Hosted by the School of Psychological Science
Abstract: Children inherit their parents' genes, but they also inherit traits through social means like teaching and copying. While natural selection acts on both genetically and socially transmitted traits, we have traditionally focussed on biological over cultural evolution. In this talk, I will provide computational evidence to argue that we are wrong to dismiss culture. First, I will show that cultural evolution could have rapidly outpaced biological evolution to shape uniquely human emotional behaviour. Second, I will show that cultural evolution is an emergent property even in organisms with a highly limited cognitive architecture. Without being dismissive of efforts to understand genetics and gene-environment interactions, I will conclude by underscoring the importance of considering social and familial environments in developmental and evolutionary psychology.
Bio: My research interests are best summarised as the quantitative exploration of development, both within individuals and in populations. Broadly, I investigate how affective and cognitive faculties impact each other, and how they are affected by the environment. I triangulate problems with narrowly focussed experiments aided by computational models of behaviour, machine learning to find complex patterns in large secondary datasets, and agent-based population simulations.