MVE Conference 2015 English Version

The 15th MVE Annual Meeting (Human Behavior from an Evolutionary Perspective)

The 15th annual meeting of the MVE (Human Behavior from an Evolutionary Perspective) took place at the University of Würzburg from Tuedsday March 17th until Thurday March 19th, 2015.

Organizers: Christine Hennighausen, Benjamin P. Lange, Frank Schwab

Topic:

The Evolution of Social Cognition and Behavior

Are we human beings egoists? Are we only agents of our selfish genes? Or are we reciprocal altruists, at least? Do we invest in others only to our own evolutionary benefits (e.g., by means of parental investment)? Can we, or should we also do good to others, even when our own fitness interests will take a backseat then? Do ethically acting and morality have a natural basis? Or are lies, cheating, and self-deception at the heart of our nature to our own evolutionary advantages? The annual meeting of the MVE-list (Human Behavior in Evolutionary Perspective) in Wuerzburg wanted to focus on the topics cheating and deception as well as morality and ethics. How can we explain the mentioned social phenomena in evolutionary terms for a better understanding? Beyond submissions dealing with social evolution, we also welcomed other submissions from all areas of the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

So, we warmly welcomed all oral presentations and poster submission. Submissions focusing on aspects of social evolution were especially fostered in Wuerzburg!

 Invited speakers:

Robert L. Trivers (Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Anthropology)

Norbert Bischof (LMU München, Institut für Psychologie)

Eckart Voland (Universität Gießen, Biophilosophie)

Gerhard Vollmer (TU Braunschweig, Philosophie)

Program
Please find the detailed program here.

Collection of essays
The German publisher Pabst has made the offer to publish a book made of a collection of essays or articles based on the meeting's presentations. Hence, if you are interested to see you oral presentation or poster as a chapter in such an anthology, please let us know. If there are enough contributions, the book would become a reality. If you presentation is based on original data so that you are afraid to publish them in such an anthology because of not being able to also publish them in a journal then, you might alter your contribution accordingly, that is shorten it or focus only on theory.

Many thanks for your participation! See you in 2016!

Christine Hennighausen, Benjamin P. Lange, Frank Schwab

Information on past MVE annual meetings are available at the MVE-List website.