HBES

Day 3 of #HBES2026! 🌍 We open at 9:00 with today’s plenary: Sara Lowes on “Culture, Policy, and Economic Development.” Parallel sessions follow, plus the student mentor lunch at 11:45 and Plenary 4 at 16:30 with Youssef Bokbot on Neolithic Morocco. Big day ahead!

📢 Calling all students still on the market for this fall. 🚨 Post-doc opportunity working on how to adapt interventions to different cultures, with Catherine Thomas at the University of Michigan. Due June 15: careers.umich.edu/job_detail/277… @iaccp @UMich @SPSPnews

Reason at the micro level works well; at the macro level, scientific reasons get outcompeted by cultural elements better tuned to how human interests cluster. #HBES2026 #CES2026

A historical database of notable scholars showed the share working in abstract / human / natural domains was strikingly stable across space and time — even during the Scientific Revolution. Science only attracted more people once it started yielding practical benefits.

Joint #HBES2026 / #CES2026 plenary 🎤 Hugo Mercier on "The evolution of reason and the cultural evolution of reasons." With Dan Sperber, he’s argued reason isn’t a fix-everything mechanism — it’s a social one. A thread 🧵

Day 2 of #HBES2026 starts today! 🌍 Parallel sessions kick off at 9:00, with a packed program spanning mind, mating, cooperation, and more. The highlight: Hanna Kokko’s plenary at 16:20 — “A long life: how desirable is it, evolutionarily speaking?” See you there!

Scelza’s call: stop framing findings like these as “exceptions to the rule.” The more exceptions we find, the more we should rethink the rule itself. Not to abandon sexual selection theory — but to broaden the questions we ask. #HBES2026

On jealousy: the classic sex difference replicates cross-culturally, but Himba women were MORE upset by sexual infidelity than American men were. Culture predicts severity more than sex does — and paternal investment levels track jealousy intensity.

Plenary 1 at #HBES2026 🎤 Brooke Scelza on “More Than Our Differences: Moving beyond dichotomies in the study of human mating.” Drawing on 15 years with the Himba of NW Namibia, she pushed us to broaden how we frame sexual selection. A thread 🧵

We’re kicking off #HBES2026 with opening remarks! 🌍 Welcome to the 37th annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in Rabat, Morocco. Stay tuned for our first plenary with Brooke Scelza at 11:30.