KLI Colloquia are invited research talks of about an hour followed by 30 min discussion. The talks are held in English, open to the public, and offered in hybrid format.
Fall-Winter 2025-2026 KLI Colloquium Series
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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5881861923?omn=85945744831
Meeting ID: 588 186 1923
25 Sept 2025 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET
A Dynamic Canvas Model of Butterfly and Moth Color Patterns
Richard Gawne (Nevada State Museum)
14 Oct 2025 (Tues) 3-4:30 PM CET
Vienna, the Laboratory of Modernity
Richard Cockett (The Economist)
23 Oct 2025 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET
How Darwinian is Darwinian Enough? The Case of Evolution and the Origins of Life
Ludo Schoenmakers (KLI)
6 Nov (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET
Common Knowledge Considered as Cause and Effect of Behavioral Modernity
Ronald Planer (University of Wollongong)
20 Nov (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET
Rates of Evolution, Time Scaling, and the Decoupling of Micro- and Macroevolution
Thomas Hansen (University of Oslo)
4 Dec (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET
Chance, Necessity, and the Evolution of Evolvability
Cristina Villegas (KLI)
8 Jan 2026 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET
Embodied Rationality: Normative and Evolutionary Foundations
Enrico Petracca (KLI)
15 Jan 2026 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET
On Experimental Models of Developmental Plasticity and Evolutionary Novelty
Patricia Beldade (Lisbon University)
29 Jan 2026 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET
Jan Baedke (Ruhr University Bochum)
Event Details

Topic description:
Assessing mental activity from the material residues of behavior is a crucial and thorny problem for both archeologists and animal cognition scholars. Assessing the behavioral performance that is supposedly guided by such mental activity, and produces the material residue more directly (at least in theory), is however an earlier step that is not easy either. This goes frequently overlooked, for we tend to focus on cognition and its species-typical requirements. In this talk, I offer an overview of the inferential processes that we use to deduce behavioral performance from artifacts. My interest lies specifically in accounting for behavioral performance that exceeds the innovation capacity of a single individual, which has recently been proposed as an evidential criterion for cumulative culture phenomena.
Biographical note:
Chiara holds a Master´s degree from the University of Milan and has been working on her PhD thesis "The Evolutionary Role of Imitation in the Hominid Lineage: Time for a Reappraisal" at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand as well as at the Australian National University, Canberra. Having received a Writing-Up Fellowship from the KLI she is currently completing her PhD thesis.