Inaugural Lecture ‘The evolution of good and evil’
Our capacity for moral awareness is an adaptation that enables us to achieve more by working together than we could alone. But there’s another side to this moral awareness, claims Matthijs van Veelen in his inaugural lecture. He argues that there are signs indicating that our moral capacity cannot escape the inherent tensions between the interests of individuals and the collective.
About Matthijs van Veelen
Econometrist Matthijs van Veelen (born in 1972) studies the evolution of altruism and morality. In his research, he draws on evolutionary game theory, the application of classical game theory (economics) to populations of life forms in biology. In 2011-2013 he was a visiting scholar at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) at Harvard University. Since 2012 he is a member of De Jonge Akademie (The Young Academy), which is part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).