Anthropologists have a long history of applying concepts from evolutionary biology to cultural evolution. Evolutionary biologists, however, have been slow to turn to anthropology for insights about evolution. Recently evolutionary biology has been engaged in a debate over the need to revise evolutionary theory to account for developments made in the sixty years since the Modern Synthesis, the standard evolutionary paradigm, was framed. Anthropology has much to offer to this debate. This lecture explores how the domestication of plants and animals provides an ideal model system for evaluating central EES tenets about directionality, causality, targets of selection, modes of inheritance, and pace of evolution.
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