Скачать или смотреть Outreach for the Cultural Evol. Soc. : Everybody needs to know a little bit about cultural evolution

Dysoc/NIMBioS Webinar Series on Cultural Evolution

The Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis are happy to announce a series of free webinars on cultural evolution.

http://www.dysoc.org/ces_webinars

Speaker: Peter J. Richerson (University of California, Davis)

Moderator: Sergey Gavrilets (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics, DySoC Director, NIMBioS Associate Director for Scientific Activities, University of Tennessee)

Abstract: Biology education has a terrible problem. On the one hand it is a vast discipline webbed into all of natural science and mathematics. Specialization is a must, yet for any given specialty, any other specialty might become relevant. An ecologist might suddenly need to know molecular genetics. The US solution is to teach high school and 1st year college students a little bit about all of biology before they specialize. Practicing ecologists don't really have a working knowledge of molecular genetics but if an ecological problem presents itself for which molecular genetics might help, many ecologists will remember enough to head to the internet or down the hall to bone up. Biology is a successful mega-discipline in part because of those comprehensive if necessarily superficial courses. The human sciences, which really should be thought of as a sub-discipline of biology, have no such courses, and hence no good sense of how humans fit into the larger world. Cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution are topics which illustrate how humans are webbed into the natural world. For example humans make extraordinary use of culture, but we are among a large number of species for which it is important. Human cultural phenomena are intimately connected with the rest of human biology. The physiological imperatives of raising highly altricial young have driven the evolution of our family systems. A mission of the Cultural Evolution Society is to help every biology student, especially every student of humans, know at least a little bit about cultural evolution.

Bio: Peter J. Richerson Is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on the processes of cultural evolution. His 1985 book with Robert Boyd, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, applied the mathematical tools used by organic evolutionists to study a number of basic problems in human cultural evolution. His later books with Boyd include Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, an introduction to cultural evolution aimed at a broad audience and The Origins and Evolution of Cultures, a compendium of their more important papers and book chapters. He has recently co-edited a book Cultural Evolution with Morten Christiansen reporting the results of a Strüngmann Forum. His recent publications used theoretical models to try to understand some of the main events in human evolution, such as the evolution of the advanced capacity for imitation (and hence cumulative cultural evolution) in humans, the origins of tribal and larger scale cooperation, and the origins of agriculture. He and his colleagues also investigate cultural evolution in laboratory microsocieties.

This webinar was streamed live and recorded for later viewing. The recorded video will be uploaded to our CES Modules YouTube channel and a link will be posted here when available. Subscribe to receive notifications when new recordings are posted.