LOCATION: Teleconference Room, Alexander Library, 4th floor, 169 College Avenue

4th Lembersky Conference on Human Evolutionary Studies

Whenever individuals work together toward shared goals, cooperation is the result. This is true whether those individuals are genes, cells, microbes, people, corporations, or nations. Among humans, cooperation occurs at levels ranging from families and friends to communities, markets, corporations, states, and, via both trade and international organizations, the entire world. Despite the ubiquity of cooperation and its importance for the healthy functioning of organisms and societies, only recently has a transdisciplinary science of cooperation begun to emerge. The purpose of this conference is to further the development of a transdisciplinary science of cooperation.

9am: Breakfast and registration

10am: Welcome from Erin Vogel, Director of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies

10:10am: Welcome from conference organizer Lee Cronk

10:15am: Keynote speaker, Gerald Wilkinson (Maryland): Insights from studies of cooperation and conflict at multiple levels

11am: Coffee break

11:30am: Christopher Ellison (Rutgers): Cooperation and conflict within the genome

12noon: Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello (Rutgers): The human microbiome in the anthropocene

12:30pm: lunch

1:30pm: Rebecca Brittain (Rutgers): Microbiota-host cooperation across a shifting nutritional landscape

2pm: Athena Aktipis (Arizona State): Multicellularity, cancer, and cooperation across domains

2:30pm: Alex Pritchard (UC Davis): Personality of stress-coping and social network position in a primate that forms temporary coalitions

3pm: Erin Vogel and Caitlin O’Connell (Rutgers): Social support in a semi-solitary species? The costs and benefits of sociality in wild orangutans

3:30pm – 4:30pm: Discussion

6pm: reception at a location yet to be determined

Co-sponsored by the CCA Working Group Cooperation Across Domains