Social Learning and Cultural Evolution in Animals and Humans

Announcing a one-day workshop with Kevin Laland (St. Andrews) on social learning and cultural evolution. The workshop will include speakers from the Biology and Philosophy departments at Macquarie University. The workshop is free to attend, but registration is essential. Please contact Richard Heersmink to register for attendance: [email protected]

Traditionally, culture has been seen as a uniquely human trait. Recent evidence of social learning capable of sustaining multi-generational behavioural inheritance in animal species from fish to primates challenges this picture. Rather than being a lonely biological peculiarity, it is now clear that human cultural inheritance sits at one end of a spectrum of types of cultural and traditional inheritance mechanisms seen right across the Animal Kingdom. When viewed in this light, the study of animal social learning, traditions and cultures, is essential to understanding human cultural evolution, and vice versa. In this interdisciplinary workshop, philosophers and biologists working on cultural evolution and social learning in animals and humans come together to consider key issues such as the role of niche construction in cultural evolution, the importance of development to a science of human and animal cultural evolution, the tempo and mode of cultural evolution and the simil!
 arities and differences in cultural inheritance mechanisms between species.

9.15 coffee/tea and registration

9.55 Introduction

10.00 - 11.30 Kevin Laland (St. Andrews) The Evolution of Culture

11.30 - 12.00 morning coffee/tea

12.00 - 1.00  Culum Brown (MQ) Social Learning in Fishes

1.00 - 2.00 lunch

2.00 - 3.00 Rachael Brown (MQ) Impossible Cultures? Exploring the Applicability of the Evo-Devo Conceptual Framework in the Cultural Domain

3.00 - 4.00 Karola Stotz (MQ) TBC

4.00 - 4.30 coffee/tea

4.30 - 5.30 Richard Menary (MQ) The Enculturated Brain: The Case of Mathematics

5.30 - 6.30 Andrew Barron (MQ) TBC

6.30 Drinks

The workshop will be held at the Macquarie School of Management on the University campus in room 101 Location and details of how to get there can be found here: http://www.conferences.mgsm.com.au/macquarie-park-executive-conference-centre/location/