Examined Lives

Purpose

Each month in Examined Lives we have lively discussions exploring evolutionary thinking and applying it towards human behavior. We do this by examining an aspect of human behavior through the lens of cutting-edge evolutionary science, hence our group’s name.  Our topics are suggested and voted on by participants. Over the past three years we have discussed altruism & prosocial behavior, attachment & parenting, climate change, convergent evolution, cultural evolution & dual inheritance theory, dehumanization, disinformation and mental immunity, evolutionary mismatch, evolutionary psychiatry, happiness, human self-domestication, learning, lies & self-deception, monogamy, morality, religion, science denial, status, trust, war, and weaponized stories & narratives.

Evolutionary Science as a Lens for Understanding

Cosmides and Tooby stated that “Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it.” ^[1]  That is what we try to do in our discussions – apply “that way of thinking” (i.e., evolutionary psychology, biology, and anthropology) to whatever topic is on the table.

^[1] Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J.  Evolutionary psychology: A primer.

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History

Founded by Andy Norman, Examined Lives is now co-moderated by Steven P. Gilbert and Sage Gibbons.

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How to Join

The first step is to simply register for an upcoming session of Examined Lives. We meet by Zoom for one hour on either the 3^rd or 4th Thursday of each month at noon ET. There is no obligation to attend every month. The facilitator for the month suggests a few readings and/or videos to look at ahead of time to get everyone thinking about the topic at hand. The meeting officially ends after one hour, but interested participants can stick around for an additional half hour of discussion.

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At the end of that session, you will be invited to join our group on Hylo where we keep suggest future topics, keep the conversation going, and self-organize in general.

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Examined Lives is a member group of the ProSocial Commons which you are encouraged to join to engage with many other groups just like Examined Lives.

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