Every seat in the Fowler Museum auditorium was occupied on Wednesday night, as guests crowded in to see a lecture by acclaimed author, scholar and UCLA professor Jared Diamond.
Diamond’s lecture kicked off a speaker series called “Darwin Evolving,” which celebrates what Blaire Van Valkenburgh, chair of the series committee, called “the year of Darwin.”
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his “On the Origin of Species.” The series is a number of lectures focusing on the many reverberations of Darwin’s theory in today’s society.
Diamond’s lecture on the “Evolution of Human Societies” focused on child-rearing practices across cultures.
“Every feature of adult life has a developmental root in childhood,” he said of the topic.
The presentation highlighted differences in parenting practices between Western state societies and traditional societies, including hunter-gatherers and simple farmers.
Diamond argued that, while state societies may be seen as more successful than less developed societies, they might nonetheless benefit from the adoption of certain child-rearing practices of more traditional cultures.
For example, Western cultures often feel that responding immediately to the cries of infants can spoil children, Diamond said.
In traditional societies, where parent-child contact is more consistently maintained, parents often reply almost immediately to their children’s cries, he added.
Diamond also said that alloparenting, where the raising of children involves many parental figures beyond the biological parents, is much more common in traditional cultures than in Western state societies.
In traditional cultures, grandparents, siblings, friends and community members play a larger role in collective child development than in the Western world, where the nuclear family is the basis of child development.
Diamond said he was struck by the self-confidence, independence and social skills of the children he encountered during his time spent in traditional cultures in New Guinea.
“Generalizations about children are based on modern society,” he said. “There is a whole natural range of child-rearing that is limited by Western thought. These practices can inform our own thinking about how we raise our own children.”
Many attendees were surprised by Diamond’s focus in the lecture, which did not tie in directly to Darwin’s work.
“It was nice to see someone come in from a different field,” said David Gold, a doctoral student in the area of ecology and evolutionary biology. “Evolutionary biologists are not used to thinking about societies.”
Matthew Baker, an audience member who completed both graduate and undergraduate degrees at UCLA in the areas of English and business, heard about the event from the UCLA Alumni Association.
Baker said he had read Diamond’s books and found them fascinating, and he wanted to see Diamond speak in person.
“I found it very interesting, but it’s also very complicated research,” Baker said.
Baker said that Diamond’s extensive knowledge and research on the subject could not be fully conveyed in the one-hour lecture.
The “Darwin Evolving” series initiated by Diamond will incorporate six additional guest speakers by May 20.
UCLA is well-suited to the lecture series because of its strong evolutionary biology and human genetics departments, Van Valkenburgh said.
“It’s good to be able to educate people ““ and hopefully entertain them as well,” she said of the series.