biology – behavior – biotech

About

About me and what I do

Hi - my name is Wael. I'm a PhD student working in behavioral biology. This lets me research cool things like the biological factors that influence our success in the sexual marketplace, or the the ways in which our .

I also write stuff which you may have seen featured by Quillette, Genetic Literacy Project, International Business Times, Arab Millennial, or by a number of other news sites and think tanks. Some of my think pieces and reports have been translated and republished, which is great since I love languages - I can manage in up to five (though I'm told my Japanese has a persistent Persian accent).

You can scroll down to get in touch or learn more about what I do. If you've got a cool project and you want to reach out, you can email me at waeltajimiller@gmail.com.

Interests

Stuff I like to read and write about - and occasionally even work on

  • Cognitive Anthropology
    • Non-biological belief-predicated kinship groups; their evolutionary templates
    • Social grouphood & cognition; enabling group identity
    • Cultural evolution and devolution
  • Neuroscience
    • Declarative memory and meaningful experiences
    • Neuropharmacology; nootropics, n=1 autoexperimentation
    • Cognitive ability and individual differences
  • Behavioral Economics
    • Bounded rationality and behavior
    • Prosociality and dyssociality
    • Behavioral externalities and collective outcomes
  • Cliodynamics
    • Cultural cyclicity
    • Inadequate equilibria
    • ‘Asabiyyah
  • Evolutionary Biology
    • Gene-culture coevolution
    • Life history theory
    • Behavioral ecology

Q1 – how does inequality in the domains of cognitive ability and reproductive outcome affect the life cycle and stability of social ecologies?

Q2 – how do cultural and religious systems evolve patterns of behavior to alleviate the effects of these inequalities?

Q3 – how might answers to these problems be used to build models that explain human history – and predict future trajectories for social systems today?