The Evolution of Creativity | Gifford Lectures 2019 | Prof Mark Pagel | Pt 2

'Wired for Culture: the origins of the human social mind, or why humans occupied the world' - The Gifford Lectures 2019

Lecture 2: The evolution of creativity: you’re not as clever as you think

Human societies are unique among animals for their ability to accumulate knowledge and technologies. It is why we are able to build soaring cathedrals, smart-phones and driverless cars, while our close genetic cousins the chimpanzees live life on the forest floor as they have for millions of years. Why this difference? The usual answer is that we are smarter than the other animals, and we can just figure things out. But it turns out that we are far less clever than we like to think, and most of us never invent anything, much less understand how the things around us work. Even something as simple as a pencil combines many technologies. How, then, have we accumulated knowledge and technology while no other species has, and what can we do to promote innovation in the future?

Dates: 23, 24, 28, 29 October 2019
Location: Sir Charles Wilson Lecture Theatre, University of Glasgow

Mark Pagel is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Reading University in the UK. He is best known for his work on building statistical models to examine the evolutionary processes imprinted in animal and human behavior, from genomics to the emergence of complex systems – to language and culture. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning Oxford Encyclopedia of Evolution and co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology which is regarded as a classic in the field. He is widely published in Nature and Science. His book 'Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind' was one of the Guardian newspaper’s best science books of 2012.

The University of Glasgow, changing the world since 1451.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/