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Te Evolution of the Human Brain

Center for Human Evolution

Proceedings of Workshop

Foundation For the Future

, th Avenue

Bellevue,

: --

: --

www.futurefoundation.org

---

. Evolution Human

. Human Brain

. Human species futurology

. Title.

e comments and deliberations of allparticipants are deemed very important

by the Foundation For the Future. While

every attempt has been made to preserve

the accuracy of dialogue in the workshop

sessions, it is impossible to guarantee that

no errors or omissions were made in the

course of transcribing and editing the

live-session tape recordings. All partici-

pants were afforded the opportunity prior

to publication to review and amend their

comments recorded in this document.

e Foundation advocates no causes or

positions. Its goal in publishing the pro-

ceedings of the workshop is to encouragehuman minds to ponder issues that may

shape humanitys future.

A printed copy of this publication is

available at cost from the Foundation For

the Future. Contact the Foundation for

details.

Printed in the United States of America


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Officers

Walter KistlerPresident

Bob CitronExecutive Director

Sesh VelamoorDeputy Director, Programs

Donna HinesDeputy Director, Administration

Board of Advisors

Dr. William CalvinUniversity of Washington

Dr. Eric ChaissonTufts U niversity

Dr. Clement C.P. ChangTamkang University

Joseph CoatesConsulting Futurist, Inc.

Dr. Ricardo Diez-HochleitnerClub of Rome

Dr. Brian FaganUniversity of CaliforniaSanta Barbara

Barbara Marx HubbardFoundation for Conscious Evolution

Dr. Donald JohansonInstitute of Human Origins

Dr. Michio Kaku

City University of New York

Graham MolitorPublic Policy Forecasting, Inc.

Dr. Robert MullerUniversity for Peace

Advisors Emeriti

Dr. George BugliarelloPolytechnic University

Dr. Christian de DuveInstitute of Cellular Pathology

Dr. Edward O. WilsonHarvard University

Co-operating Organizations

FuturiblesParis

Institute forAlternative FuturesAlexandria, VA

Pacific Science CenterSeattle, WA

World Future SocietyWashington, DC

World FuturesStudies FederationPhilippines

April 2006

Dear Readers:

Making a science of human beings is a touchy matter in our society today and, as

a result, we do not adequately understand what drives the human mind. e brain

has basically two parts: the cortex, which is largely a reservoir of knowledge, and thelimbic system, which controls emotions, drives, and motivations. e more we can

study and come to understand both parts of the brain, the better equipped we will be

going forward into the future of the species.

e Foundation For the Future was established with the mission to increase and

diffuse knowledge concerning the long-term future of humanity, and the Center for

Human Evolution focuses that mission on evolution, an arena of vast application.

In March 2005, the Center for Human Evolution brought together eight noted scholars

to offer their research and perspectives on the evolution of the human brain. I am

pleased to present to you the proceedings from that workshop. is book is a record of

the papers presented, the questions and answers engaged as a result of the papers, and

the scholars views on emerging knowledge of the brain and its implications for the

long-term future.

I hope you will enjoy reading the comments of prominent scholars on these

challenging and important issues.

Sincerely,

Walter Kistler

President and Benefactor


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The Evolution of the Human Brain | Center for Human Evolution Proceedings of Workshop v

Contents

Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix

The Proceedings Sections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi

List of Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xiii

Section 1 The Critical Questions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Section 2 Center for Human Evolution Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Section 3 Description of Workshop 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Section 4 Workshop Transcripts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

4.1 Introductory Session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

4.2 Scholar Presentations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

4.2.1 William H. Calvin Presentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

4.2.2 Terrence Deacon Presentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

4.2.3 Ralph L. Holloway Presentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

4.2.4 Richard G. Klein Presentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

4.2.5 Steven Pinker Presentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

4.2.6 John Tooby Presentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

4.2.7 Endel Tulving Presentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

4.2.8 Ajit Varki Presentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

4.3 Emerging Knowledge of the Brain and Its Long-term Implications for Humanity. . . . . . . .105

4.4 Closing Session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

Appendix 1 Workshop Agenda. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137

Appendix 2 Participant Biographies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139


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Contents


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The Evolution of the Human Brain | Center for Human Evolution Proceedings of Workshop vi i

Acknowledgments

The Foundation For the Future wishes to acknowl-edge the following persons for their efforts andcontributions in the Center for Human Evolution

Workshop e Evolution of the Human Brain:e Foundation Board of Advisors for their guid-

ance in planning the Center for Human Evolution

Program. ese members currently include Dr. Wil-liam H. Calvin, Dr. Eric J. Chaisson, Dr. Clement C.P.Chang, Joseph Coates, Dr. Ricardo Diez-Hochleitner,Dr. Brian Fagan, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Dr. DonaldC. Johanson, Dr. Michio Kaku, Graham T.T. Moli-tor, and Dr. Robert Muller. Advisors Emeriti are Dr.George Bugliarello, Dr. Christian de Duve, and Dr.Edward O. Wilson.

e eight participants of the workshop e Evo-lution of the Human Brain, whose broad expertiseand indefatigable seeking aer knowledge formed thebasis of the workshop and whose contributions will

be valuable well into the future. ese participantsinclude William H. Calvin, Ph.D.; Terrence Deacon,Ph.D.; Ralph L. Holloway, Ph.D.; Richard G. Klein,Ph.D.; Steven Pinker, Ph.D.; John Tooby, Ph.D.; EndelTulving, Ph.D.; and Ajit Varki, M.D.

e staff of the Foundation For the Future, fortheir dedication and commitment to ensure thatevent planning and facilitation resulted in a smoothand memorable experience for all involved. is staffincludes Kathy Carr, Special Programs Manager;Jean Gilbertson, Public Relations and Publications

Manager; Jeff Holdsworth, Creative Director and ITManager; Tom Price, Executive Assistant; and MaryStroh, Executive Assistant.

Lisa McClary, for transcription.Bill Wright, for extensive photographic coverage.e Trustees and Executive Director of the Foun-

dation, for reposing their trust and confidence in allof us.

Sesh Velamoor Donna HinesDeputy Director, Programs Deputy Director, Administration


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Acknowledgements


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The Evolution of the Human Brain | Center for Human Evolution Proceedings of Workshop ix

Introduction

The fundamental objective of the Foundation Forthe Futures Center for Human Evolution work-shops is to bring together prominent thinkers

from a variety of scholarly disciplines for the purposeof sharing their knowledge and perspectives of theevolutionary factors affecting the long-term future of

humanity.Center for Human Evolution workshops are con-

vened on a periodic basis as the need arises for anin-depth look at a specific aspect of evolution. Fiveworkshops have been conducted to date. e pro-ceedings of all five colloquies, with transcripts ofpresentations and discussions, may be downloadedfrom the Foundations website at www.futurefounda-tion.org/programs_pub.htm.

All Center for Human Evolution workshops areheld at the Foundation building in Bellevue, Wash-ington USA.

e Foundation For the Future maintains a neutralstance in regard to research and perspectives in thescientific and social sciences fields. In keeping with its

mission to increase and diffuse knowledge concern-ing the long-term future of humanity, the Foundationdoes not advocate positions, but rather believes that itis the dissemination of research findings and scholarlydialogue that benefits the full community of scholarsand ultimately all of humanity.


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x The Evolution of the Human Brain | Center for Human Evolution Proceedings of Workshop

Introduction


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The Evolution of the Human Brain | Center for Human Evolution Proceedings of Workshop xi

The Proceedings Sections

Summarized below are the contents of each Sectionand Appendix of the Proceedings o the Center orHuman Evolution Workshop .

SECTION cites the critical questions that formed thebasis of the Center for Human Evolution workshop

on e Evolution of the Human Brain.SECTION summarizes the purpose, organization andmanagement, activities, and workshop programs ofthe Center for Human Evolution.

SECTION provides specific details describing Work-shop .

SECTION provides transcripts of the presentationsand dialogic sessions from the two-day workshop.

APPENDIX is the workshop agenda, noting keyactivities from the Presidents welcome to closingremarks.

APPENDIX provides biographical information on theparticipants in Workshop .


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The Proceedings Sections


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The Evolution of the Human Brain | Center for Human Evolution Proceedings of Workshop xi ii

List of Participants

William H. Calvin, Ph.D.University of WashingtonSchool of MedicineSeattle, WA

Steven Pinker, Ph.D.Harvard UniversityDepartment of PsychologyCambridge, MA

Terrence Deacon, Ph.D.University of California, BerkeleyDepartment of AnthropologyBerkeley, CA

Ralph L. Holloway, Ph.D.Columbia UniversityDepartment of AnthropologyNew York, NY

Richard G. Klein, Ph.D.Stanford UniversityProgram in Human BiologyStanford, CA

John Tooby, Ph.D.University of CaliforniaDepartment of AnthropologyCenter for Evolutionary PsychologySanta Barbara, CA

Endel Tulving, Ph.D.University of TorontoBaycrest Centre for Geriatric CareRotman Research InstituteOntario, Canada

Ajit Varki, M.D.University of California, San DiegoGlycobiology Research andTraining Center

Department of MedicineLa Jolla, CA


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List of Participants


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The Evolution of the Human Brain | Center for Human Evolution Proceedings of Workshop

Section

The Critical Questions

The Evolution of the Human Brain

. How might the evolution of the human brainbe assessed in terms of past, present, and future,where past refers to the evolutionary context;present means the current state of knowledge on

the human brain; and future takes into accountpotential applications of genetic and germline en-gineering, technological augmentation, culturalindoctrination, and space colonization?

. What are the implications of brain plasticity inthe nature versus nurture debate?

. Will human brains be significantly different in thefuture, given the potential of technological inter-

vention?

. Will/should a global brain protocol emergeaimed at regulating intervention and manipula-tion of the human brain?


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Section | The Critical Questions


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Section

Center for Human EvolutionOverview

Purpose

e Center for Human Evolution was established bythe Foundation For the Future to sponsor researchand conduct workshops related to the understandingof the evolutionary factors affecting the long-term

future of humanity.

Organization and Management

Established in , the Center for Human Evolutionbecame fully operational in early . It is directedby the Foundation For the Future and managed bythe Deputy Director, Programs, overseen by WalterKistler, founder and President of the Foundation.

Activities

Activities of the Center for Human Evolution include

providing funds for: studies in the field of human evo-lution, publishing the results of research in humanevolution, and hosting seminars and workshops con-cerning human evolution. Additional activities maybe determined by the Foundations Board of Trustees.

Workshops

e subject of workshops and , held in November and February , respectively, was e Evo-lution of Human Intelligence. Workshop was heldin November and convened scholars to discussHow Evolution Works. Workshop , on Cultural

Evolution, was held in May , and Workshop, which is the subject of this proceedings, was heldin March on the topic e Evolution of theHuman Brain.

Center for Human Evolution workshops focus ona wide range of evolution questions including, but not

limited to:

How did human intelligence evolve and how is itcurrently evolving?

What role does culture play in the evolution of hu-man societies?

How do genetic factors influence human behavior,intelligence, innovation, motivation, and achieve-ment?

What role will medical and genetic technologiesplay in the future evolution of human intelligence

and in the long-term evolution of human societies?

What role does dysgenics play in the developmentof human societies?

Participants

Each workshop brings together six to ten scholars,experts in fields related to the evolution topic desig-nated for the workshop. Participation is by invitationonly. Researchers interested in participating in work-shops on specific aspects of human evolution maycontact Sesh Velamoor, Deputy Director, Programs.


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Section | Center for Human Evolution Overview


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Section

Description of Workshop

e Evolution of the Human Brain was the themeof Center for Human Evolution Workshop . Eightscholars were invited to participate, specificallyselected to allow for a solid, scientific look at thehuman brain and its evolution, both past and future.e invitees were selected by Walter Kistler, President

of the Foundation, and Sesh Velamoor, Deputy Direc-tor, Programs.

Each participant was asked to prepare a paperfor presentation and discussion at the workshop.Abstracts of these papers were received sufficiently inadvance to allow time for distribution to all attendeesprior to the event. During the workshop, each partici-pant was given approximately one hour to deliver hispresentation and respond to questions and commentsfrom the other attendees.

In addition to the eight scholars, three officersof the Foundation For the Future and four outside

observers took part in the discussions.

Venue and Themes

e Center for Human Evolution Workshop washeld in the main conference room at the FoundationFor the Future building in Bellevue, Washington. Inaddition to the views of human brain evolution that

were presented in the eight papers, the workshopdiscussions led spontaneously into a wide-rangingdialogue on emerging knowledge of the brain and thelong-term implications for humanity.

Publication of Results

Transcripts of all presentations and discussions inthe workshop e Evolution of the Human Brainare published in this document, which is available inhard copy upon request to the Foundation as well asdownloadable from the Foundations website at http://www.futurefoundation.org/programs_pub.htm.


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Section | Description of Workshop


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Section

Workshop Transcripts

Center for Human Evolution Workshop addresseda variety of issues related to e Evolution of theHuman Brain. Eight participants, whose exper-

tise ranged from neurobiology and anthropology topsychology and cellular and molecular medicine,were charged with assessing the past, present, and

future of the human brain.ese scholars hold professorial and research

positions at university and research institutions. eypresented lectures sharing the perspectives of theirdisciplines and study.

Center for Human Evolution workshops arestructured as colloquies. Each participant is givenapproximately one hour to present a paper andanswer questions generated by the presentation.Following each paper, a round-table discussionprovides a means of synthesizing the wide-ranging

material. Finally, each group of scholars discussescritical themes related to the subject. Followingare transcripts of these presentations and discus-sion sessions in Workshop , e Evolution of theHuman Brain.


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Section | Workshop Transcripts


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Eight participants all experts in one aspect or anotherof the human brain gathered at the Foundation build-ing for the workshop Te Evolution of the HumanBrain. In the opening session, they were welcomed byFoundation officers, then introduced themselves withcomments about their professional affiliations andresearch interests.

BOB CITRON:Good morning. We are glad to see youall here for this workshop. I would like to introduceWalter Kistler, the President and benefactor of theFoundation.

WALTER KISTLER:Good morning, everybody, and wel-come to this meeting. is promises to be a mostinteresting meeting. I hope you will enjoy these con-

versations on the human brain over this time we havetogether.

Where have we come from?

Where are we today? And whereare we going as a species thousands

of years into the future?

CITRON: anks, Walter. Just a few words now aboutthe Foundation For the Future: All of you have seenour new brochure, which gives you a good sense ofwhat the Foundation is and what its purpose is. Animportant point to emphasize is that the Foundationis here in perpetuity it has an endowment; it neverseeks outside funding. A thousand years from now, generations into the future, there will be another group

such as yourselves sitting around a table discussingsimilar issues to the ones youre going to discuss today,and the Foundation will host those people.

Four or five years ago we produced a -minute filmthat places the Foundation in context: Where have wecome from? Where are we today? And where are wegoing as a species thousands of years into the future?Not the near-term future but the long-term future.

As you deliberate in the next day and a half, keep inmind that when we talk about where the human brainis going, were talking about multimillennia, not justthe near future.

With that, were ready to roll the video, CosmicOrigins, which was created for us by a filmmaker fromWGBH in Boston who also makes films for the Novaseries and Frontline. Aer the film, Sesh will open the

workshop.

[Showing of film Cosmic Origins]

In the next day and a half, I am

hopeful that we can cover much

ground with respect to three specific

aspects of the brain: the past,

the present, and the future.

SESH VELAMOOR: ank you, Bob. We are ready tostart the deliberations for the morning, and first I

want to put into context why were here and what thefocus of the workshop is. Essentially, the workshopis all about the human brain. In the next day and ahalf, I am hopeful that we can cover much groundwith respect to three specific aspects of the brain: thepast, the present, and the future. We expect that thepapers that will be presented today will set the stagefor assessing the human brain in the evolutionarycontext, bringing us all the way from the past to thepresent, in terms of what we know about the brain.

e conversations tomorrow will focus on whatthe future is of the human brain over the next thou-sand years the very long-term aspect is a matter ofspecific interest to the Foundation. Our conversationstomorrow morning will formulate the questions forthose discussions, specifically taking into account allof the interventions and augmentations, and perhapseven possibilities for evolution if we were to colonizesome other planetary body in space. So, those are theobjectives that were trying to accomplish.

Section . | Transcripts

Introductory Session


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Lets start with introductions of the participants,beginning with Dr. Pinker.

my empirical research has beenconcentrated on one very small

phenomenon of language, the

difference between storage in memory

and real-time computation

PINKER: Im Steve Pinker, Professor of psychology atHarvard. I am interested in all aspects of the mind. Myempirical research has been on visual cognition, earlierin my career, but mostly on language: language devel-opment in children, language in the brain, the structureof language, the use of language in real-time.

In the last ten or fieen years, my empirical research

has been concentrated on one very small phenom-enon of language, the difference between storage inmemory and real-time computation, which I studyby contrasting regular and irregular inflectional mor-phology: the difference between walk-walked, onthe one hand, and bring-brought, on the other. eidea is that though both of them are matched in termsof what they do in language they are just two differ-ent ways of talking about something that happenedin the past one of them is a productive, combina-torial process, so that when a new verb enters thelanguage, like spam, everyone instantly knows that

the past tense has to be spammed. Even though theynever memorized that word, they dont have to go tothe dictionary to look it up.

On the other hand, for the irregular forms like sing-sang, bring-brought, and so on, you have no choicebut to memorize them. So, its a way of contrastingthe role of memory in computation in language. Ivelooked at how regular and irregular forms develop inchildhood, how they change over historical time peri-ods, how they differ in closely related languages, andwhere they are processed in the brain.

About ten years ago, I started to write books for

a wider audience. My first two books were highlytechnical books on language acquisition. I wrote abook called Language Instinct: Everything You AlwaysWanted to Know about Language, followed by a bookwith the modest title How the Mind Works, whichtried to do the same thing for the other cognitive andemotional faculties such as visual perception, reason-ing, the emotions, humor, music. In , I wrote a

book called Words and Rules, which tried to presentmy research on language in a framework that wouldmake the microscopic study of one phenomenon oflanguage widely accessible. My most recent book wasthe one I spoke about last night, Te Blank Slate: Te

Modern Denial o Human Nature.

Specific things that weve worked on

have demonstrated, for example, that

reasoning fractionates into a series of

content-specialized systems.

TOOBY: Im John Tooby, and Im presently a Profes-sor of anthropology at the University of California,Santa Barbara. My wife and lifelong collaborator,

Leda Cosmides, and I are co-directors of the Centerfor Evolutionary Psychology.

My background is in psychology, evolutionarybiology, and anthropology. Since I was an undergrad-uate, I have been interested in exploiting the reallygreat and under-used inferential power present inbringing together what we know about natural selec-tion, the cognitive revolution, and other phenomenato see, if you put it all together, what inferences youcan make about the computational organization ofthe human brain and mind. Weve been trying to do anumber of existence proofs or demonstrations of the

empirical power of these kinds of applications, work-ing backwards from adaptive information-processingproblems we believe our ancestors were subject to,to see if that would lead us to discover phenomenonstructures or adaptive, functional, regulatory archi-tecture in the human brain that people hadnt thoughtwas there before, in contrast to the idea that the thingthat is doing most of the inferential work in thehuman brain is some sort of general set of content-independent learning and inferential systems.

Specific things that weve worked on to ourown satisfaction, not to anybody elses have dem-

onstrated, for example, that reasoning fractionatesinto a series of content-specialized systems. eresan inferential system that is specialized for reasoningabout hazards, danger, and precautions, and theres asystem for reasoning about exchange. So, the founda-tion economic activity is, in fact, a specialized abilityfor doing conditional reasoning in the context of con-tingencies of interpersonal interaction.




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We have moved out into other areas of emotion.Reasoning was one of the hardest cases because thatswhat people had assumed was completely a content-independent kind of system. But we have been movingsystematically into other aspects of cooperation andconflict. We think there is a distinct coalitional set ofinferential and motivational and emotional specializa-tions existing in groups for dealing with other groups,for navigating within your social group, for collectiveaction, for competition in groups, even includingaggressive competition in groups. So, maybe ourhistory of endemic, small-scale, inter-group conflictmight have led to some specializations, and we haveevidence about how these collective-action systemsoperate.

There are lots of differences in human

brains and nonhuman brains, and I

have been very interested in trying

to understand what the

crucial difference is.

DEACON:Im Terry Deacon. I am currently at the Uni-versity of California, Berkeley, in anthropology andneuroscience. My background is mostly centeredaround the question of whats unusual about humanbrains, or, rather, to use Gregory Batesons phrase:Whats the difference that makes a difference? ere

are lots of differences in human brains and nonhu-man brains, and I have been very interested all of mycareer in trying to understand what the crucialdif-ference is.

I began my benchwork actually studying differentspecies connections with respect to memory in thehippocampus. I did my Ph.D. work on the connec-tions of what one might call homologues to languageareas in primate brains, tracing connections from thehomologue to Brocas area, Wernickes area, anteriorsingulate supplementary motor and a number ofbrain stem nuclei that control, for example, tongue

and larynx. I found that they were strikingly similarto what people had predicted about human brains,and now that more and more imaging has come out, Ithink that most of those correlations have shown it tobe the case that the connectivity, at least, of monkeybrains is very much like our own.

I have gone on from there to study developmentsand, over the last decade, I spent a great deal of time

doing fetal neural transplantation actually acrossspecies. My purpose was to find out how axons findtheir targets and to find out if it is different in dif-ferent species. What we found out, surprisingly, wasthat its not very different. In fact, this work wenton to be used in transplantation work in people forParkinsons disease, Huntingtons disease, and others even across species, to some extent against my will.But what I can say is that, as far as we could find, therewas very little difference.

Subsequently, I have shied my attention a bit fromthe development to ask another question thats relatedto that: How is it that our behavior has changed ourevolution? is is a question I asked many years agoin my book Te Symbolic Species. Ive essentially repu-diated some of my thoughts, then, and Ill talk a little

bit about that today.

Im a biological anthropologist Im

really interested in human variability,

particularly brain variability.

HOLLOWAY: My name is Ralph Holloway. Im in theDepartment of Anthropology at Columbia Univer-sity. Im a biological anthropologist, a dying breed. Igot my degree in geology from the University of New

Mexico and found myself working as a metallurgicalengineer the next year in Burbank, California. atexperience was so shattering that I went to Berkeleyand got a Ph.D. degree in anthropology.

My main interest is to find out how this speciesbecame so insane. at is really my target. My maininterest when I got out of graduate school was to doquantitative neural histology on primates, havingdone it on rats in the visual cortex. I came to ColumbiaUniversity with that hope, but since I wasnt studying

Aplysia, the sea slug, there was no possibility of learn-ing anything about primate brains. I ended up looking

at something that I had said in my dissertation wasabsolutely useless, which was brain endocasts, that is,the cast of an inside of a skull. ats what Ive beendoing for the last years: looking at the inside of skullsand working with latex rubber, and so forth, which isa very delightful process. I brought for your consider-ation a hobbit brain, in case at some point during theproceedings you would like to talk about it.

Transcripts | Section .



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My interests, though, are very broad. Im reallyinterested in human variability, particularly brain

variability. Ive worked on sexual dimorphism ofthe brain, particularly corpus callosum in males andfemales. Im interested in sex differences, naturally.Im interested in racial differences. And Im about toretire in another two years.

Ive always been interested in trying

to integrate the evidence for human

biological evolution with the evidence

for the evolution of behavior

KLEIN:Im Richard Klein. I lecture on human evolutionat Stanford University. I guess Im an archaeologist

Im not sure. I like to think theres a field calledpaleoanthropology that combines the study of humanfossils and the study of the artifacts that occur withor without the fossils but in the same time period.Ive always been interested in trying to integrate theevidence for human biological evolution with theevidence for the evolution of behavior, the archaeo-logical evidence.

I have been particularly interested in the questionof when and where people like us evolved, and I sup-pose you could also add to that why Ill talk aboutthat later. It seems to have happened about ,

years ago in Africa that modern humans in the fullestsense emerged, modern humans both in their anat-omy and their behavior, and they spread from thereto the rest of the world. I would like to talk a little bitabout that in my presentation.

In terms of what I actually do, every summer I gooff to South Africa and I dig up some old bones andstones, and analyze them. I hope that I do it in an open-minded way and dont just attempt to fortify a position,which youll see I have, about the relatively sudden ori-gin of modern humans about , years ago.

by far, the most interesting, most

mysterious object left for scientists to

study is human consciousness.

TULVING: I am Endel Tulving. I am essentially inter-ested in consciousness. Ive always been interested

in it, since my high school days. It took me a long,long journey to actually get close to it as an objectof scientific interest, but what Im trying to do nowis to convince as many people as I can that, by far,the most interesting, most mysterious object le forscientists to study is human consciousness. I will betalking about the future later on today, which turnsout to be a part of human consciousness. Its some-thing that only the human brain can produce in itsparticular manifestation.

My training has been in cognitive psychology.Psychologists are people who, when theyre hard upfor new ideas or new discoveries, change at least thenames of the ideas they already have. So, I started asan experimental psychologist, then became a cogni-tive psychologist, then became Professor and now

Chair of something called cognitive neuroscience.I do not know anything at all about the brain. I

finally figured out what the front end of the brainis and what the back end is. I know a few technicalterms, but what goes on in there is totally and utterlybeyond me, but it turns out, too, to my own satisfac-tion, that one really doesnt have to know very muchabout things that one is interested in, in order to makesome sense of them.

what I now focus on is how you

avoid speaking incoherent nonsense how your brain creates ever more

coherent arrangements of ideas

CALVIN: Im William Calvin. Im a neurobiologist. Istarted in physics, wound up doing a Ph.D. in physiol-ogy and biophysics, working on nerve cells basicallytheir electrical computing properties. I moved on toemergent properties of circuits of cells, and what Inow focus on is how you avoid speaking incoherentnonsense, that is to say, how your brain creates evermore coherent arrangements of ideas in the several

seconds before the words come out of your mouth.But Im also fascinated with why such quality boot-

strapping has evolved, presumably sometime in thelast few million years of human evolution. So, I writebooks likeA Brie History o the Mind: From Apes toIntellect and Beyond. I scratched the surface, at least,of linguistics. I, too, write about consciousness.

When evolution is rapid, climate changes are usu-




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ally part of the push, and so for the last years Ivealso been paying a lot of attention to the paleoclimatestudies. It turns out that the glacially slow ice ages werepunctuated by hundreds of very fast flips big changeslike drought, but everywhere and they flip back evenfaster into a warm and wet climate like todays.

In , I was asked to write a cover story for TeAtlantic Monthly, which came out as e Great Cli-mate Flip-flop. was a time when no one had yetheard much about whats currently in the news andin the disaster movies. e effect of flips on humanevolution is what my previous book was about, called

A Brain or All Seasons: Human Evolution and AbruptClimate Change.

If you want to understand the human

brain, you need to understand the

human condition

VARKI: Im Ajit Varki, a Professor of medicine andcellular and molecular medicine at the Universityof California, San Diego. I earned a medical degreeand proceeded to complete training in hematology,oncology, and internal medicine, and even practicedfor a while, but then I became what is called a physi-cian-scientist. I got interested in science, using my

background in medicine, so thats really my job at UCSan Diego.

In , my daughter was born, and no amount ofeducation in medicine and pediatrics prepared mefor watching the human mind emerge. e secondthing that happened in was I saw a patient inwhom there was an immune reaction against animalproducts and it turned out that we then found thefirst known molecular and genetic difference betweenhumans and our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. So,in the middle of the s, I got very interested in thisquestion of what makes us human. Since then, I havebeen pursuing it mostly at a molecular and cellularlevel but also collaborating with other people at dif-ferent levels. Im involved in the Chimpanzee GenomeProject and other issues related to great apes.

I guess Ive come a long way from starting out inmedicine. But I think I have the advantage that medi-

cal education forces you to learn lots and lots of thingsabout everything, and youre not scared of finding outabout anything new. I like to go into new fields andlearn. I realize Im nave about some of these things.

As far as this particular meeting goes, Im not sureI have so much to say about the brain, but my pointis going to be: If you want to understand the humanbrain, you need to understand the human condition,just as much as if you want to understand a diseasein a human, you dont study just the specific organ orsystem where you think there is a disease; you haveto study the whole human. ats the way I think we

should approach the problem of the human condition.

VELAMOOR:ank you, all. We have a most interest-ing and qualified group to discuss the human brain.

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Troughout the first day of the workshop, the eightparticipants presented papers on aspects of the humanbrain. Here, Program Director Sesh Velamoor provides

guidelines for the presentations.

Our objective is to assess the past,

present, and future of the human

brain, and each of you hasprepared a presentation on an

aspect of the brain

VELAMOOR:We are ready to begin the presentations ofthe papers. Our objective is to assess the past, present,

and future of the human brain, and each of you hasprepared a presentation on an aspect of the brain inwhich you are particularly interested. We have allot-ted approximately an hour to each paper, with breaksbetween the papers. Following each presentationwill be an opportunity for the speaker to entertainquestions from the other participants or from theobservers in the room. Lets begin.


Scholar Presentations


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Scholar Presentations


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Intellect is not about set pieces but

mostly about things we havent done

before, a way of repackaging things.

CALVIN: Intellect is not about set pieces but mostly

about things we havent done before, a way of repack-aging things. It tends to be about novel assemblagesof things, particularly long and complex like thesentences were capable of speaking. eres a greatdeal of need to do quality control just to improve theassemblage and to ignore nonsense.

Because brain size is oen all we have to go on,together with some of the endocast findings, we tendto assume that bigger brains are better. ere are cer-tainly comparative studies over many species that dosuggest some role of that, and it may, indeed, be truefor some of the period of brain evolution, but Im

going to raise the issue of whether its really importantin human evolution,per se.eres certainly a reorganization in the brain, size

aside, that is surely very important. Language sharing,novel plans that are right the first time, and creativity all those things require some brain reorganizationand that may, in fact, be what the brain size increasesare about.

Just to remind those of you who arent anthropolo-gists, the ancestral environment for the great apesis typically forest with clearings [slide: river forest,woodland, savanna]. Some of the chimpanzees canlive out in woodland, but thats the specialty of thebipedal woodland apes, which are the australopith-ecines and such. By the time you get to Homo erectusand probably earlier, they are clearly able to make aliving out in the grassy areas where there is not a con-

venient tree to climb. Woodlands are very nice for atransition population: You can nest in trees. You canclimb them. e woodlands also have a lot more rea-

sons to climb trees than the forests do, namely lions.ere is, on the other hand, this enormous resource

of meat on the hoof [slide: herds of zebra and wil-debeest], and there are probably some behavioralchanges that one can speculate about early on, by .million years ago. For example, theres probably someway of dealing with the lions and the hyenas, and soforth, which are going to show up pretty quickly when

a kill is made. Certainly what many species do to dealwith larger animals is the so-called mobbing behav-ior that you see oen in birds. I assume that ourancestors learned that there was safety in numbers that if they all rushed toward the lions, throwingclods of dirt or whatever, they could buy some timefor one of them to amputate a leg and run off with it.It would be fairly sure that the lions wouldnt followbecause they would have the rest of the carcass there,which would be terribly tempting.

ere was likely an improvement in sharing behav-iors back then. Its one of the advantages of big prey as

opposed to small. You might be able to eat the wholething yourself if its small prey but not the big prey.e best strategy then is to give in to all the othersthat come around and want a piece, and to expectreciprocity.

e other thing I suspect theyre going to need,certainly by the time they get out into the savanna,where there just are no good places to nest at night,is a social organization that would lead to an abilityfor most of the people to sleep while only some stayawake. ose are what you might expect to be earlybehavioral changes.

ere is a big brain puzzle [slide: Brain size isperhaps notdriven by a steady improvement in tool-making during the first million years.] is is justan old picture of brain size Ive rearranged a bit thatshows you this modern range in the human brainsize. is shows the ice ages and major stages in hom-inid toolmaking. A steeper slope of brain size comesin somewhere in the last half to three-quarter million

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The Once and Future Brain

Presentation by William H. Calvin, Ph.D.


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years. ere is a substantial conservatism in toolmak-ing styles from the initial invention at . million yearsago to the first really major improvement at . mil-lion years ago. at isnt to say that the old style didntcontinue. e improvement clearly did not replace it.

If bigger brains are cleverer, it doesnt

really show up very well in the first

million years of toolmaking

Its interesting to note that bigger brains did not nec-essarily make them cleverer at toolmaking. In otherwords: If bigger brains are cleverer, it doesnt reallyshow up very well in the first million years of tool-

making, so maybe it is growing for some reason otherthan toolmaking.

However, reorganization in a brain may havesomething to do with it. Let me tell you what I meanby reorganization. e temporal lobe houses cat-egories in regions that are about objects for tool use,animate/inanimate, and so on. But the visual area, theV area, that is right in the middle of the temporallobe beneath the auditory specializations in monkeys,has moved all the way back to the occipital parietal

junction in humans. If you have to reorganize some-thing, as anybody who has had to reorganize an office

knows, its sure nice to have some surge space. at isto say, its nice if you can increase something withouthaving to downsize something else simultaneously.So, in any generation, the individuals who by chancehappened to have larger brain size were also the oneswhere the reorganization would go more easily. So,brain size in some sense could be an epiphenomenonof reorganization. I like to put it this way: We mightbe able to take our present brain size and downsize itback to one-third, and as long we kept the same orga-nization, it might function pretty similarly. I dontknow what size,per se, adds to anything yet.

Protolanguage is certainly one of the things thatbrain reorganization might be better for. Proto-language is the words and short sentences like atwo-year-old has. For short sentences, you dont needsyntax. You can get along pretty well without all theclues of who the actor is, who the recipient is, andso forth. Its not that hard a problem. But surely thegrowth in sentence complexity would require some

brain reorganization.Sharing is one of these things that, the more items

you share, the more people you share them with, overlonger periods of time all have a growth curve thatkeeps on giving. rowing accuracy is like this too.No matter how good you are, getting twice as goodhas additional payoffs in terms of days per month thatyour family can eat a nutritious and relatively ster-ile source of food. So, all of these have great growthcurves, which is unlike a lot of things in evolution.Once youve invented a carrying basket, its played a

very important role probably in human evolution, butit doesnt have this kind of growth automatically.

Staged toolmaking is the idea that you make onething and then from it you make something else. Forexample, if you create a ledge, you can come along and

strike it, shaving off single-edged razor blades. atsan example of what is meant by staged toolmaking.Blades come in by about , years ago in Africaand are well established by , years ago.

e time frame for the designation anatomicallymodern was moved back a few weeks ago to ,years ago instead of , or so. But there wasnt abig step up in behavioral complexity then. Everybody,I think, would agree that images the sort of thingyou see in cave paintings are behaviorally modern.Certainly if the holes in the snail shells [referring toslide] were well polished, you would be fairly con-

vinced that these were used for necklaces. eres alsoa lot of red ocher found in various places that peoplehave argued represents a body decoration such as warpaint. Chimpanzees love to decorate themselves. Idont think thats the issue. e issue is that its hard toimagine apes sticking to a task like this long enough,and that same argument is probably true for ourancestors up to some point. If these were beads fornecklaces, it does bespeak a notion that humans bythat time had a capacity to maintain agendas, revisitthem, and update them, and so forth, in a way thatwas perhaps lacking earlier.





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The big brains, while they might be necessary, are

not sufficient to get modern behaviors. Theres likely

something else we have to deal with here.

[Slide: though anatomically modern came in, years ago, the Minds Big Bang took another, years, taking off only about , years agoin Africa.] is is the last , years. ere weresome big brains already back in Homo heidelbergensistimes. e halfway-modern stuff is all in the periodof , down to , years ago; we call it ,for convenience. ere is a gap of , years when this gap was first postulated years ago, it was

more like , and you could easily imagine thingsjust changing place. Now it has expanded about ten-fold. It tells you something: e big brains, while theymight be necessary, are not sufficient to get modernbehaviors. eres likely something else we have todeal with here.

I want to now go through some candidates thathave been proposed for what makes this behaviorallymodern what traits had to be there for it to happen.One is mimicry.

Now, mimicry can be done with a bird-sized brain[slide: much mimicry is seen in birds]. is is not

an argument about size. e problem is that even ifmimicry is easy, you dont see much of it in chimpan-zees (though orangutans oen mimic). For example,Tomasello did this nice experiment at Yerkes, takinga couple of young chimps out of a playgroup of youngchimps and teaching them, just with standard condi-tioning practices, to make a gesture in order to get afood reward. I dont know what he did, whether it waspatting his head or pulling his ear, or something likethat, but he trained up a couple of the animals this wayand put them back in the playgroup. en the experi-menters came around with a pouch of goodies andevery chimp there knew what the goodies were for.But only the two animals that had been trained evergot any of the goodies and all the rest were standingaround trying to figure this out. Not a single one ofthem ever picked up on either of the two gestures theyhad been trained for. It shows that arguments abouthow useful it would be for them to do this really breakdown here. eres something about the chimpanzee

mindset that doesnt make monkey see, monkey dothe standard practice that you might have thought.

Yet theres a lot of mimicry in us humans. eres somuch of it that we do a lot of it unconsciously: mirror-ing or echoing or matching the sort of thing wheretwo people are talking and one crosses his legs, and inthe next minute the other person is likely to cross hislegs. ats what is referred to here. People will syn-chronize breathing; theyll do all sorts of things, evenwith strangers. It appears to be part of establishingrapport. ere was an experiment with graduate stu-dents working as waitresses, who on alternate nightsof the week would match, fully sympathetic, whateverthe tone of voice the person ordering was using andmimic some of their body gestures. ey got a lotmore tips those nights than on the alternate nights

when they avoided doing those things. So, mimicry isone of the candidates.

Creativity is oen mentioned as another candidatefor the transition to Homo sapiens sapiens. Language,of course, is another, as are logic, more workingmemory, planning. And consciousness could be, tosome extent, thought of as an umbrella term coveringthe rest. I like all of these. I would just add the wordstructured to them, so you end up with mimickingsequences, with the kind of creativity that includesgetting set offline, and not just protolanguage butlong sentences that you need syntax for, and not just

a logical inference but chains of logic where theres alot more possibility to go wrong. Maybe its not moreworking memory but a better-structured workingmemory. Maybe its not simply planning, but plan-ning that has contingencies built in, so if one thingdoesnt work for example, if you cant go to thecountry this weekend, you could go to the movies onSunday instead.

Coherence-finding, when we discover hidden patterns

amongst seeming chaos, is the sort of thing we have

to do to reconstruct the past or to makea projection into the future.

e best-known example of structuring amongst thehigher intellectual functions is, of course, syntax. Withsyntax, you can even nest sentences like: I think I sawhim leave to go home. e other higher intellectualfunctions include things like games with arbitrary

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rules, which, of course, is a lot like logic where youhave to check against an arbitrary set of rules. Musicthat goes beyond rhythm and melody to use multiple

voices in parts-singing or in symphonies. Coherence-finding, when we discover hidden patterns amongstseeming chaos, is the sort of thing, as I was mention-ing earlier, that we have to do to reconstruct the pastor to make a projection into the future. Were engagedin trying to find things that hang together well.

Complex thought, as in figurative speech, narra-tive frameworks, parables that map one story ontoanother but leave out certain attributes, are examplesof structured thought and they all pretty much sep-arate humans from the great apes. Now imagine uswithout them in other words, looking fully humanbut not having the structured aspect of these things.

Its very hard to find examples of that. Oliver Sacks hasa nice description in his book Seeing Voices[Univer-sity of California Press, ] about the deaf. is is aboy who is being tested at age eleven but for the firstten years of his life he was mistakenly diagnosed asbeing mentally retarded and no one taught him signlanguage. e average age for diagnosis of deafnessis age three, which means that a lot of deaf childrenare undiagnosed for three years, And if the averageis three, there are an awful lot that arent diagnoseduntil ages five and six. Its something that could be soeasily fixed before the infant ever leaves the hospital.

Its quite sad that these kinds of tragedies occur. Hereis a paragraph from Seeing Voices:

Joseph saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he hadno problems with perceptual categorization or general-ization, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyondthis, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan. Heseemed completely literal unable to juggle images orhypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imagina-tive or figurative realm. He seemed, like an animal oran inant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined toliteral and immediate perception.

any intrinsic aptitude for language

has to be developed by exposure

during early childhood

ere are similar cases like this that indicate thatany intrinsic aptitude for language has to be devel-

oped by exposure during early childhood, and Josephreally didnt have the opportunity to observe syntaxin operation. Whatever instincts there might be for itare clearly something that kids pick up. ey pick upthe syntax of their own culture and surroundings byhaving a lot of examples.

is premodern mind probably had some thingslike Freuds sense of trial action. But without struc-turing plus the offline quality improvement that youneed to make it work, you cant create novel sentencesof any length or complexity and you likely cannotthink such thoughts either. You might dread, forexample, another repetition of something unpleasant,but you couldnt worry about novel threats withoutstructure and imagination and some quality control.Joseph is a candidate for what our ancestors even

the ones that look like us might have been like until, to , years ago when real creativity finallyappeared on the scene.

Certainly there are parts of the brain that have

a lot of movement planning and there are

areas of the brain that we think of as language areas

theres a fair amount of overlap.

So, how could this happen? What stepped up? Well,a lot of things that happened in evolution are on

the basis of what you might call borrow first andbuy later. at is to say: Behavior invents some newmoves. If the move is particularly useful, the biological

variations that make it more efficient will reproducebetter. Natural selection thus reinforces what wasbasically a behavioral invention. Certainly there areparts of the brain that have a lot of movement plan-ning and there are areas of the brain that we think ofas language areas theres a fair amount of overlap.One can imagine protolanguage going to language viasome sort of borrowing like this. Nested movementslike throwing are things that have to be planned in

great detail.Doing something novel for the first time is handled

by a lot of animals very simply by just going slowly andfumbling their way into it. ere are very few situationsthat really demand advance planning, and theyre theballistic movements because the feedback really cantguide you. A dart takes an eighth of a second. It alsotakes an eighth of a second to send a message into the





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spinal cord and go back out again. e whole motionfrom the time you start is truly ballistic: eres no call-ing it back and changing it. So, the ballistic movementsare good candidates for what you might need a lot ofthis for. And throwing is hard; you have at least four

joints to coordinate, hundreds of muscles, a need toguess the movement combinations that hang togetherto get it on target and the trouble is that while theremay be hundreds of combinations that would work,theyre hidden in a sea of wrong answers, millions ofthem, any one of which would cause dinner to runaway. eres a real premium here upon being rightthe first time as you get set to throw.

e other good setup for syntax is in the area ofsharing. Its pretty standard in us, compared to apes.It has a long growth curve: As I say, sharing more

things over longer periods of time, etc. Sharing alsohas this cheater problem at every step, having tocombat the freeloaders. Its been suggested, by DerekBickerton [co-author with William Calvin of Linguaex Machina, MIT Press, ] in particular, that youhave a need to keep rough track of who owes whatto whom, amongst all the hundred people that youdeal with, by, in effect, tagging some of your memo-ries with whether this person is an actor or a recipientand the value of things exchanged. ats one of theways to make the cooperation curve go a lot furtherthan it would otherwise.

Once that mental capacity is there for doing thesharing problem, then its likely that you can makeuse of the same neural machinery in order to gossipabout who did what to whom. at is to say: Its notentirely a free lunch. It was paid for by the naturalselection for the sharing problem, but once youve gotthe circuitry for monitoring sharing, then you can useit for other things.

In this creative-explosion period, sometimes calledthe Minds Big Bang, for some skills, clearly earlieris better. For languages, as in Josephs situation, lateris much more difficult. So, you can imagine a sce-

nario for a sensitive period early in life where beingexposed works much better than it does otherwise.For example, some individuals manage to solve thesyntax problem with something like case marking,where there are different forms of the word for if theperson is an actor versus a recipient (heand him; sheand her), and now there are kids overhearing thisstructured language at an age where theyre more

impressionable literally, kids can sowire for thesethings, apparently, becoming much more capable.

[Slide: sensitive period of early childhood] estandard neurobiological thinking on this is that theseare plots of the number of connections or inputs percortical neuron, and theres quite a growth in themin the first eight months of life in humans the firsttwo months in monkeys and then they tend to dridown. ey dri down different amounts in differentareas of cortex, but some, like the visual cortex, godown by about half. While this all could be perfectlyrandom, of course, the general thinking is that there isa use it or lose it going on here and that what youredoing is creating a pattern this way. Its just like doingwoodcarving: removing material in order to leave apattern there. is is the kind of speculation that one

makes about whats going on.[Slide: natural selection for long sentences] is

is a hypothetical construct showing proficiency as anadult as a function of being exposed to things at vari-ous ages so it shows how acquisitive and when.Suppose a person is basically acquisitive for structuredstuff at the age when he has enough fine motor con-trol to do throwing, as an example. I suspect that a lotof food preparation would qualify in here, too. If thiscurve is out beyond this inflection, it really doesntmake much difference at what age you do it becausethis curve is flat. Now, suppose that that curve shis

into the area where now there is a lot of increasedproficiency as an adult if your basic acquisitivenessfor the knowledge shis back. So, if the acquisitionage is heritable, the better adults create even earlier

variants, and this repeats. at is to say: You wouldexpect the curve to march back because of the steep-ness of that.

[Slide: dominant task shaping the sowiring ofchildhood] is is a model for how you might takea dominant task, something like throwing or foodpreparation that would be in later childhood, andmove it back into a region where its now operating

upon observational stuff instead, such as language.Now language tunes up the circuitry in an area whensowiring is really much easier and produces thesepermanent effects into adulthood. Now we have thissituation where kids handle structured sentences atan age when they still cant tie their shoelaces theyhave the speed of operation for the vocal system butstill not for the limbs.





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ately see that if you had a mechanistic understandingof mind that allowed you to train for either of thesethings, you could very likely improve kids comingout of that training to be higher in, at least, IQ. I tendto think IQ and intelligence are somewhat differentthings, but you could certainly change IQ scores ifyou were able to train early for such skills.

for a second Minds Big Bang, you probably dont

need gene changes what will affect the most people

in the most places will be a better-informed

educational practice

I would point out that for a second Minds Big Bang,you probably dont need gene changes. Im sure they

will be tried, but I think what will affect the mostpeople in the most places will be a better-informededucational practice: knowing what to do when in thesowiring period of early childhood, in particular.e analogy I like to use is that in the th centurymedicine went from being probably percent sci-entific and percent empirical to, in the course ofthe century, becoming closer to . We began tounderstand what worked and why it worked, and webegan to understand all the things that didnt work,even though they seemed perfectly logical and workedin some settings.

It is very much like leaving bleeding and purgingbehind. Bleeding is a very good treatment for iron-reten-tion disorders, as it turns out, but over-generalizing itand using it for everything was ineffective. Finding sucherrors and improving the bottom-up approaches madegreat strides in th century medicine.

I tend to think that st century education, once ithas developmental psychology and a lot of cognitiveneuroscience to go on, will be able to make a transi-tion something like th century medicine did. atis to say: If you figure that, of the current educationalpractices, only about percent are informed by sci-

ence, imagine it getting closer to . at wouldbe the major development. While the babies that popout of the womb might not be different from today, bythe time they pop out of the school system, they couldbe substantially different than they are today.

ank you. Are there questions?

What I dont see, when you go through

the fossil record, is trying to take into

account the relationship of body sizeto brain size

HOLLOWAY:e size of the brain is an old chestnut inanthropological figuring, and the old chestnut hasbeen that theres just no relationship between brainsize and behavior or cognitive tasking, and so forth.e recent studies that have now been replicated over times involve using MRI and algorithms to cal-culate brain size. ese are correlated with cognitivetests at the level of between . and ..

In a recent metastudy, a meta-analysis was done

on all of those studies and it came out to be about .in terms of a correlation coefficient the correlationcoefficient being extremely significant. So, there issome aspect of the size thing. What I dont see, whenyou go through the fossil record, is trying to take intoaccount the relationship of body size to brain size,because youve got both allometric and nonallometrickinds of changes in brain size with time.

CALVIN:Yes. One of the things Im fond of pointingout about brain size is that as you get a bigger body,you get longer conduction distances for the nerves.Unless you do something to increase the conduc-

tion of velocity, your reflexes are going to slow downsubstantially. e basic cure for this is to insulatethe nerves better with more myelin so that you canget the messages there in the same amount of time.at takes a lot of space. When the corpus callosummyelinates, the number of axons it can get throughthe corpus callosum drops by about percent or percent. Myelin size within the brain has to be a sub-stantial part of the so-called brain size increase andits not about intellect at all. Its about compensatingfor body size.

What you point out in terms of cortical thickness

having some correlations, Im not surprised at all. Whatwe dont understand is that you can do things like put-ting rats from the standard impoverished environmentof a cage by themselves into enriched environmentsand cause, temporarily at least, even an percentincrease in the number of synapses per neuron. isisnt to say that thats permanent. You certainly cantkeep doing that or the head would explode.





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e problem is: How do you create new patternsin the brain to do these things? Clearly, part of that isepigenetic and theres an awful lot about what cultureyou grow up in that determines what brain wiring isavailable in adulthood. I think that thats a big part ofthe puzzle. Culture is going to be very important herebut the genetics will still be there because theyll helpmake it more efficient and theyll fill in behind. eywont necessarily get rid of the bugs because bugs, atleast in the side effects of medicines, are things whereits very hard to get rid of one and save the other. Andevolution is just full of genes that do more than onething and it can be difficult to change one withoutmaking another part of the system so inefficient thatyou get developmental failures.

How strong are the inferences that you

can make from material culture

to brain structure?

TOOBY:ings that strike people as interesting expres-sions of uniquely human abilities are, of course,rooted in the brain very importantly, but also because as you describe, and other people do this culturaleffect of improving the quality by it being processedand reprocessed is something that involves the size

of the social network. I, myself, am open-minded skeptical would be too strong a way of putting it that people put timing in the biology by looking atthe paleoarchaeological record, but one thing thatshappening is that population sizes are very low then,so to identify the creative explosion as a time whenbiological changes happened seems to me to be nota strong inference. If you look at the Tasmanians, ifyou took three of us and dropped us on some islandoff the shore here, in two generations we would looklike Tasmanians: We wouldnt have computers; wewouldnt have anything.

My question is (and maybe Richard would be ableto speak to this as well): How strong are the infer-ences that you can make from material culture tobrain structure?

CALVIN:Clearly there are a lot of things that are justcarried along by cultural practice and its very easyto lose them if you get a disease that comes through

that happens to wipe out the experts before theyvetrained another generation. is is, presumably, whathappened to the Tasmanians.

TOOBY:Im saying the other way around. What if youhad really smart people , years ago but theyrein very small groups, and then you only start to getthe significant large population sizes oen enoughthat they start to show up in the record ,?

CALVIN:I agree that there could be a substantial gapin there. One of the things that genetic changes do,even as simple as the one Im hypothesizing here taking the acquisitiveness curve and moving it back is make a cultural practice more efficient and morelikely to be reinvented. at is to say: Its sufficientlystrong now that a deaf kid will invent his own sign

language to use with another deaf kid. ere are someinstincts now that are serving as backups but theyre

very general in how detailed they are.

Maybe there were many attempts to

take off, so to speak, and so when we

finally see a take-off, we assume that

that was the first take-off.

VARKI: Following up on the matter of population,I think that really is an issue. When we talk about

human universals lets say that music is a humanuniversal. Well, its not, in the sense that many peoplein the population couldnt carry a tune if they hadto, to save their lives; then there are others who areMozarts. Its possible that what happened is that youhad these abilities maybe , years ago, but as thepopulation grew and they started bootstrapping thisculture, then maybe that one population got wipedout. Maybe there were many attempts to take off, soto speak, and so when we finally see a take-off, weassume that that was the first take-off.

We were talking at the break about the ,-

year-old spears from Germany that are stillunexplained. Somewhere, someone was able to makethese incredible balanced javelins out of whole trees.Whoever those people were, they didnt make it,obviously, because we would have seen signs of thattechnology around aer that. Im not discounting thepossibility of some specific genetic event or events.Im saying that its also equally plausible that you





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could have had a problem of bootstrapping that keptrecurrently failing until it finally.

But then, if that was the case, we would haveexpected a larger effective population size in the end,because if there were many peoples that were capableof this and, finally, one group had to take off, that cul-ture would have dispersed. Instead, what we see in thegenetic record is a relatively constrained, small-grouporigin.

CALVIN:Indeed. As I suspect Richard will tell us, thepopulation density in some of the areas where we

think this was going on, like Southern Africa, this wasa low point. Its not as if you can argue big popula-tions.

Furthermore, the climate was constantly flippingback and forth, so there were always big droughtdownsizings in this period. About ,,, years ago, the climate was flipping every coupleof centuries. is was a very unstable situation. eycould build up a good population size in the warmand wet, but then it is crashing back down.

VELAMOOR:ank you, Dr. Calvin.





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I actually think of our own species as

a kind of degenerate chimpanzee

in a very serious genetic sense and

neurological sense.

DEACON:What I want to say today is something that

I think youll find very counter-intuitive. Evolutionis one of the hardest things to study because it foolsus every time. We always think that anybody whohas gone through high school knows how evolutionworks; they know how its supposed to be. But, in fact,I think theyre confused most of the time. I think weare confused most of the time. As much as weve gonethrough years of studying this process, we stillhave a lot to learn.

What Im going to suggest today is not a storyabout all of evolution. eres no chance that I couldfit that in. Im going to talk about one very counter-

intuitive feature that Ive been looking at recently. Imnot going to talk a lot about brains but this all has todo with brains. e question that I want to talk abouthas to do with the nonprogress side of the story. I amgoing to say that the nonprogress side of the storymay be one of the most interesting parts of it yousometimes have to fall back to leap ahead. ere isa significant feature of human evolution, and I thinkthis may be generalized to many aspects of evolu-tion, and that is where what we might want to calldevolution turns out to be tremendously powerful. Iactually think of our own species as a kind of degen-erate chimpanzee. I dont mean this just humorously;I mean this in a very serious genetic sense and neuro-logical sense. Im going to try to make that idea clear.

[Referring to slide] ese are the chimpanzees; wesee the bonobos over here in blue. is is the mitochon-drial DNA tree. Here we are, this little red bush overhere. e Neanderthals are pretty close; in fact, theyrecloser to us than most of the chimpanzee groups are

to each other. What you might think is: If I saw this inany other natural history study, I would say that this is aspecies on the way out. Tis is a species that has lost itsgenetic variance. Tis must be a tiny corner someplace inthe world where they are about to go extinct. We havent.One of the reasons, I think, is because there has beena kind of degeneration process going on. ats what Iwant to suggest to you here. I dont want to suggest that

this is everything there is to know about evolution, butI think that we tend to overlook it and maybe it is moreimportant than we think.

What is the flexibility of our evolved cognitive and

emotional adaptations to cope with the highly divergent

social, technological, and living environments that were

involved in now and are about to produce?

What matters most for the next thousand years, sincethats where were looking here? Brain evolution,

certainly by spontaneous natural means, is probablynot going to be in the cards unless we get really iso-lated on Mars or somewhere else for a very, very longperiod of time. In that case, perhaps some interestingthings will happen. But I think a number of things domatter. One is: What is the flexibility of our evolvedcognitive and emotional adaptations to cope withthe highly divergent social, technological, and liv-ing environments that were involved in now and areabout to produce? Were going to move into very alienenvironments. I think thats a pretty remarkable andtroubling issue. Whats the sensitivity of our brain

development to these significant departures from thespecies typical environments? Brains have evolvedfor environments. ey have evolved to take advan-tage of things in the world around them. One of thethings Im going to talk about today is exactly howthat process happens.

Finally, whats our capacity to co-opt old, adaptivecomplexes to serve phyletically unprecedented, novel,


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adaptive functions? Clearly, something like readingand writing is a case in point where phylogeneticallyold and unrelated faculties have been drawn into this

very novel process.I titled my book Te Symbolic Species[subtitle: Te

Co-Evolution o Language and the Brain, W.W. Norton,] because I have all along been of the impressionthat weve been significantly altered biologically byevolving within a symbolic niche. I think that the useof symbols is quite old perhaps there will be debateabout that. In any case, if we have been living in asymbolic niche for any significant period of time, thatcould have had a remarkably powerful effect on ourbiology and I want to talk about how that might havehappened. I want to talk about how things get distrib-uted, not just inside of our heads but across all those

influences that might affect cognition.eres little doubt that we have unique biologi-

cal capacities and unprecedented features that makeus capable of acquiring language. I actually think, asSteve [Pinker] does, that these were honed by exten-sive natural selection, that we went through a verylong and intensive period in which the features thatnow drive language have changed our brains to makeit easier for us in a variety of ways. Its an importantbackground piece of the story.

I want to ask a few questions: Whats the nature ofthe contribution if its made by the evolved changes

that have affected our brain structure? What is thecontribution of what we are doing now or what wepossibly can do that can be attributed to brain struc-ture itself? Are there other significant influencesaffecting language, competence, and structure thatare not in the brain, so to speak? (Ill use language asmy example throughout this talk.) What might therebe that has an effect on language and the structureand even our competence to do language that is notin the brain? Finally, how could such capacities haveevolved either one of these kinds of capacities? Oneof the things Im going to suggest is that, in part, they

evolved because of things falling apart.

to the extent that epigenesis can

take advantage of these kinds of

things the genome will

cede control of these and shift toa more regulative role

Im going to title this the lazy gene hypothesis.Obviously, it has inverse connotations with othergene terms. e point I want to make is that we noware very familiar with lots of what oen are calledself-organizing processes in biology. Lots of sys-tems assemble themselves, organize themselves intocyclic processes. ey are not regulated and they arenot instructed in a strong way. So, to the extent thatepigenesis can take advantage of these kinds of things

self-organizing, self-assembly, or environmen-tal invariance in the world the genome will cedecontrol of these and shi to a more regulative role,handling contextual variables instead of trying toinstruct the specifics. Weve seen this again and againas weve begun to trace genes and their effects in cellsand developing embryos.

My favorite example is the Fibonacci spiral, whichoccurs all over in the plant world. We now knowthat with a simple physical model of simply drippingliquid metal onto a watchglass, we can produce Fibo-nacci spirals by just adjusting the rate at which the

drips occur. e Fibonacci spirals are there in naturebecause of spatial phenomena, not because theyreencoded in the genome. But what they doprovide isa wonderful distribution so that the sun hits all theleaves reasonably well in a plant thats growing upa stalk. It has adaptive advantages but that adaptiveadvantage can be utilized without having to encodeit directly. You still have to encode things that affectgrowth, and so on.

Im going to make a genetic parsimony argumentthat will be behind all of this. It basically can be laidout in three parts: Extragenomic support for struc-ture formation or functional operation that can beobtained extragenomically will tend to degrade cor-responding information embodied in the genome,and will do so by masking the forces of stabilizingselection that maintain its structural integrity. It willlead to a random-walk mutational diversity in deg-radation of those systems. e key word here thatIll come back to again and again is masking. at is,


Erasing the Slate: Devolving toward Increased Complexity of Brain Function

Presentation by Terrence Deacon, Ph.D.


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selection can be masked by a variety of phenomena,some of them produced simply by behavior.

I want to contrast two extreme views. One claimsthat everything thats relevant to language is somehowin a box in the brain, and that there was a wonder-ful, hopeful-monster mutation someplace in the past.Various of us might want to place this wonderfulhuman-making mutation at some place, nearby orfar back. According to this view, thats what makeslanguage possible that theres a unitary, modular,domain-specific, mental algorithm that does it all. Infact, its the strong computer model.

Im going to make a very different model a modelthat talks about the distribution of control, because inall other biological systems we oen find that controlgets distributed, gets shoved off of the genome. My

argument is that its a system of neural, behavioral,and social regularities all working together. eres nosingle feature that controls this. ey are self-organiz-ing processes within the brain, within embryogenesis,within the genome, and within social interactions.eyre all playing a role in this.

Mostly today Ill be talking about the effects ofhigher-order organizing phenomena on the lower-order systems. I will give you some neurological andgenetic examples and then show you some simula-tions weve run.

While we used to think that maybe one or two structures

might be doing language, its now becoming clear that a

vast number of structures are playing crucial roles.

One of the stories that weve come to realize over thelast decade and a half is that the more we look for struc-tures in the brain that are doing something relevant tolanguage, they multiply daily. While we used to thinkthat maybe one or two structures might be doing lan-guage, its now becoming clear that a vast number of

structures are playing crucial roles. Whether it has todo with automatization in the basal ganglia or whetherit has to do with intentional phenomena that are con-trolled both in mid-line cortex and all the way downin cerebellum, were finding all kinds of multiple con-tributions. Its the kind of thing that when you havea very complex process that could involve many sup-ports, you can recruit a lot of helpers to do it, and the

more you recruit and the more you can integrate thathelp, the better your processing can be.

Alfred Russel Wallace asked: How can you explainthe complexity of human cognition? It goes so farbeyond what you might imagine to be survival value.e answer to this at the end of the th century wasposed by a number of researchers who made a kindof end-run around Lamarckian-inherited stories totalk about what is now called the Baldwin effect,although it was actually discovered by three peopleindependently James Mark Baldwin, Lloyd Morgan,and Henry Osborne in fact, all in the same year. eargument was that you could acquire innate capacitiesby virtue of your plasticity: If early-on you had rela-tively little innate support but a lot of trial-and-errorsupport for a behavioral adaptation or a phenotypic

adaptation that was simply a physiological adaptationthat had some plasticity to it, it would, in effect, shieldselection. So, individuals who could make it by theirplasticity and flexibility for transmitting informationgeneration to generation could, in effect, do so longenough so that spontaneously variants could show upin the population we would say mutantstoday. iscould eventually replace this clumsy way of doing itwith a more innate, more streamlined way of doingit. Baldwin called it organic selection. It has cometo take on his name aer a number of critics called itthe Baldwin effect in the s.

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