Folmer Bokma directs a Lab in the Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences at the Swedish Umeå University. Professor Bokma will talk about how scientists come to know the factors that influence species to go extinct, remain stable, or evolve into new species, and he will pay special attention to Punctuated Equilibria theory.
Daniel Dor holds a PhD in Linguistics awarded by Stanford University. He is Senior lecturer in the Communication Department of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Israeli Tel Aviv University. Dor developed the theory of Language as a Communication Technology (LCT). This theory provides a new general framework for the description, analysis and explanation of language as a socially-constructed communication technology, originated through cultural evolution to allow for communication across the experiential gaps between its users.
Emanuele Serrelli is Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy of Biology at the “Riccardo Massa” Department of Human Sciences at the Italian University of Milan, Bicocca as well as Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow at AppEEL. He is specialized in evolutionary theory and its ongoing revisions and extensions, and his interests include population genetics models, tree-thinking, macroevolution, ecological concepts in evolution, and cultural evolution. He will talk about the re-discovery of the importance of ecological and geographical events for Human Evolution.
Larissa Mendoza Straffon is a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at AppEEL. She studied archaeology in Mexico, has a Master’s degree in the archaeology of human origins, and recently completed a PhD at the Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society, in The Netherlands. She will talk about the evolutionary origins of visual art and the evolution of human cognition and behaviour.
Mónica Tamariz works at the Spanish University of Granada. She will talk about how computer simulations can help scientists to test the various theories there exist on language evolution.
Douglas P. Zook is Professor at Boston University as well as the current Vice-President and former President of the International Symbiosis Society. He will talk about how organisms interact with one another, a process called symbiosis; and how such interactions can influence the course of evolution, a mechanism called symbiogenesis.