Armand Marie Leroi | The Science of Culture

Humans are culture-generating machines. Our world is filled with the books, music, poems, paintings, scientific papers, and technology that we make. Studying all this stuff has long been the province of historians. But as all of culture becomes digitised, and we now have access to millions of artefacts, the traditional ways of studying — one book, one poem, one song at a time — are inadequate. We need to construct a science of culture. This science will be based on evolutionary principles since, like evolutionary biology, it is about explaining diversity. In this lecture, I will show how we can use machine learning to unravel the history of pop music, the scientific literature, novels and even cars — and explore the forces that have shaped them. Armand Marie Leroi was born in New Zealand, grew up in South Africa and Canada, studied in Canada (Bsc, Dalhousie, 1983) and the USA (PhD, University of California Irvine, 1994). He is a Dutch ci