Couple quite interesting talks on evolution.

1. Evolution of Beauty – Genetics
2. How Imagination and Creativity Reshaped Human Evolution

Evolution of Beauty – Genetics

Talk by Richard Prum
Why have animals evolved a sense of beauty?
The Neuroscience of Beauty
We may have the evolution of beauty completely wrong
Book The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum

How Darwin’s forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world – and us.

How Imagination and Creativity Reshaped Human Evolution

Talk by Agustín Fuentes
Link to CARTA

Humans can see the world around them, imagine how it might be different, and translate those imaginings into reality…or at least try to. Meaning, imagination, and hope, are as central to the human evolutionary story as are bones, genes, and ecologies. Current paleoanthropological, archeological, and biological data make it abundantly clear that the human lineage, especially in the last two million years or so, underwent specific morphological changes alongside less easily measurable, but significant, behavioral and cognitive shifts as it forged, and was shaped by a new niche, a highly distinctive way of being in the world—a human niche. This niche contains the human baseline of creativity, our ability to imagine, communicate, and collaborate with increasing prowess…processes that facilitated our lineages’ transition from a cluster of medium-sized, hairless, fangless, hornless, clawless ape-like beings armed with a few rocks and some sticks into the species who invented domestication, economies, cities, nations, religion, warfare and broad-scale peace. This talk lays out the framework and sketches an outline for how this happened.