Biweekly Colloquia: From cultural evolution to the evolution of cooperation (Charles Stanish / University of South Florida & Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, USA)
Jun 12, 2023 from 04:15 PM to 05:45 PM
Leibnizstraße 1, room 204
Charles Stanish • Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment, University of South Florida & Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, USA
This talk explores some emergent theoretical frameworks in contemporary cultural evolutionary studies. Stage-based evolutionary models were abandoned in the early 1980s and a number of fruitful approaches have been developing since that time. This talk examines cultural transmission models that combine elements of evolutionary game theory and complexity theory. These elements include self-organized criticality (SOC), pathway dependency, costly signaling, and emergence, among others. This approach is epistemologically-aligned with the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) and provides an exciting way to model the social evolution of our species. An empirical example from prehistoric Peru is used to illustrate how this new framework can model the emergence of complex society in the archaeological record beginning in the 3rd millennium BCE.
Biweekly Colloquia Abstract: Charles Stanish
