Add Roger's talk

_posts/2016-05-23-session-2.md

@@ -14,8 +14,8 @@ talks:
   institute: "Chemistry"
   start: "13:15"
   end: "14:00"
-- title:
-  abstract:
+- title: "Do archaeologists need thermodynamics?"
+  abstract: "Understanding the development of social complexity has often been couched in terms of social evolution which in turn is seen often (but not always) allied with Darwinian evolution. Archaeologists have vacillated in their affection for such approaches, with some tying themselves closely with evolutionary biology and others rejecting evolutionary accounts instead preferring to hold human practice as something special; something that has decoupled itself from evolutionary processes, and can only be understood from unique contextual perspectives. This paper questions how accounts of human life have become decoupled from biological and physical systems and in turn asks how thermodynamics and kinetics might provide useful ways to understand the development of social complexity. Work by Swenson et al. has highlighted how Darwinian natural selection cannot provide a comprehensive theory of evolution simply because it cannot account for how life, itself, was the product of evolution. The decoupling of the biological and physical systems in this manner is now well-rehearsed and more recently some scholars have turned to exploring how social systems may be reconnected with a general theory of evolution that is understood as a planetary (or even universal) phenomenon, where the Earth system evolves as a single global entity. This has obvious implications for our understanding of traditional physical and biological systems, but also for our ideas of how social systems might develop. The paper concludes by suggesting that archaeologists and anthropologists should be more comfortable with ideas of determining conditions, perhaps more familiar to physicists, and should not consider these in tension with histories that seek to reveal the creativity and uniqueness of human communities. It is instead argued that the vital forces for creativity and their myriad manifestations through time are precisely the result of such specific forms of life emerging within systems that are undeniably coupled to thermodynamic processes."
   speaker: "Roger Doonan"
   url: "https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/archaeology/people/doonan"
   institute: "Archeology"