Agenda
Conference “Eating: one behavior, many sciences.: When genes, brains, cultures and environments meet around the dinner table“
Ever felt the urge to do something you shouldn’t, resisted, and failed? Then this day is for you!
That small moment of failure says something important: what we do is not fixed, and it is not decided by a single cause. Every behavior —a craving, a choice, a lifelong habit— is a moving equilibrium between forces that all pull at once: our genes, our brains and bodies, our evolutionary past, the culture we were raised in, the people around us, and the environment that makes some options easy and others hard. Understanding the dynamic of these forces matters, because many individual and societal problems — obesity, addiction, environmental damage — depend less on what people know and think than on what people do. The difficulty is that each of these forces is studied by a different discipline, on its own timescale, with its own language. The result is many partial explanations of the same act, and no shared picture of how they add up.
The INCEPTION program and the department of Computational Biology are pleased to invite you a one-day conference entitled “Eating: one behavior, many sciences. When genes, brains, cultures and environments meet around the dinner table“, to be held on November 9, 2026, from 9:30am to 5:30pm, in the CIS auditorium. This conference will ask whether the pieces can be put back together, using one familiar behavior as a common thread: eating.
Held in English, the event will bring together perspectives from genetics, neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, sociology, philosophy, and environmental science to explore the many factors that shape human eating behavior.
Through accessible talks, concrete examples, and interdisciplinary discussions, speakers will examine how genes, brains, and bodies interact with our evolutionary history, and the social and cultural environments in which we live. The day will also provide opportunities to connect these different perspectives, compare approaches, and discuss how they can contribute to a more integrated understanding of human behavior.
Find out more about the final agenda
Organized with the support of the Institut Pasteur, the conference is open to all, both within and outside the institute, and anyone interested in the topic is welcome to attend!