Culture and Evolvability: A Brief Archaeological Perspective

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• Professor Michael O'Brien, Texas A&M University - San Antonio
• Thursday 02 November 2023, 16:00-17:30
• McDonald Institute Seminar Room.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Simon Carrignon.

Evolvability refers to the capacity, ability, or potential of an organism to generate heritable variation. Under this view, all extragenetic inheritance is regarded not as noise, fine-tuning, or a luxury add-on to genetic inheritance but as an essential tool for short-term adaptation. With respect to humans, the cultural contribution to evolvability is key to understanding evolution. In many instances, cultural inheritance directs genetic inheritance, not the other way around. Culture, being relatively free from the genetic leash, can produce change that genetic inheritance cannot. Soft inheritance—the view that heredity can be changed by an organism’s experiences—has been disdained for over a century, but in light of the recent outpouring of data demonstrating extragenetic inheritance, defining evolution only in terms of genetic change ignores half the adaptive process, discarding much of what is interesting and relevant. Archaeologists can play a key role in evolvability research, given their contributions to topics such as niche construction, modularity, mosaic evolution, and developmental bias.

This talk is part of the Department of Archaeology - Garrod seminar series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Arch seminars
• Computational and Digital Archaeology Lab (CDAL)
• Department of Archaeology - Garrod seminar series
• McDonald Institute Seminar Room

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