• Home
• |
• Future
  • Spring 2012
  • Ticket Options
• |
• Past
  • Browse
  • Past events
  • Hot Topics
  • Written debates
  • Talks
  • Transcripts
  • Quick Debates
  • Micro-sites
  • Partners
• |
• About
  • Background
  • Contact
  • Press
  • Newsletters
  • People

Subjects

• Politics UK
• Politics International
• History
• Media
• The Arts
• Literature
• Ideas
• Technology & Science
• Environment
• Travel

The best of...

• Great Writers
• Great Oratory
• Humorous
• Left-field
• Paradigm Shifts
• Right-wing

See all the best of...

Our partners

• Edinburgh Literary Festival
• Contagious Magazine
• IQ2 Green Festival
• Institute of Art and Ideas
• Democracy's Illusions

See all our partners

Double click video
to toggle full screen

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on evolutionary empathy

16 Jul 2009

Speakers: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

• summary
• speakers
• expert comments
• user comments

American anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy lectures on the evolutionary origins of humans' ability to empathise and engage with each other, propounding the theory that these abilities originated in the necessity of co-operational breeding in early hominin groups.

She suggests that long before the emergence of anatomically-modern humans, emotionally-modern humans were 'already questing for inter-subjective engagement with each other'.

This video was kindly provided by The RSA

related content

• Mothers and Others by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (2009)

  Hrdy thoughfully explores the ability to engage others in one's care - how it is not an accident, bu...

• Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (1999)

  Hrdy reveals the motivations behind some of our most primal and hotly contested behavioural patterns...

• Dawkins or Gould: Which is the fittest?

  20 Nov 2009

• Richard Dawkins on evolution and creationism

  08 Nov 2008