Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description
Food, Groups and Mates: Evolution, Culture and Choice
Instructor(s): Monica Raveret-Richter, Biology
Description: What will you eat? Which group will you join, and what sorts of relationships
will exist among group members? With whom will you share, fight, mate, or raise young?
Insects, birds, social carnivores, and primates, including humans, all face these
choices. What determines their behavior? In this seminar, students will compare the
choice behavior of a broad variety of animals, and explore relationships among resource
quality, distribution, and control, mating systems, and the structure of families
and societies from both evolutionary and cultural perspectives. Students will bring
evidence and methodologies from the natural and social sciences to bear on the patterns
and relationships under study, and will determine where generalizations regarding
the determinants of choice behavior might be possible, and where caution in making
broad generalizations is warranted.