Please join us in Moore Filene Auditorium on Tuesday, May 13, starting at 2:30 p.m., for a special lecture given by Nicholas Christakis, PhD, MD, MPH, Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. 

Title:  The Biology of Human Social Interaction

Abstract: Natural selection has shaped our species to be social and has endowed us with important capacities, such as love, friendship, and cooperation. Our biology reflects this. Our bodies respond to, and foster, social interactions in myriad ways. Here I provide an overview of work in our lab regarding this phenomenon. I discuss how our bodies respond to social isolation, including via circulating biomarkers in our blood. I review evidence that we have evolved the capacity to pick particular people as suitable mates. I show how our genes also shape how many friends we have, where we are located within social networks, and even who we pick as friends (i.e., the people who become a kind of “functional kin” to us). In a line of other work, using a large sample of isolated villages in Honduras, I show how the social networks we form depend on, and affect, our gut microbiome. Commensal microbes circulate in our social networks and these microbes in turn produce chemicals in our bodies that can shape both our behavior and our health. Finally, I discuss ongoing work in which we are exploring the fascinating topic of human social chemosignaling. Humans evolved to produce and detect odors that signal important social phenotypes, suggesting that we can smell out people who are suitable friends to us, or modify the behavior of the people around us by the volatile organic compounds our bodies emit. Human society is deeply biological.

Coffee, tea, and cider donuts will be available a few minutes before and after the talk in the foyer space outside of Moore Filene Auditorium.