Economist Herbert Gintis offers the lecture The Evolution of Morality, describing morality as a result of a dynamic cultural and genetic interplay, at Bates College at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 4, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

The event is open to the public at no charge. It’s sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program, which makes available each year a dozen or so distinguished scholars who visit colleges and universities that have chapters of Phi Beta Kappa.

For more information about the lecture, please call 207-786-6146.

In The Evolution of Morality, Gintis will challenge the classical understanding of morality, as presented by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, as a product of civil society. Instead, he will posit morality as the product of an evolutionary dynamic involving genes and culture.

In this model, culture is transformed by humans, and the new culture encourages new adaptive behaviors — making genes the product of culture just as culture is the product of genes. So morality is attributed to a set of evolved predispositions such as altruistic cooperation and punishment; the valuing of character virtues like honesty, loyalty, considerateness, cleanliness and courage; sensitivity to the judgment of others; and empathy.

Gintis is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a professor of economics at Central European University in Budapest, where he heads a multidisciplinary research project, The Social and Mental Dynamics of Cooperation, funded by the European Science Foundation.

He is the author of books including Game Theory Evolving (Princeton University Press, 2000) and The Bounds of Reason (Princeton University Press, 2009). He regularly reviews material for prominent academic publications such as Science, Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and is an editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and of Games.

He received his doctorate in economics from Harvard University. His areas of expertise include altruism, cooperation, gene-culture co-evolution, human capital theory, and behavioral, evolutionary and epistemic game theory.

Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars spend two days on each campus, meeting informally with students and faculty, taking part in classroom discussions, and giving a public lecture open to the entire academic community. The program aims to contribute to the intellectual life of the institution by making possible an exchange of ideas between the Visiting Scholars and the resident faculty and students.

Now entering its 55th year, the program has sent 577 scholars to colleges and universities across the country.

According to Cartmill, author of the award-winning “A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History,” people differ genetically. “Some of these differences are correlated with factors of geography, physical appearance and behavior. However, these biological facts do not justify classifying people into so-called races. If races are defined in terms of geography, then biological human races have not existed for centuries, if ever.”

Loring Danforth, professor of anthropology at Bates, emphasizes that in contradicting many people’s common-sense views of race, “physical or biological anthropologists have crucial insights to offer on the subject.”

A member of the Duke faculty since 1969, Cartmill is the recipient of the Duke University Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award and the Duke Medical Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. His research interests include animal locomotion, origin and differentiation of primates, evolution of arboreal adaptations in mammals, evolution of the carotid arteries and basicranium, origins of higher primates, theoretical systematics, history of ideas and the philosophy of science.

Co-author of Human Structure, Cartmill is former editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and past president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. He has received grants and fellowships from National Institutes of Heath as well as the Guggenheim, National Science and Leakey foundations. Cartmill received his B.A. from Pomona College and his M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Chicago.

The annual Visiting Scholar Lecture is sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious academic honor society. The lectureship program brings some of the country’s most distinguished thinkers to college campuses for public lectures and classroom discussions.

Spacks, Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, will discuss The Logic of Self-Love: Jane Austen and ‘Frankenstein,’ an exploration of how two women in the Romantic period suggested critiques of an ethic of self-aggrandizement.

Chair of her department from 1991-97, Spacks was also professor of English at Yale University from 1979-89 and taught at Wellesley College from 1959- 79.

Her books include The Poetry of Vision (Harvard, 1967); The Female Imagination (Knopf, 1981); Imaging a Self (Harvard, 1976); The Adolescent Imagination (Basic, 1981); Gossip (Knopf, 1985); Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English (University of Chicago, 1990) and Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (University of Chicago, 1995).

Past president of the Modern Language Association, Spacks is a trustee of the National Humanities Center and chair of the board of the American Council of Learned Societies.

She formerly served on the boards of the American Association for the Advancement of the Humanities, the English Institute and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and as a trustee of Wellesley College.

Spacks has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and was the recipient of the Outstanding Faculty of Virginia Award in 1995. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Institute and the National Humanities Center.

Spacks received her bachelor of arts degree from Rollis College, her M.A. from Yale University, her Ph.D. from the University of Califronia, Berkeley, and an honorary doctorate of human letters from Rollins College.

The annual Visiting Scholar Lecture is sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious academic honor society. The lectureship program brings some of the country’s most distinguished thinkers to college campuses for public lectures and classroom discussions.