ALLELE Lecturer to Discuss “The Consuming Instinct” at UA

TUSCALOOSA – Dr. Gad Saad, an evolutionary economist and professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, will deliver the next lecture in the 2013-2014 ALLELE Lecture series on Thursday, Nov. 7 at 7:30 p.m. in the Biology Building Auditorium on The University of Alabama campus. His lecture, “The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature,” is based on his book of the same title.

ALLELE lectures are coordinated by the Evolution Working Group at UA, and are free and open to the public.

Saad’s talk will offer a synopsis of his work in the area of evolutionary consumption by discussing key tenets of his book. Saad asserts that many consumption acts can be mapped onto four key Darwinian modules: survival, mating, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism. Furthermore, Saad’s book explains that cultural products such as song lyrics and movie plotlines are “fossils of the human mind” that highlight a shared biological-based human nature.

Saad has published other works on evolutionary consumption, including The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption in 2007. He also edited Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences as well a special issue on the futures of evolutionary psychology published in Futures magazine. He has published more than 70 scientific papers that relate to the intersection of evolutionary psychology and a broad range of disciplines including consumer behavior, marketing, advertising, psychology, medicine, and economics.  

Saad is the holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption and has held visiting associate professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California–Irvine. He is also a highly popular blogger for Psychology Today online.

He received a B.S. in mathematics and computer science and an M.B.A. from McGill University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Cornell University.

The 2013-2014 ALLELE series is supported by UA’s College of Arts and Sciences and the departments of anthropology, biological sciences, communicative disorders, geological sciences, philosophy, and religious studies.

The ALLELE lecture series is part of UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, the University’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships and memberships on the USA Today Academic All American Team.