GELIFES Seminars - Luke Rendell

Luke Rendell (University of St Andrews, UK)

The cultural lives of cetaceans and the reach of gene-culture co-evolution outside humans

In recent years our understanding of the vital role of cultural transmission and inheritance in cetacean societies has widened significantly, which has implications for how we thing about their evolution, population biology, and conservation. In this talk I will outline the kinds of evidence that underpin this new understanding, and show how research on cetaceans is at the forefront of growing insights into the importance of interactions between cultural transmission and genetic evolution, termed gene-culture co-evolution, in non-humans in general.