New grants:

Brandon Prins :
  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory University Engagement for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Safeguards Courses at the University of Tennessee, Howard H. Baker Center for Public Policy. $28,000.00 from DOE - ORNL - UT-Battelle - Oak Ridge National Laboratory for Baker Center . 
  • Peacebuilding in conflict & post-conflict societies. $8,528.00 from International Studies Association to Baker Center.

Sergey Gavrilets has received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation entitled "Dynamic Models for Basic Theory and Applications in Cultural Evolution" ($234K).  The grant's goal is to organize and develop web based educational materials on dynamic modeling for graduate students and post-docs from across the social sciences, as well as a textbook/review aimed at applying methods of the dynamical systems theory to the evolution of institutions, a topic bringing together many basic and applied issues in cultural evolution. These activities will lay the groundwork for a social scientific paradigm shift, and can provide policy tools by which we might humanely direct our own evolution.


New papers:

O’Brien M.J & R.A. Bentley (2018) Dual inheritance, cultural transmission, and niche construction. In The Handbook of Culture and Biology (J. Causadilas, E. H. Teller & N. A. Gonzales, eds.): 179-202.

Lucas, J. R., Gentry, K. E., Sieving, K. E., & Freeberg, T. M. (In Press; 2018). Communication as a fundamental part of Machiavellian Intelligence. To appear in Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Brooks, Heather Z., Maryann E. Hohn, Candice R. Price, Ami E. Radunskaya, Suzanne S. Sindi, Nakeya D. Williams, Shelby N. Wilson, and Nina H. Fefferman. "Mathematical Analysis of the Impact of Social Structure on Ectoparasite Load in Allogrooming Populations." In Understanding Complex Biological Systems with Mathematics, pp. 47-61. Springer, Cham, 2018.

Williams, Nakeya D., Heather Z. Brooks, Maryann E. Hohn, Candice R. Price, Ami E. Radunskaya, Suzanne S. Sindi, Shelby N. Wilson, and Nina H. Fefferman. "How Disease Risks Can Impact the Evolution of Social Behaviors and Emergent Population Organization." In Understanding Complex Biological Systems with Mathematics, pp. 31-46. Springer, Cham, 2018.

Dana Lynn Moseley, Graham Earnest Derryberry, Jennifer Nicole Phillips, Julie Elizabeth Danner, Raymond Michael Danner, David Andrew Luther and Elizabeth Perrault Derryberr "Acoustic adaptation to city noise through vocal learning by a songbird" Proc. R. Soc. B 285: 20181356 (2018)

M. Thalos "Dirty hands: The phenomenology of acting as an authorized agent", Monist 101:2 (2018)


New members:

Chien-fei Chen
Dr. Chien-fei Chen serves as the Director of Education and Diversity Programs and Research Associate Professor for CURENT. She is also an adjunct faculty member in the department of sociology. Dr. Chen received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Washington State University. Her research in social psychology focuses on how the content and structure of social relations are mediated through social norms, networks, interpersonal communication and related psychological factors at both individual and group levels.

New courses:

Mariam Thalos will be teaching a seminar in the spring 19' on Rational Choice and its applications in a variety of social sciences (Philosophy 640).

Talks given or oncoming:

  • NIna Fefferman gave a plenary talk at SIAM Life Sciences in August on "Linking Local Decisions with Global Outcomes in Networks" - much of which focused on the multilevel selective pressures on the evolution of social behaviors.
  • Sergey Gavrilets gave a plenary talk at the 9th Moscow International Conference on Operations Research in October on "The evolution of social norm internalization"
  • Mariam Phalos gave talks at APA Eastern Division symposium on her book "A Social Theory" and on "Disaggregating goods: The power of fUtility" at Cambridge University CamPos and HPS colloquium series.
  • Oleg Manaev will make presentation "Impact of Russian Media on the Countries in the East Slavic Triangle" at the 50th Annual Convention of Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which will take place in Boston on December 6-9.

DySoC/NIMBioS Investigative Workshop on "Extending the Theory of Sustainability"
Meeting dates: December 5-7, 2018; link
Location: NIMBioS at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Organizers:
Peter Richerson, Environmental Science & Policy, Univ. of California, Davis
Eli Fenichel, Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale Univ.
Sergey Gavrilets, Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity (DySoc)/NIMBioS; Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics, Univ. of Tennessee