EVENTS

STOQ 2009 – THE STOQ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
«BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION. Facts and Theories»

Abstracts of the Lectures:

Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

The Concept of Evolution as Applied to the Development of Human Cultures

The emergence and development of our species, Homo sapiens, can certainly be encompassed within the framework of Darwinian evolution. Nor is it argued that there is anything in the development of human cultures and societies which runs counter to Darwinian principles. But the ‘human revolution’, commonly taken to refer to that emergence, took place some 200,000 years ago in Africa. The ‘sedentary revolution’, accompanied by the development of agriculture which followed some 10,000 years ago, and then the rise of urban communities which succeeded it in some regions, do not seem much clarified by the application of such principles. Attempts to propose ‘evolutionary’ mechanisms for human culture change, comparable perhaps to the genes which underlie explanations of biological development (such as ‘memes’ or ‘cultural viruses’) have not been successful. It has sometimes been proposed that the diversity of human cultures which developed could be compared with the geographical distribution of sub-species within a biological species, but the parallels are difficult to sustain.
The paper seeks to analyse further some of the difficulties arising when an attempt is made to employ Darwinian principles in the explanation of culture change. A similar set of problems arises when the focus is upon languages and the explanation of linguistic diversity.