Wired for Culture: The natural history of human cooperation

*Please be aware that there are some images used in this talk of a violent nature.
Mark Pagel, one of the world's leading experts on human evolution and development, visits the RSA to investigate our species' capacity for culture, cooperation and community.

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[rsaorg]

Thanks for your comment, great to hear that you enjoy our videos.

[rsaorg]

Hi, glad you enjoyed the talk I am afraid that we don't have any plans at the moment to turn this video into an RSA Animate but we do hope to have a new video from our RSA Animate series landing soon.

[kakudmi]

Well if humans have been around for more than several millions years, or more, clearly the whole premise on how humans came to existence takes a whole new perspective.
thanks

[Jaksary]

Just found this channel, so nice to see that there are other people that think the same way as I do. Thankyou! :)

[CharlottePierce]

Animate! Animate! :-) This was in the required reading for Howard Rheingold's "Literacy of Cooperation" course. Enjoyed it very much.

[dririthlan]

I would like to introduce you to a concept. "Out of sight, out of mind". Nobody is forcing you to watch anything. But I do understand what you are on about. Try to remember the good rather than the bad. And it is perfectly fine to be obsessed with something everybody else thinks is stupid.

[whiterabit]

can you please turn this talk into a whiteboard animation? :)

[firehot]

Even though I fundamentally disagree with your time scale of human evolution, how does the timing of when humans evolved dispute the basic premise of Darwin's Theory of Evolution?

[firehot]

Also, it took me all of 30 seconds to find a page talking about the latest theories on the flagellum motor which dispel the myths Cremo came up with. Check out the external links at the bottom of the wikipedia page.

[firehot]

But you find it so confusing you can't even list one?

[firehot]

Well from the videos and research I have seen it appears we are extremely close to discovering how life originated from inorganic matter, so to simply state that there were no conditions for creating the amino-acids needed is to state something which we can't rule out. Saying we don't yet know how life came about still doesn't disprove the theory of evolution.

[maxgunn]

the one place you should actually read comments.

[GeorgiySlobodenyuk]

Yeah, it would be better if he used terminology like time-binding as said by Korzybski. No other animal that we know of accumulates knowledge from previous generations the same way we do. Which may give rise to why we are no longer hunter/gatherers while most animals still are even though they've been around longer.

[voiceofreason]

"Why do we advance, exponentially, while all other life stays the same? That alone defies Darwin's theory."

Advancement in terms of speciation does not exist, only the ability to adapt to ones environment. Suffice it to say that the reason why we do those things is because our environment influences will require such tasks of us. If the chimps that were given the similar environmental factors which lead to our evolution then it would happen.

[AnnoyedDragon]

Let me tell you about democracy in the UK.

Last election no single party got enough votes to form a government, because the public didn't have enough confidence in any of them.

Confidence is low because all three parties have practically the exact same policies. They have the same policies because they are being dictated to by the EU. We have no say on our own immigration, we have no say on our own food standard, we have no say on our fishing policy and now the EU wants to control our economy.

[MMiler]

a) humans can create, compose and do science because of the ways our brains have developed b) This is explained with biology c) Darwin's theory of evolution is also the unifying theory of biology d) as a human, Darwin did something other species can't do e) this simply means humans evolve differently to other species f) This reinforces his theory g) without evolution there would be no language to come up with the theory in the first place.

[kakudmi]

OK, there are numerous archeological evidence that clearly shows that the antiquity of human race is far greater than the suggested 150k years. Not one evidence, not two pieces of evidence, but tons. However, those are not my own findings and I can only express my belief in the works of scientists like Michael Cremo. Again, I suggest you watch some of his videos. Thanks.

[kakudmi]

Too many to list. Pls search Michael Cremo and study his evidence as he's much more qualified. Thanks.

[StephenDeagle]

I like the general direction he takes, but he ends up missing the point in analogizing human culture with a sort of Natural Selection 2.0, this idea that our culture can build upon the knowledge of the past in a way disallowed to previous species. While this may be true, this avoids the truly dialectical dynamic at play throughout human history. Natural selection maintains stability by adapting a pattern to a chaotic environment. Dialectical evolution, however, is change ex nihilo; revolution.

[dririthlan]

So you haven't been to places like, Kahnacademy. org, Ted. com, reason.tv or fora.tv there are probably many more that I am missing. But I would still beg to differ that you are looking hard enough.