The suggestion that culture changes in broadly Darwinian ways goes back to Darwin himself, who suggested that his explanation of species change might also apply to language change. However the idea of studying culture in Darwinian terms fell out of favour for most of the 20th-century, after some early anthropologists misused Darwin’s ideas, for instance to defend distinctions between supposedly ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ cultures. The idea of cultural Darwinism was revived in the 1970s and 1980s in various forms, the most well-known of which is Richard Dawkins’ idea of the meme. But how Darwinian is culture really? In this talk, Dr Thom Scott-Phillips will discuss the history of the idea of cultural evolution, and the prospects for a Darwinian science of culture.
About Thom Scott-Phillips
Dr Thom Scott-Phillips is Senior Research Fellow in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, at Durham University. His research focuses on evolutionary and cognitive approaches to the human mind and culture, and in particular to communication and language. He employs a variety of research methods: controlled cognitive science experiments, mathematical and computational models, and theoretical, cross-disciplinary synthesis. His first book, Speaking Our Minds, was published in November 2014. His major prizes and awards include an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant, early-career fellowships from the ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust, and Durham University’s Addison Wheeler bequest, the New Investigator Award from the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (2011), and the British Psychological Society’s prize for Outstanding Doctoral Research (2010).
About Richard Dawkins
Professor Richard Dawkins is a renowned British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. His popular science books include The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), and The God Delusion (2006), and he is aso a Vice President of the British Humanist Association.