Robert Newman is a British stand-up comedian, author and political activist. In 1993 Newman and his then comedy partner David Baddiel became the first comedians to play and sell out the 12,000-seat Wembley Arena in London causing the British tabloids to proclaim comedy as ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’. It's not and thankfully the Róisín Dubh is a much better place to see a great comedy show than Wembley or the O2.

In his new show, Robert argues that evolution is driven by cooperation as much as competition. From Herbert Spencer’s survival of the fittest to Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, Darwin's theory of evolution has been hijacked by a reductive, individualist ideology that has left people with a narrow, pessimistic view of human nature. New discoveries in epigenetics, brain imaging and ethology, however, are eroding the Genes R Us determinism, replacing it with a more complex, generous idea of human behaviour.

Robert Newman's New Theory of Evolution takes us from altruistic vampire bats and sentinel crabs to social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, and from well-dressed Neanderthals to the recently discovered mirror neurons in the brain's anterior insula which suggest that empathy is hardwired into the very core of our being.

The collapse of the Neodarwinism, he argues, also returns Darwinism back to the Darwin who wrote:
'A tribe possessed of a spirit of empathy, always ready to aid one another and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes and that would be natural selection". (Descent of Man, 1871. )