Dr Anne Campbell is a Reader in the Psychology Department, University of Durham. Dr Campbell is an evolutionary psychologist who thinks that you can't have a full understanding of the human mind without looking at how the process of evolution has shaped it.

Area of Interest:
The brain is as much an organism of the human body as any other, and I think it's important that we should look at the kind of natural and sexual pressures that lead to the kind of brains we have now. On the other hand, if it's the case that perhaps evolution is reaching its end, this may turn out to be a largely historical enterprise but may not guide us very far in making predictions about the future.

On giving entirely Darwinian explanations of the human mind:
I was just reminded that of course evolution is a process, a process of change over time, and it doesn't have to apply only to genes, there's no reason why it couldn't apply to a large number of other things. And of course, one thing could be human ideas. In fact, culture itself is usually defined as the social transmission of ideas from one generation to the next. We can see those ideas to some extent, as kind of particular forms that are subject to variation and to subject to selective retention and transmission. So in that sense you can apply the idea of evolution beyond merely genetics and into the kind of ideas that we take around with us all the time. The kind of inventions that we have are all subject to evolution.

On the idea that human evolution has stopped:
I think, in terms of genetic evolution, you can make a very strong case for that in the West. The major differences in fecundity and mortality between individuals have been minimised a very great deal. But that doesn't mean that evolution in terms of ideas has not accelerated, and, in fact, it accelerated massively, even in the last fifty years or so. As we all know, our sons and daughters understand more about the workings of PCs than I do. So you have actually a rather odd situation where transmission is almost going in the reverse direction, generally where in which we're sort of hastening to keep up with children who have acquired massive amounts of cultural information that wasn't available to us when we were their age.

On the missing link between genes and cultural information:
We know obviously that genes build bodies, and we know that they build brains and the kind of brains we have are very, very interesting and unusual for a primate. And one of the main things that we're able to do that we suspect others aren't is to engage in representational thought. In other words, we can use symbols. We can use written symbols, we can use language - spoken language itself is a symbol - we can use mathematics which is a particular symbolic form. Because we're able to do that, it absolutely explodes massively, the kinds of ideas, the kinds of inventions we can have, and of course the rate at which they can be spread around a society from one mind to another, and I think that's what makes humans very unique, and which makes this rapid period of evolution quite frightening in how these ideas are proliferated.

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