Dear all, You are warmly invited to two special seminars put on by the Nature and Culture group. Heidi Colleran (Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse) will be speaking at 2pm on Tuesday 3rd May in Seminar Room 1, and 2pm on Wednesday 4th May in the Board Room, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane.
2pm Tuesday 3rd May Decisions, decisions: models of reproductive decision-making in evolutionary anthropology Evolution relies on reproduction. And yet, as I’ll argue in this talk, evolutionary anthropology doesn’t have a comprehensive theory of reproductive decision-making. Such a theory should be general enough to explain how reproduction ‘functions’ in both high and low fertility contexts, and specific enough to delineate causal hypotheses that can deal with changing reproductive patterns. Evolutionary anthropology has been successful in accounting for aspects of reproductive decision-making in small-scale and so-called ‘natural fertility’ contexts, but it is struggling to make sense of the demographic transition to low fertility that characterizes most of the contemporary world. Reconciling alternative modeling approaches, in particular, bringing in insights from cultural evolution theory, may help in developing an overarching framework. But different subfields tend to consider their own view the more general one so there has been little integration. Conceptual overlaps make competing alternative hypotheses difficult to delineate, and there are many empirical and interpretive issues to be grappled with in the process. Using demographic transitions to low fertility as a focal point, I will highlight some of these problems, and try to sketch a way forward. 2pm Wednesday 4th May Contraceptive use and the meaning of ‘natural fertility’ The idea of ‘natural fertility’ permeates evolutionary anthropology and demography. In this talk I’ll provide an overview and a critique of this approach to human reproduction, from an anthropological and evolutionary perspective. I’ll argue that, quite apart from the ethical issues of consigning some populations to be ‘natural’ and others ‘modern’, natural fertility creates unnecessary theoretical and conceptual problems for evolutionary researchers. Focusing on contraceptive behavior cross-culturally and in my own work in rural Poland, I will argue that if we take a behavior-based rather than a method-based approach to contraceptive use, there can be no such thing as natural fertility. http://www.humannature.hps.cam.ac.uk// <http://www.humannature.hps.cam.ac.uk//> _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
