Senior research officer
After more than 25 years as a researcher, in September 2022 I went over to working with something that actually makes a difference, as a senior research officer at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.
Cultural Evolution
The latest scietific work I carried out focussed on investigating the evolution of democracy. For this reason, I was one of several project managers for the V-Dem-project at the Department of Political Science in Gothenburg.
I also did research on the evolution of religion, where my aim was to bring order in the relationships between evolutionary factors, psychological factors and religious phenomena. Further, I investigated how health effects of religious practices come about through religious regulations and placebo effects, and how these health effects in turn have affected the evolution of religion.
Biological Evolution
In my biological research, I investigated how species differences and sex differences in mammal brains are related to sex differences in behaviour. The results so far indicate that behavioral differences between the sexes has had some influence on primate brain architecture, but also that these relationships are far from clear.
My other biological research focused mostly on the use and development of phylogenetic methods, especially through analyses of the evolution of sex differences. Besides that, I long nurtured a special interest for social evolution in general, and the evolution of cooperation in particular.
During my post-doc at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville I investigated what factors that influence parasite diversity. The data I helped gather is available at the Global Mammal Parasite Database.
