The Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity and Exeter is happy to announce a series of free weekly webinars for Fall 2021 on Evolution and Social Systems. Webinars will be held on Tuesdays at 11:45am Eastern time from September 28 through December 7. A Zoom registration link and more information about the webinar series and weekly topics can be found at http://www.dysoc.org/ess_webinars.

This series is a continuation of the past semester seminars: DySoC/NIMBioS Webinar Series on Cultural Evolution and DySoC/NIMBioS Webinar Series on Human Origins and Cultural Evolution.

Organizers: Thomas Currie (University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, Cornwall) and Sergey Gavrilets (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics, DySoC Director, University of Tennessee)

Co-organizer: Peter J. Richerson (University of California, Davis)

Human social systems are extraordinarily complex and diverse. Around the world are organized into different societies that are structured and by a variety of different institutions, social norms, beliefs, languages, and other aspect of culture. Understanding how societies function and why societies are the way they are, are topics of interest to a wide variety of different academic disciplines. Evolutionary thinking can help bring together the insights from different disciplines and approaches, and can play an important role in understanding the similarities and differences between human societies and those of other species, the ways that different environmental contexts present different challenges that societies have adapted to, how and why culture and societies change over time, and how different cultural histories have shaped the world we live in today. In this interdisciplinary seminar series we present talks from a variety of researchers, including anthropologists, archaeologists, behavioural ecologists, economists, psychologists, and sustainability scientists. As many of the talks will illustrate, this work is not only of academic interest but is increasingly important in addressing some of the biggest social and ecological challenges we face in the world today.