Garrod Research Seminar - Why be a monk?

Thu 19 October 2023

McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

In order to understand the past, archaeology has always been concerned with how culture arises, how it is defined and how it changes through time. Several theoretical and methodological approaches have been proposed within the field to do so, one of the most promising ones being Cultural Evolutionary studies. Rooted on the biological concept of descent with modification, this specific theoretical approach analyses how different factors (environmental, social, psychological, biological...) interact with the transmission of social items to shape human cultures.

In this Seminar Series, we will welcome to Cambridge some of the foremost cultural evolutionary archaeologists and social scientists. We hope to foster a greater understanding of Cultural Evolutionary Theory among archaeologists with diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds. In this way, we aim to provide the attendees a solid decision framework on whether this methodological and theoretical package can help them improve their research.

Professor Ruth Mace (University College London) is a leading anthropologist studying evolutionary demography and life history, particularly empirical studies focussing on rural African and Sino-Tibetan populations.

Abstract: Here we examine the evolution of religious celibacy from an evolutionary perspective. We use this issue to address the wider question of whether fitness considerations underly the evolution of cultural traits. We use the tools from behavioural ecology. We model how sending a child to the monastery, to live a celibate life, could evolve as a mechanism to enhance inclusive fitness. If close kin benefit from the decision and the decision is made by parents rather than the boy himself, then sending more than a negligible proportion of sons to the monastery to live as monks can be favoured by selection. We test the model with demographic data from Western China, where a significant number of young boys were sent to live as monks in Tibetan monasteries. We show that the decision to send a son to monastery was not costly to the parents of monks in terms of inclusive fitness and thus can evolve by kin selection. Thus monasteries represents an example of a complex institution that may have arisen due to kin-selected benefits.

Cost: Free