The evolution of animal and human cultures

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• Thursday 25 June 2009
• 7.00pm - 8.30pm
• Lecturers: Prof Andrew Whiten

Our human capacity for culture - acquiring skills and knowledge from previous generations, and accumulating these in ever more complex ways - seems to make us different from all other animals. It has allowed our species to spread to almost every part of the earth and created a mind-boggling diversity of customs in the process. It has been said that our unique cultural nature allows us to rise above the biological constraints experienced by other animals, and divorces us from the evolutionary, Darwinian struggles that shape other life-forms. In this lecture, celebrating the 'Darwin-200' year, Andrew Whiten will argue that to the contrary, there is now a big story to tell about the evolution of culture itself, which would have greatly excited Darwin. This story comes in two parts. First, in recent decades we have learned much about the evolution of the 'capacity for culture' - the ability to learn from others and pass on traditions - in the animal world.

In this talk, aided by video clips, Andrew will describe his research on the 'cultures' of chimpanzees and other primates, and what we have learned in recent years about how other animals, from bees to parrots to meerkats, learn from others. The second part of the story of cultural evolution arose most strikingly in our human ancestral past, as culture itself diversified to create all the different traditions of the world, including languages, technologies and religions. In recent years the methods of evolutionary biologists have been trained on these phenomena to reveal fascinating new discoveries.

Tickets cost £8 standard, £6 concessions, £4 Ri Members