This year’s Stirling Lecture will be delivered by Dr Holly Dunsworth, University of Rhode Island, with a talk entitled ‘This View of Wife: How Woman’s Evolution Challenges Traditional Narratives of Man’s’. The lecture will take place on Tuesday 15th October 2019 between 18:00 and 20:00 in Keynes Lecture Theatre 1. The event is free and open to all.
Dr Dunsworth will be challenging traditional evolutionary explanations for sex differences in height and hips that focus only on big, competitive men and broad, birthing women. She claims that clinging to simple answers to deceptively complex questions about human variation may be impeding scientific progress.
Abstract
Here we question assumptions about the evolution of sex differences in human biology, specifically regarding sex differences in height and in pelvic dimensions. Conspicuous sex differences in anatomy have featured prominently in human evolutionary science since its origins and continue to be mistaken for evidence of innate sex differences in cognition and for natural gender norms and roles. Evolutionary explanations for sex differences in height and hips that focus only on big competitive men and broad birthing women must account for evolutionary developmental approaches and for physiological phenomena that complicate, weaken and challenge traditional thinking. In this case, clinging to simple answers to deceptively complex questions about human variation may be impeding scientific progress, as well as perpetuating the popular misunderstanding and abuse of it.
Biography
Holly Dunsworth is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rhode Island. She began her career studying the anatomy and paleoenvironment of fossil apes. Now she is investigating the energetics of marmoset monkey pregnancy and lactation to answer questions about the evolution of human reproduction, growth and development. She’s behind the EGG (Energetics of Gestation and Growth) hypothesis for the timing of human birth (contra the ‘obstetrical dilemma’): she argues that ‘reproductive consciousness’ is a uniquely human trait of significance, and is working to expand the dominant evolutionary explanations for sex differences in human height and pelvic dimensions.