Dear All, A reminder that the fourth and final Nature and Culture seminar will take place tomorrow (Tue 19th May) from 1pm to 2.30pm in Seminar Room 1 of the HPS Department. Kevin Laland (St Andrews, and a visitor to HPS this term) will speak on "The Evolution of Culture".
Abstract: Both demographically and ecologically, humans are a remarkably successful species. This success is often attributed to our capacity for culture. But how did our species’ extraordinary cultural capabilities evolve from their roots in animal social learning and tradition? I will provide a provisional answer. After characterizing contemporary research into animal social learning, I will describe the findings of an international competition (the ‘social learning strategies tournament’) that we organized to investigate the best way to learn. I will suggest that the tournament sheds light on why copying is widespread in nature, and why humans happen to be so good at it. I will go on to describe some other theoretical and experimental projects suggesting feedback mechanisms that may have been instrumental to the evolution of culture. These include comparative statistical analyses across primates that revealed that innovation and social learning frequencies co-vary positively with relative brain size, suggesting that these abilities were instrumental in driving the evolution of the large primate brain, a mathematical model of the evolution of teaching, and an experimental study of the cognitive underpinnings of cumulative culture, in children, chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys. All welcome, Best wishes, Tim -- Tim Lewens University of Cambridge Professor of Philosophy of Science, Department of History and Philosophy of Science Deputy Director, Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Principal Investigator, 'A Science of Human Nature?' http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk http://www.humannature.hps.cam.ac.uk New Books: _The Biological Foundations of Bioethics_ (OUP, January 2015) http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198712657.do# _Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges_ (OUP, August 2015) http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199674183.do _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
