#216 Thomas Morgan: Cultural Evolution And Transmission, And Cumulative Culture

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/the-dissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT Anchor (podcast): https://anchor.fm/thedissenter Dr. Thomas Morgan is Assistant Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. His background is in the evolution of animal social behavior and cognition. He graduated from Cambridge with a bachelor's in zoology in 2009, focusing on vertebrate evolution and behavioral ecology. He completed his doctorate in 2013 at the University of St. Andrews working with Kevin Laland to carry out a series of experiments testing evolutionary hypotheses about human social learning. From 2014 to 2016, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Tom Griffiths in the computational cognitive science lab at University of California at Berkeley where he developed a new platform for large-scale online social experiments called Dallinger. He joined the Adaptation, Behavior, Culture and Society group at Arizona State Unviersity in August 2016. He’s interested in the psychological mechanisms that support culture and evolutionary explanations for how humans came to be.  In this episode, we talk about cultural evolution. First, we discuss how we study the cognitive mechanisms that provide a biological basis for culture, and the relationship between biology and culture. We then get into Dr. Morgan’s work on conformist transmission, and sex differences in conformity and where they stem from. We also talk about the chicken-and-egg problem of culture, and issues with sociocultural constructionist approaches, and cross-cultural variation. Finally, we discuss what we can learn by studying other species, and about how peculiar is cumulative culture in the animal realm.  -- Follow Dr. Morgan’s work: Faculty Page: https://bit.ly/2VXrVGN Ecco Lab: https://bit.ly/2JjQUe4 ResearchGate profile: https://bit.ly/2W241K0 -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, SCIMED, PER HELGE HAAKSTD LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, RUI BELEZA, MIGUEL ESTRADA, ANTÓNIO CUNHA, CHANTEL GELINAS, JERRY MULLER, FRANCIS FORD, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BRIAN RIVERA, ADRIANO ANDRADE, YEVHEN BODRENKO, SERGIU CODREANU, ADAM BJERRE, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, AIRES ALMEIDA, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, AND RICARDO VLADIMIRO! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, ROSEY, AND JIM FRANK!