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/ Events

Culture evolves

28 - 30 June 2010 09:00 - 17:00

Organised by Professor Andrew Whiten FBA, Professor Robert Hinde FRS, Professor Christopher Stringer FRS and Professor Kevin Laland

The capacity for culture is a product of biological evolution - yet culture itself can also evolve, generating cultural phylogenies. This highly interdisciplinary joint meeting with the British Academy will address new discoveries and controversies illuminating these phenomena, from the roots of culture in the animal kingdom to human, cultural evolutionary trees and the cognitive adaptations shaping our special cultural nature.

This meeting is part of See Further: The Festival of Science + Arts, celebrating 350 years of the Royal Society. This unique ten-day festival filling every corner of London’s Southbank Centre, features the Royal Society’s annual Summer Science Exhibition and a host of cross-disciplinary collaborations, including music, dance, comedy, discussion, film, literature and art.

The proceedings of this meeting have now been published in a dedicated issue of Philosophical Transactions B.

Organisers

  • Professor Andrew Whiten FBA, University of St Andrews, UK

    Andrew Whiten is Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology at the University of St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of the British Academy and of the International Cognitive Science Society. Through the last four decades his research has increasingly focused on the comparative study of social learning and culture, pursued through a combination of field research and 'lab' experiments spanning chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, several species of monkey, children and human adults. Antecedents to his editorship of the issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society corresponding to the present meeting include Culture Evolves (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2011, with Hinde, Stringer and Laland) and The Extension of Biology through Culture (PNAS 2017, with Ayala, Feldman and Laland).

  • Professor Robert Hinde CBE FBA FRS

  • Professor Chris Stringer FRS, Natural History Museum, UK

    Professor Chris Stringer has worked at the Natural History Museum since 1973, and is now Research Leader in Human Origins and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His early research concentrated on the relationship of Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe, but through his work on the 'Recent African Origin' model, he now collaborates with archaeologists, dating specialists and geneticists in attempting to reconstruct the evolution of modern humans globally. He has excavated at sites in Britain and abroad, directed the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (AHOB) for 13 years, and now co-directs the Pathways to Ancient Britain project (PAB). His recent books include The Origin of our Species (published in the USA as Lone Survivors, 2013) and Britain: one million years of the human story (with Rob Dinnis, 2014).
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    Professor Kevin Laland, University of St Andrews, UK

    Kevin Laland is Professor of Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews, and prior to that held positions at UCL, UC Berkeley and the University of Cambridge. He studies animal behaviour and evolution, with a specific focus on the evolution of cognition, particularly animal social learning, innovation and intelligence. He has published over 200 scientific articles and 10 books on these topics. His books include Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour, Animal Innovation, and Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Royal Society of Biology.