An Historic Meeting for Cultural Evolution
Today I leave for the inaugural conference of the Cultural Evolution Society… feeling the historic significance of this gathering as I look at this collection of books selectively pulled from my personal library.
This is but a tiny sampling of knowledge representing the arc of history for cultural evolutionary studies. The first book, written by Charles Darwin, came out in 1871 and was the earliest attempt to characterize humanity using the scientific lens of evolutionary studies. Not surprisingly, this evoked quite a controversy among the religious and otherwise dogmatic in the scientific community at the time.
Track forward with other works that made a similar argument, and you will see the same effect. Most famous of these was the book Sociobiology by E.O. Wilson that came out in the late 1970's.
Other books depicted here include the first formal and rigorous use of mathematics (Cultural Transmission and Evolution), translated from population genetics, to establish cultural evolutionary studies as a robust and eventually flourishing quantitative science.
This week we will bring together more than 200 researchers from dozens of academic fields who have been studying cultural evolution in one form or another. Never before has such a gathering happened.
I include a book on the history of the “evolutionary synthesis” in this photo as a reminder that biology itself took decades to achieve synthesis. For the study of culture through an evolutionary lens, it has taken nearly 150 years!
Honored to play a small role in this monumental arc of history…as the co-investigator on a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to help create the Cultural Evolution Society.
Onward, fellow humans.
Links to the books with their original publication date:
- The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex by Charles Darwin (published in 1871).
- The Evolution of Man and Society by C.D. Darlington (published in 1969).
- Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E.O. Wilson (published in 1975).
- The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology edited by Ernst Mayr and William Provine (published in 1980).
- Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman (published in 1981).
- Social Evolution by Robert Trivers (published in 1985).
- Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd (published in 2004).
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