Prof. Dr. Alex Kacelnik (University of Oxford, UK) will give a lecture entitled “How Parenting, deception, exploitation, reciprocity and vengeance: life in a bird community”.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Alex Kacelnik is an Emeritus professor of Behavioral Ecology at the University of Oxford (UK). He studied biology in Buenos Aires and completed a doctorate at Oxford in 1979. Besides Oxford, he has held research positions at Groningen (Netherlands), Cambridge (UK), and Berlin, and was founder and director of the Oxford Behavioural Ecology Research Group. He is fundamentally interested on how evolution shapes psychological processes, including learning, choice, and problem solving. Alex is a Fellow of the Royal Society (London), Member of the European Academy, honorary professor at Buenos Aires University, and has received awards from the Comparative Cognition Society (USA), the Tinbergen Medal from the (British) Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour, and from the Cogito Foundation (Switzerland). He is currently External Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence “Science of Intelligence” in Berlin.
When/Where: 3rd June 2026, 14h00, at Universidade de Aveiro (Room 5.3.27 DEP-UA) and online.
Abstract:
The social life of humans and other species include complex interactions in which our psychology is constantly challenged. We (and other animals) have special emotional bonds with our offspring, we deceive each other, we sometimes exploit each other’s vulnerabilities to our advantage, we return favours and hurts even when interacting with strangers, and so on. It is perhaps surprising that all these interactions are also present between bird species, but they do, and their presence offers opportunities to try and model what may be called the algorithmic mind, namely make explicit how the mind drives action. A particular form of reproduction offers a uniquely rich research opportunity. Brood parasites are species whose reproduction includes exploiting the parental psychology of others so as to induce them to look after the parasite offspring at the expense of their own. I will describe many such interactions, show unpublished video evidence, and discuss what is known and unknown about this peculiar form of sociality. My final example will be an analysis of a form of reciprocity that Aristotle called one of human beings worst vices: vengeance. In birds, as in humans, this vice is present and not fully understood.
Online access: Available Soon
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