KLI Colloquia are informal, public talks that are followed by extensive dissussions. Speakers are KLI fellows or visiting researchers who are interested in presenting their work to an interdisciplinary audience and discussing it in a wider research context. We offer three types of talks:
1. Current Research Talks. KLI fellows or visiting researchers present and discuss their most recent research with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
2. Future Research Talks. Visiting researchers present and discuss future projects and ideas togehter with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
3. Professional Developmental Talks. Experts about research grants and applications at the Austrian and European levels present career opportunities and strategies to late-PhD and post-doctoral researchers.
- The presentation language is English.
- If you are interested in presenting your current or future work at the KLI, please contact the Scientific Director or the Executive Manager.
Event Details
Topic description:
The perplexing diversity of the human personality is a yet unresolved puzzle in evolutionary science. Several hypotheses exist about its ultimate and proximate explanations without discussing the temporary aspects of its evolution. I propose the agricultural trigger hypothesis that explains how, when and why the current diversity evolved. Although pre-agricultural human bands already had to have some genotypic and phenotypic variation in personality traits, this was limited by their environment and social norms. Agriculture, however, altered several aspects of ancestral life, most importantly, it loosened the strict mutual control over the behavior of fellow group members. A positive feedback loop of social division of labor and individual niche specialization, fuelled continuously by the ever growing settlement sizes, economic inequality and hierarchy, thus triggered a major personality explosion. The current state of global diversity could therefore be the result of the above process, born with the Neolithic and still running. Supporting this hypothesis I present two agent based models capturing sub-problems of the above processes. The first explores how social division of labor can result in heritable behavioral differences, and the second shows how egalitarian norms can effect behavioral diversity.
Biographical note:
Zsóka Vásárhelyi holds a BSc and Master´s degree in Biology from the Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest. She is doing her PhD thesis in the Theoretical Evolutionary Biology Doctoral Program of the Eötvös Lóránd University under the supervision of István Scheuring. Zsóka Vásárhelyi has been awarded a KLI Writing-Up Fellowship to complete her thesis.
