Monday, October 01, 2012

HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION: A Conversation with Joseph Henrich

From Edge, a very interesting talk on the role of culture in human evolution by anthropologist Joseph Henrich, Professor of Psychology and Economics, University of British Columbia (Canada). His research interests include:
  • evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making, and culture with an emphasis on the cognition foundations of cultural learning
  • culture-gene coevolution, human sociality, prestige, leadership, and large-scale cooperation
  • economic behavior and the emergence of complex human institutions and societies
  • cultural and evolutionary origins of faith and religion, and its relationship to cooperation and societal complexity
Henrich holds the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition, and Evolution at the University of British Columbia.

As a side note, I am not on board on his plan to consider cultural evolution as an aspect of biological evolution - we can't collapse objective biology with collective culture. 

HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION

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