rofessor Jean Aitchison delivers her second Reith Lecture from her series entitled ‘The Language Web’. She examines the origin of language in the human species and explains how a fresh look at the role of language has led to new ideas about how it started.
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Tagged with “evolution”
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RSA Audio: Supercooperators: The mathematics of evolution, altruism and human behaviour
Tagged with evolution altruism cooperation rsa supercooperators
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Reith Lectures Archive: 1996 2. A Web Of Deceit
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Richard Leakey Reflects On Human Past—And Future : NPR
Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey talks about what several generations of fossil finds reveal about human origins, and how modern Homo sapiens are threatening the future of life around the globe. Evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson joins to discuss the origins of language, which, like hominids, he’s traced to Africa.
Tagged with science evolution npr richard leakey
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The Origins of Language
Brain Science Podcast #30 is a discussion of Christine Kenneally’s book, The First Word: The Search for the Origin of Language.This episode concentrates on the emergence of the study of language evolution (evolutionary linguistics) from an area of area of inquiry that was banned in the 19th century to one that is flourishing and benefiting from new evidence from fields as diverse as genetics and studies in animal communication.
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The Artificial Ape
From: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2010/the-artificial-ape
There are seven species of great ape on the planet. How did the weakest ape come out on top?
With breathtaking scope and depth, archaeologist and prehistorian Timothy Taylor presents a new and much-needed theory of technology. It not only turns Darwinian theory on its head, but also argues that (alongside physics and biology) it is the human relationship with artifice that has as powerfully framed and formed human evolution.
Taylor compellingly displays how from the moment this weak bi-pedal ape chipped its first stone and slayed the stronger mega-fauna, the process of ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ was undermined. From birth to death, from fire, tools, weapons, gifts and image making to screen technologies, it is our innovations that have allowed us to nurture immature offspring, increase protein intake, prioritise innovation, confer strength, define culture and spread ideas.
Taylor goes even further, and asserts not only that technology evolved us, but that it is driven by its own unfolding logic. That the entire system of technological inertia is by now so immense that the sorts of choices left for us to make in the future are essentially trivial.
Join Timothy Taylor at the RSA as he traces our relationship with artefact and technology, from the Venus of Willendorf to Anthony Gormley, referencing a huge range of culture and scholarship, casting a critical and surprising light on what is currently happening to our bodies and minds - why they are progressively and inevitably weakening, and why it may not ultimately matter.
Speaker: Dr Timothy Taylor, reader in archaeology, University of Bradford, editor-in-chief, Journal of World Prehistory and author of The Artificial Ape (Palgrave Macmillan, 9 September 2010)
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The Human Edge: Finding Our Inner Fish
It took him years of searching in the Canadian Arctic, but in 2004, Neil Shubin found the fossilized remains of what he thinks is one of our most important ancestors.
Turns out, it’s a fish.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127937070
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Professor Christopher Dye: Are Humans Still Evolving?
Homo sapiens have been around for 250,000 years - surely long enough to have become fully evolved?
It was thought that the dramatic extension of life spans during the 20th century eliminated natural selection, but new evidence shows that to be false.
Will selection always be natural, or could postmodern also mean posthuman?
http://fora.tv/2009/03/26/Professor_Christopher_Dye_Are_Humans_Still_Evolving
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NYPL: Adam Gopnik with Steven Pinker - How Far Can Darwin Take Us?
Adam Gopnik, author of Angels & Ages, A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life and Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and many other works, will discuss a fundamental question: How far can Darwin take us as a guide to why we are the way we are?
Both outspoken appreciators of Darwin, Adam Gopnik and Steven Pinker will compare their visions—perhaps complementary, perhaps contrasting—of what Darwin’s legacy is on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth.