Robert Boyd: Recognizing the Role of Culture in Human Evolution
September 21, 2010How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
Rob Boyd, Professor of Anthropology, UCLA
Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2010
7 pm
Design North (CDN 60), ASU Tempe campus
Cosponsored by:
ASU Origins Project
Institute of Human Origins
School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Humans are a paradoxical species...
On the one hand, we are exceptionally good at adapting. Humans occupy a wider ecological and geographic range than any other species, using a much greater range of subsistence strategies and social organizations.
On the other hand, much of our behavior seems frankly maladaptive. For example, humans engage in cooperation in large groups of unrelated individuals.
In this talk, Boyd argued that both our exceptional adaptability and our propensity for folly stem from the fact that humans, unlike any other animal, acquire important components of their behavior by observing the behavior of others. This ability allows us to rapidly evolve superb culturally transmitted adaptations to local conditions, but it also necessarily leads to the cultural evolution of maladaptive behavior.
A professor of anthropology at UCLA, Boyd has written extensively on the ways that culture and the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation have helped us succeed as a species. His books include Culture and the Evolutionary Process and Not by Genes Alone, both coauthored with PJ Richerson. He has also written an introductory textbook on biological anthropology, How Humans Evolved, with his wife, Joan Silk, also a professor of anthropology at UCLA.