And the Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only this is episode 417. I'm your

host Thomas Smith and I've got a fascinating one today. We're going to be joined by Dr. Timothy

Waring from the University of Maine talking about a paper that Lydia and I saw covered in some popular

press and it seemed to suggest that maybe humans kind of evolutionarily

may not be equipped to handle things like climate change or other global kind of

catastrophes I don't know if there's a comparable one to think of, but things like climate change

that may happen in our future, I suppose. And we wanted to have Dr Waring on to talk about it. It's always fun.

That's my favorite part of doing this podcast is seeing an interesting study and

contacting the people who actually did it and being like, hey, come talk about this.

It's the best. And this one's really fascinating and it turns out it's maybe a bit of an

emerging field that

wasn't necessarily obvious to me at first because I'm not an expert but yeah

cultural evolution I mean I love talking about evolution in any sense I mean it's just the

most fascinating thing to me it's one of the reasons I was really hooked into the atheism and skepticism and all that. I just I just love

Evolutionary biology. I love learning about that. It's such a fascinating concept. And so seeing this being put

through the lens of cultural evolution definitely piqued my interest. And so let's talk to

Dr Timothy Waring about the recent paper, it's called characteristic

processes of human evolution, caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions.

And also about this kind of new field and what it's about and how he looks at the world

and looks at our evolutionary history and indeed our potential features.

So very excited to get on over to that.

As usual, before then, I want to pitch that if you go to

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