would help
to organize innovative interdisciplinary conferences and panels and would advocate for new
funding opportunities targeted at interdisciplinary cultural evolution scholarship. She would also use
her network of international collaborators to help broaden the geographic boundaries of the
Cultural Evolution Society, in order to make it a truly global and equal-opportunity endeavor. 

Russell Gray
Member-at-Large Position 5 — Male from Open Regions
My research spans the areas of cultural evolution, linguistics, animal cognition, and the philosophy
of biology. I have helped pioneer the application of computational evolutionary methods to
questions about linguistic prehistory and cultural evolution. This work has shed new insights on the
200 year-old debate on the origin of Indo-European languages, dubbed by Diamond and Bellwood
as “the most intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant problem in historical linguistics”. In
collaboration with colleagues in Europe I have extended this evolutionary approach to test
hypotheses about the roles of culture and cognition in constraining linguistic variation. In contrast
to the claims of some generative linguists, the analyses revealed striking language family specific
dependencies. However, the work that I am most proud of focuses on questions about the history
of languages, cultures and people in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Simon Greenhill and I
developed a large lexical database for the languages of this region. We then analysed this data
using Bayesian phylogenetic methods to test hypotheses about the sequence and timing of the
peopling of the Pacific. This linguistic work set the stage for my recent research applying ecological
and evolutionary methods to questions about the cultural evolution of religion and the development
of large-scale stratified societies both in the Pacific and around the globe. My colleagues and I
have found that notions of god vary with ecology, that moralising gods promote the development
of social complexity, and in a darker vein, that ritual human sacrifice promotes and sustains the
evolution of stratified societies. I am sometimes asked if I know the other Russell Gray who works
on New Caledonian crows. I normally reply that actually, “I am Russell Crow.” My colleagues and I
have found that the remarkable tool manufacturing traditions of these birds are the product of a
lengthy period of socially scaffolded learning, and are underpinned by brains with large associative
regions and the ability to make certain kinds of causal inference. I have published over 100 journal
articles and book chapters including nine papers in Nature and Science. I am the Director of the
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of
Human History In Jena, and hold adjunct positions in the School of Psychology at the University of
Auckland and the Department of Philosophy at the Australian National University.
I am absolutely delighted by the formation of the Cultural Evolution Society and keen to support it
in whatever way I can. As a student of cultural diversity I am pleased to see that it has already
embraced the need for diversity in disciplines, gender, career stages, and geographic
representation. If elected to the Executive Committee I would encourage a similar recognition of the
need for the society to embrace a diversity of theoretical viewpoints, rather than being a vehicle for
any particular agenda or philosophy (including my own). I would love to see the Society’s meetings
become a vibrant showcase of the breadth of research on cultural evolution, and a place where
there will be time for a discussion of the critical issues that is passionate, rigorous and respectful.

Andrew Whiten
I am Wardlaw Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology at the University of St
Andrews. I have studied social learning, traditions and culture, particularly in human and non-
human primates, for a quarter-century now, starting with the Whiten and Ham review (1992) of the
‘nature and evolution of imitation’. During the present century I and my research associates have
published over 120 articles on these subjects, and edited the Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B Theme issue
(2011) and OUP book (2012) “Culture Evolves”. I have focused on both ontogenetic and
evolutionary facets of social learning and culture, and their interwinement. Research on the first of
these threads has been pursued by studies of children and other developing primates. The
evolutionary thread has been pursued principally through comparative studies of primates,
including observational and experimental studies with wild and captive monkeys and apes
including marmosets, capuchins, vervet monkeys, orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees, as well
human children and adults. I have favored the development of complementary approaches
including large scale surveys in the wild (e.g. ‘chimpanzee cultures’) and experimental studies,
extending to cultural diffusion analyses.
Vision for the Society
I strongly support the further development of the interdisciplinary approaches to cultural evolution
that have taken the field so far already, ranging over the life and cognitive sciences, biological and
cultural anthropology, archaeology, philosophy and related endeavors. I think a substantial
comparative thread would be healthy in the Society, addressing social learning, traditions and
elements of culture in non-human animals – and I appear to be one of the few candidates for
election who could seriously cover this. Humans are not the only species to display these key
phenomena! This and other aspects of diversity are good for our field, extending to numerous
different methodologies that can complement each other. However, I think it’s most important that
for collaborations in such things as meetings and publications, we maintain high standards of
scientific rigor. Where there is scientific debate, dialogue is to be encouraged. In support of that I
would hope (and expect!) we shall manage to establish an annual or biennial international
conference and encourage widespread public engagement with our progress and discoveries.

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder
I am a human behavioural ecologist with strong interest in the cultural evolutionary processes
insofar as these intersect with my research foci in demography, human health, natural resource
management, and economic development. I study reproduction and marriage systems (Brown,
Laland & Borgerhoff Mulder, 2009 Tr. Ecol. Evol.), cooperation and social networks (Kasper &
Borgerhoff Mulder, 2015 Curr. Ant.), common pool resource management (Brooks, Waylen &
Borgerhoff Mulder, 2012 PNAS), cultural practices pertaining to health (Ross et al., 2016 Hum.
Nat.) and marriage (Lawson et al., 2015 PNAS), and the intergenerational transmission of inequality
(Borgerhoff Mulder et al., 2009 Science). I have active field sites in Tanzania, work intensively in
NGOs dedicated to conservation and development, and am initiating a new project at the
intersections of cultural multilevel selection, REDD+ and the global carbon market.
Cultural evolution is poised to bridge multiple disciplinary approaches to understanding human
diversity. I would be delighted to stand in the inaugural elections for the Cultural Evolution Society
as a Member at Large. My goal would be to help guide the society into an area where theory,
modeling, fieldwork and data analysis are well integrated in the identification of cultural evolutionary
processes, ensuring both a strong emphasis on fieldwork across diverse contexts and a focus on
rigorous comparative work. I would also strive to facilitate the society’s goal to maintain genuine
international representation.

Quentin Atkinson
My research draws on tools from molecular systematics, population genetics, epidemiology,
ecology and experimental economics to shed light on human cultural diversity in domains as varied
as language, religion and resource management. This work spans three related areas: 1) the
creation of large cross-cultural databases for quantitative analysis; 2) the development of
stochastic models of cultural evolution and 3) field work in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. I have
used these tools to answer questions as diverse as the causes of deforestation in the Pacific, the
role of religion in complex societies, the tempo of language change and the origin of the Indo-
European languages,
I see cultural evolution as fundamental to understanding the most interesting aspects of human
behaviour. The Cultural Evolution Society is fundamentally about promoting the science of cultural
evolution. To achieve this, I would like to see us focus on 1) using digital media to grow
membership across the academy - we can find scholars working on cultural evolution from physics
to film studies and we want these people to find us; 2) establishing a thriving network of scholars
united by the common language of evolution and where ideas can spread - we are cultural
evolutionists, so we should be able to achieve this; 3) identifying and supporting research on
cultural evolution that is relevant to key challenges facing humanity today and, in so doing, raising
the profile of evolutionary approaches to culture among the public and policy-makers.

Rob Boyd
Relevance to cultural evolution
Most of my research focuses on incorporating cultural transmission into the Darwinian theory of
evolution, and using the modiﬁed theory to understand why humans are such peculiar creatures.
Unlike other organisms, humans acquire a rich body of information from others by teaching,
imitation, and other forms of social learning, and this culturally transmitted material allows human
populations to evolve high quality adaptations to particular environments, adaptations that are
beyond the learning abilities of individuals. My research is focused on the evolutionary psychology
of the mechanisms that shape human culture, and how these mechanisms interact with population
dynamic processes to shape human cultural variation. I have done almost all of this work in
collaboration with Peter J. Richerson. This work is set out in two books, Culture and the
Evolutionary Process and Not by Genes Alone, and in a number of papers, many are collected in a
volume entitled The Origin and Evolution of Cultures.
My vision for the Society
I believe that the society should be a venue for inclusive, interdisciplinary research on the evolution
of human behavior. This means we need to develop a culture in which a wide range of expertise is
valued. This should include the usual suspects: evolutionary psychology, human behavioral
ecology, and cultural evolution. However, much research on evolution and human behavior is
ahistorical, as if biologists studied adaptation without consulting paleontologists. The new society
should actively reach out to historical disciplines like history, archaeology, paleoanthropology.
There are also important research traditions within economics and political science focused game
theory and the evolution of norms that provide theoretical depth beyond what we see in behavioral
ecology, and are highly relevant to understanding human sociality. What we need to avoid is a
narrow society in which "cultural evolution" scholars only talk to each other in a comfortable setting
where everybody agrees about what is important. Understanding how humans evolved is a huge
but difﬁcult question, and we should challenge ourselves with the best thinkers and the best
research across a wide range of disciplines.

Laurel Fogarty
How your research relates to the field of Cultural Evolution
I work on the theoretical foundations of cultural evolution and how interpretation of that theory can
be used to further our understanding of human evolution and complex social phenomena.
My work uses agent-based simulation approaches as well as analytical approaches based on
established population genetic models to examine cross-cultural patterns of cultural accumulation
and cultural loss, and our creative cultural responses to changing environments.
I am also interested in the ways in which the cultural transmission of ideas and traits affects
important issues of social policy. For example I have worked on the implications of the cultural
preference for sons over daughters in China for social policy surrounding fertility and social security.
This work combined demographic matrix modeling, models of horizontal, vertical, and oblique
cultural transmission, and Chinese survey and census data.
Finally, I aim to understand the ways in which cultural traits might interact with genetic traits, and
with one another, using models of cultural niche construction and gene-culture coevolution. In
particular, I work on models that investigate the links between subsistence strategy (for example
small-scale agriculture or hunting and foraging) and cultural evolutionary dynamics – for example
the rate of spread of cultural traits or the relative importance of vertical and oblique learning in each
case.
Your vision for the Society that you will pursue if elected.
I hope to see an open and inclusive society for cultural evolution that can support and connect
researchers in the field as it grows. Such a society has the potential to encourage respectful and
stimulating debate on the future directions of cultural evolution research and will be uniquely placed
to facilitate interaction and knowledge sharing between researchers from the vast diversity of
disciplines currently contributing to the scientific study of culture. This society represents a
momentous and enriching step forward for cultural evolution research and researchers.

Michelle Kline
Humans display extraordinary behavioral diversity in adapting to, and altering, all of the ecosystems
on earth. Understanding this diversity requires understanding human capacities for cumulative
cultural evolution. As a Postdoctoral Researcher at Arizona State University, I take a broad
comparative approach to the evolution and development of human cultural capacities, including
learning and teaching mechanisms, and the social contextual determinants of innovation. This
comparative approach is inherently interdisciplinary, and both thrives on and expands the
interdisciplinary foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. I deploy diverse methods to study
variation within and between populations. Since 2008 I have studied teaching and social learning in
rural villages in the Fijian Islands. I have published a novel theoretical framework on the evolution of
teaching in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and empirical studies of patterns of variation in teaching
and learning behavior in Human Nature, and Field Methods. In addition, I have published on the
effects of population size and connectedness on cultural macroevolution (Proceedings B.); on
cooperation in small groups (Proceedings B; Evolution & Human Behavior; PLoS ONE); and on
applying cultural evolutionary theory to problems in sustainable ecological systems (Ecology &
Society). Across all of my research, I take an empirical approach to testing the novel implications of
cultural evolutionary theory, with an eye towards application to the hard problems facing human
societies.
Vision for the society:
The interdisciplinary nature of cultural evolutionary theory is one of its greatest strengths as a
theoretical and empirical approach to human behavior and evolution. The far-reaching implications
of cultural evolutionary theory mean that it may ﬁnd application across the full range of human
intellectual and practical endeavors. Pushing the ﬁeld forward will require continued synthetic
contributions from many different disciplines, and from a diversity of viewpoints. My vision for the
Cultural Evolutionary Society is that it will become a hub of research activity: inviting scholars from
the social and natural sciences to learn about and incorporate cultural evolutionary theory into their
work, while facilitating collaborations on the basis of research problems rather than disciplinary
divides. I am hopeful that the new Cultural Evolutionary Society will continue to prioritize inclusion—
of researchers from all disciplines, genders, races, ethnicities, and global regions. It is this very
diversity of human experience and behavior that motivates cultural evolutionary theory, and so it is
essential to the mission of the Society that our leadership and membership continue to be
inclusive. We cannot each master the whole of human history and of the human sciences, but as a
community of researchers brought together by the new Cultural Evolutionary Society, we can
advance our understanding of the human condition through community, collaboration, and science
communication.

Joshua Conrad Jackson
Male Student Representative Candidate
Joshua Conrad Jackson is an incoming doctoral student and National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellow at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He graduated from McGill
University with first class honors in 2013, and subsequently worked as a researcher at the
University of Otago in New Zealand until 2014. He currently holds a faculty research assistant
position at the University of Maryland, where he works under Dr. Michele Gelfand. Josh’s research
interests are broad, but often take an evolutionary approach to studying the emergence of
phenomena related to culture, religion, and morality. In previous empirical papers, Josh has
explored the dynamics of incipient human groups, the motivational and cognitive origins of religious
belief, and the psychological mechanisms behind religious homophily. He has also authored
reviews and theory papers on cultural psychology, including a recent Current Opinions in
Psychology paper on cultural norms and an upcoming chapter in the Annual Review of Psychology
on revenge. Josh has been trained as an experimental psychologist, but conducts interdisciplinary
research. He collaborates with anthropologists, computer scientists, and philosophers, and uses
computational and ethnographic methods to compliment behavioral and neuroscience
experimentation. He also values the importance of policy-relevant research, and has applied his
theory-driven insights to reduce intercultural hostility in the Middle East, and—in an editorial
published in American Scientist—to deconstruct the current American election cycle. Outside of
research, Josh works as a core member of the non-profit organization Useful Science, which
focuses on parsing and communicating brief, peer-reviewed summaries of scientific papers to large
audiences (over 1,000,000 yearly visits). For the past year, Josh has co-hosted Useful Science’s
podcast (with a listener base of over 12,000), where popular summaries are discussed in depth.
Goals if Elected
As student representative, Josh would focus on society-wide growth as well as student advocacy.
Cultural evolution scholarship holds immense promise because of its ability to synthesize
interdisciplinary literature while speaking to real systemic problems involving human rights and
equal opportunity. To accomplish these goals, though, the society must engage with scholars
across disciplines, and maximize the public visibility of high quality research.
• To synthesize scholarship, Josh would organize themed student-led symposia at CES
meetings featuring contributors from diverse fields. He would also work to create funding
sources that explicitly encourage interdisciplinary research, and organize workshops where
students could learn innovative research tools that are seldom used in their fields. Josh is
especially qualified to create these workshops, given his pioneering efforts to apply image-
based tracking and agent-based modeling to cultural evolution.

• To maximize visibility of cultural evolution research, Josh would help create an accessible and
informative online home for the Cultural Evolution Society. In particular, he would set up a
monthly blog where students of cultural evolution could accessibly share their research with a
broader audience. He would also create and host a twitter account for the society in an effort
to gain and maintain the same visibility that he has helped foster within Useful Science.
In addition to these two major goals, Josh hopes to engage diverse student voices within the
society, and foster an environment of collaboration and camaraderie for student-members. He will
build this community in part through an online Q&A forum where students can solicit advice from
peers within the society. He also hopes to broaden the current diversity of cultural evolution
scholarship through travel grants available to outstanding students who cannot afford to attend
conferences or workshops.
Ian MacDonald
Male Student Representative Candidate
My research and connections to the field of Cultural Evolution:
At the moment my (dissertation) research focuses on factors influencing individual well-being and
community functioning within the North American Intentional Community (IC) movement. Intentional
communities, as the name implies, represent a conscious effort to organise the social lives of
members in a more cooperative and communitarian manner, relative to the mainstream. As such,
these groups offer a meaningful sub-culture in which to explore fundamental questions concerning
human nature, cooperation, and the consequences of "life in community", all in a modern context.
Vision for the CES:
I share the common goal of making the CES a premiere scientific society. To this effect, and in
addition to enabling cutting-edge research within our field, I feel the CES should consistently strive
to practice what we preach and dissolve the traditional boundaries between "science" and "real
life". In practice, this means a readiness and commitment to turning the scientific lens upon the
society itself (we've done well so far!) and for tackling real-world problems at all scales, from local
to planet-wide. Taken together, these aspects should go a long way in demonstrating the utility of
our perspective to the general public and extended scientific community.

Jessica Borushok
Female Student Representative Candidate
I am currently a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Bowling Green State University in the
behavioral medicine track. My research examines healthy living (physical activity, weight loss, stress
reduction/wellbeing) in a variety of populations (overweight/obese, sedentary workers, students).
Studying health behavior change and prevention has increased my interest in the field of Cultural
Evolution because it is not enough to eat healthy and workout regularly if we exist in an
environment and culture that undermines and punishes these behaviors. While research on
individuals can be impactful for those involved, in order to enact widespread change in health and
wellbeing it is necessary to understand the context in which these behaviors occur, and why and
how they have developed and sustained at a community or global scale. My goal as a researcher is
to work across disciplines (psychology, sociology, education, urban planning, law/policy, biology,
etc.) to answer these questions and use that information to create public policy informed by
evolutionary theory with the hope of not only producing innovative research, but also making
meaningful changes in our society.
I am excited about the opportunities available to the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) as I believe
that we can only see the full scope of an issue if we work from multiple perspectives to create a
cohesive, integrated picture. As a new society, I believe my prior experience as Student
Representative for the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science will be beneficial in the early
stages of the CES’s development. Having already served on a board of a multidisciplinary
organization, I have experience with the process of creating and reforming bylaws, election
procedures, and addressing issues that arise as the organization continues to grow and adapt. As
a student, I understand the unique challenges that students face trying to balance learning from
others and wanting to become more involved and develop as leaders – I hope to help the society
create an environment that is welcoming and nurturing to students as the next generation of
scientists while learning from and collaborating with those already prominent in their field. My vision
for the society is a community filled with a diverse array of people passionate about the future of
cultural evolution and the opportunity to come together to address the Grand Challenges inside
and outside of the “Ivory Tower.” I believe serving as Student Representative is my opportunity to
work towards that and to build an environment within our society that fosters this vision.

Nicole Wen
Female Student Representative Candidate
My Research:
I study cognitive and social development from an interdisciplinary perspective using a variety of
methods to examine how children learn across cultures. I have explored how children ﬂexibly use
imitation and innovation for cultural learning and how this is socialized in both the U.S. and
Vanuatu. I am also interested in how rituals facilitate social group cohesion and identity formation. I
propose that humans are psychologically prepared to engage in ritual as a means of in-group
afﬁliation. I study the capacity to learn, create, and transmit culture in order to increase our
understanding of the cognitive and cultural evolution of our species.
My Vision for CES:
If elected as a student representative of the CES, I would pursue interdisciplinarity and deep
diversity by targeting a membership composed of individuals from a variety of disciplines. I hope to
encourage the involvement of students and early career scientists. These would contribute to the
goal of broadening the intellectual scope of the society. I believe that my experience as a Vice
President (and a President-elect) of my department’s Psychology Graduate Student Association, in
combination with my interdisciplinary research/academic background will help me effectively lead
as a student representative during this critical period when the CES is establishing a solid
foundation for the society’s future.

Cultural Evolution Society 2016 Voter's Manual

Cultural Evolution Society 2016 Voter's Manual

Cultural Evolution Society 2016 Voter's Manual

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Cultural Evolution Society 2016 Voter's Manual