Since we can't get together for a fish dinner, we celebrate on Zoom with a special Darwin Day Sunday Speaker!
Rob Boyd: A Different Kind of Animal - How Culture Transformed our Species
The ability to transmit information through time is a key human evolutionary innovation.
Since emerging from Africa 60,000 years ago, humans have spread to virtually terrestrial habitat, utilizing a wider range of subsistence and social systems than any other mammal. The standard explanation for our capacity for rapid adaptation is that we have superior cognitive abilities. In this talk I will argue that cultural learning is also essential. Unlike any other animal, people 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 that that are far beyond the inventive capacity of individual human cognition, but it also leads to the spread of maladaptive behavior.
Rob Boyd received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California at San Diego and a Ph.D. in ecology at U. C. Davis. He has taught at Duke, Emory University and UCLA. He has been Professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change since 2012. His research focuses on population dynamic models of culture and is summarized in two books, co-authored with P. J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, and Not By Genes Alone. Rob has also co-authored an introductory textbook in biological anthropology, How Humans Evolved, with his wife, Joan Silk. He and Joan have two grown children and live in Phoenix. His hobbies are rock climbing and bicycling.
Please join us on Zoom or YouTube:
1) Zoom Meeting:
https://zoom.us/j/535462070?pwd=UGJBOXRYcTF2SXJMb01RNTdvM2Y2QT09
Meeting ID: 535 462 070
Passcode: 4808445044
2) YOUTUBE: You can watch live (15 second delay), or you can watch later. Here is the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOw8Sl1yofrwRuGUYS_OOOA
Need help? Email ron.russell@hsgp.org before the day of this meeting.
The Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix presents its Sunday Speaker meetings twice a month on Sunday mornings. For now our meetings are on Zoom and YouTube. We look forward to seeing you at the Humanist Community Center when it's safe to meet in person!
Meetings are free and open to the public.
Go to our YouTube channel to see past meetings, presentations and and interviews: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOw8Sl1yofrwRuGUYS_OOOA
We invite you to become a dues-paying member of HSGP. To become a member or make a donation, go to www.hsgp.org
Thank you!
AZ
United States