Hosted by the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences with support from the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund.

 

About the conference

Over recent decades, cognitive science have significantly reshaped our understanding of human thought, while modern evolutionary theory has provided robust explanations of the biological origin of Homo sapiens. Yet, despite these transformative developments, cognitive and evolutionary perspectives remain under-integrated within mainstream historical and social research. This conference seeks to address this lacuna by exploring how cognitive and evolutionary approaches can enrich our understanding of the human condition in historical and societal contexts.

Recent advances in cognitive science, neuroscience, and genetics compel historians and social scientists to re-evaluate foundational paradigms. Concepts such as the embodied mind, situated and distributed cognition, and conceptual metaphor theory are increasingly applied within the humanities and social sciences, particularly in fields such as linguistics, literary studies, archaeology, and religious studies. Concurrently, emerging research in cultural evolution and cognitive theory has fostered a biologically and culturally grounded view of humans as products of long-standing bio-cultural co-evolutionary processes.

Evolutionary frameworks have gained traction in newly established interdisciplinary domains, including evolutionary cultural studies, evolutionary institutional economics, evolutionary linguistics, and cognitive evolution studies. These perspectives prompt historians and social scientists to re-examine core models and analogies—such as those comparing cultural and organismic evolution—and to investigate the roles of variation, selection, and inheritance (retention) within cultural dynamics.

At the heart of these inquiries lies a key question: how do cognitive processes—perception, memory, conceptualisation, embodied action, communicative practices, and institutional forms—function as mental constructs that contribute to social inertia or transformation? This conference invites scholarly contributions that explore these mechanisms and their implications for historical change and long-term social evolution.

https://www.kultur.lu.se/en/research/conferences/cognition-and-evolution-in-historical-and-social-research/