Peter J. Richerson and Morten H. Christiansen, Chairpersons – May 27–June 1, 2012
Program Advisory Committee
Morten H. Christiansen, Dept. of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.
Herbert Gintis, Santa Fe Institute and Central European University, Northampton, MA, U.S.A.
Stephen C. Levinson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Peter J. Richerson, Dept. of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California–Davis, Davis, CA
Stephen Shennan, University College London, Institute of Archaeology, London, U.K.
Edward G. Slingerland, Asian Center, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Goal
To explore the role of cultural evolution in explaining human social structure, technology, language and religion
Key Questions
- What can we explain by means of cultural evolution that does not follow from other perspectives, such as memetics and innatist theories?
- Can we sketch roughly how general models of cultural evolution will come to differ as they are specialized to fit various domains?
- Is there a detectable signature of cultural evolution that can be observed across all domains?
- How can researchers and scholars in different areas of enquiry benefit from adopting cultural evolutionary tools?
- How can variations in the rates of cultural evolution across the broad sweep of human history and prehistory be explained?
- Are different domains amenable to different degrees of cultural engineering?