18 November: Robert Boyd, UCLA Anthropology

Why baboons don’t have history

Many scholars interested in evolution and human behavior minimize the importance of transmitted culture. The recurrent, reliably developing components of human behavior and psychology (aka the interesting stuff) emerges from an information rich, evolved psychology. The remaining stuff that varies from time to time, or place to place, is, to quote an eminent evolutionary psychologist, “just history.” In this talk, I defend the view that understanding why humans have history and other animals do not is crucial to understanding human adaptive success, and why human behavior and social organization are so different from other animals.

This talk is a precis of a new book manuscript by Peter Richerson and myself entitled The Nature of Cultures which is currently under review. If you are interested in reading a draft of this book please email me at rboyd@anthro.ucla.edu