Gad Saad from Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) will be the featured speaker at a School of Life Sciences seminar. His talk is titled "On the Method of Evolutionary Psychology and Its Applicability to Consumer Research."

There is a growing interest amongst marketing scholars to examine the evolutionary bases of a wide range of consumer phenomena. While specific evolutionary hypotheses are typically tested using tools that marketing researchers are familiar with (e.g., experiments or surveys), the method of evolutionary psychology is rooted in its unique epistemology (the manner in which knowledge is generated and organized), which is comprised of three elements: 1) the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations; 2) the building of nomolological networks of cumulative evidence (triangulation of convergent lines of evidence); and 3) an organizing tree of knowledge. The purpose of his talk is to describe this process using marketing-relevant examples, as a means of providing a framework of best practices to marketing scholars who might wish to incorporate the evolutionary lens within their research programs.